Look, the president is elected to lead and to face the country's biggest challenges. The country's biggest challenge domestically speaking, no doubt about it, is a debt crisis, and I'm really hoping that he is going to give us a budget that tackles this debt crisis.
This debt crisis coming to our country. The wall and tidal wave of debt that is befalling our nation. Medicare and Social Security go bankrupt within ten years, we have a debt that is looming so high that in the last year of President Obama's budget just the interest payments on our debt is $916 billion dollars.
If we keep kicking the can down the road, if we follow the president's lead or if we pass the Senate budget, then we will have a debt crisis. Then everybody gets hurt. You know who gets hurt first and the worst in a debt crisis? The poor, the elderly. That's what we're trying to prevent from happening.
At this time - we're in a dramatic crisis - euro bonds are precisely the wrong answer. They lead us into a debt union, not a stability union. Each country has to take its own steps to reduce its debt.
We need to be honest with the American people about the problems and the challenges ahead and the solutions that are needed to fix them. And I would argue it's the president who has been missing in action on this front. He knows we have a debt crisis coming. All independent experts show us this. And so he hasn't even given us a budget yet. I mean, the law required that he was supposed to submit a budget the first Monday in February.
The Mexican debt crisis, Latin American debt crisis, the crises of the 1990s, the Wall Street stock market crash, and other events should have reminded us, and did remind us, that financial instability remains a concern, remains a problem.
The World Bank is now the biggest culprit in the debt crisis.
The moment a large investor doesn't believe a government will pay back its debt when it says it will, a crisis of confidence could develop. Investors have scant patience for the years of good governance - politically fraught fiscal restructuring, austerity and debt rescheduling - it takes to defuse a sovereign-debt crisis.
I do think that all economies need a sense of fiscal discipline especially over the midterm and if you are in the middle of a debt crisis you can't borrow your way out of a debt crisis. That's logically impossible.
There has been a banking crisis, a financial crisis, an economic crisis, a social crisis, a geostrategic crisis and an environmental crisis. That's considerable in a country that's used to being protected.
This accumulated debt at all levels of our society poses an immediate existential threat to America. Now unlike the manufactured crises of global warming and healthcare, this is a true crisis. This crisis threatens the very sovereignty of our country.
Civilization has given us enormous successes: going to the moon, technology. But then this is the civilisation that took us to debt, environmental crisis, every single crisis. We need a civilization where we say goodbye to these things.
The biggest challenge or biggest crisis knocking on the doors of humankind is fear and intolerance.
Crisis for others is a source of despair. For me, it's an opportunity to bring reform. I owe this country a debt I cannot repay.
Obama has been perhaps the most partisan President since Truman. He hasn't learned to be civil - note his insulting speech to Paul Ryan, who did us the courtesy of scoring a budget. The president has to talk to Republicans when it comes to the debt ceiling. He has reached the debt ceiling before anyone expected.
From my point of view it's impossible to cut debt in a country with new debt from another country.
It's the [George Bush] president's fiscal policies that have driven up the biggest deficits in American history. He's added more debt to the debt of the United States in four years than all the way from George Washington to Ronald Reagan put together.