The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.
It shows nobility to be willing to increase your debt to a man to whom you already owe much.
I learned early on what debt means, how vulnerable it makes people, what the security of owning a home means.
An increase in the debt ceiling should be accompanied by fundamental policy reforms, substantial budget savings, and a strong enforcement mechanism to tie the hands of any future Congress.
I'm not going to raise the debt ceiling.
Not raising the debt ceiling is not an automatic trigger for a default.
When President Obama was in the Senate, when he was a U.S. senator, he voted against raising the debt ceiling. And he said it was a lack of leadership that had brought us to this point.
While I'd like to be able to simply do all of my financings with a handshake or, possibly, on a napkin written in crayon, I also wish I had a herd of unicorns surrounded by rainbows, a balanced U.S. government budget, and agreement on how to address the debt ceiling issue.
I would be embarrassed to tell you how many folks ran saying that they weren't going to spend a bunch of money, they weren't going to raise the debt ceiling, and then they went to Washington, D.C., and did exactly that.
Hikes in the debt ceiling - without any political demands from the opposition party - had been routine until President Obama took office.
The Republican argument that raising the debt ceiling encourages additional future spending is logically irresponsible. The debt ceiling has to be raised to authorize spending already approved by Congress. Despite that fallacy, the GOP has been able to score political points with its argument.
If we weren't running deficits, if we weren't spending more than we were taking in, there would be no reason whatsoever to increase the debt ceiling.
I would vote against raising the national debt ceiling. Again, this is about mortgaging the future of unborn generations of Americans. It's a form of taxation without representation. I don't think we can do that.
There's no debt limit in the Constitution.
Historically, the minority party in Congress votes against raising the debt limit, forcing the majority party to whip its members into casting politically painful votes in favor.
Raising the debt limit on some levels is a ministerial act. It doesn't involve any new spending.
Historically, the responsibility for voting on the debt limit has gone to the party in the majority.
Now we are raising the debt limit 3 times, up to $8 trillion, so that our children and our grandchildren will have to pay for the cost of our expenditures.
There are a lot of anachronisms in Washington, but the need to periodically raise the debt limit by Congressional vote is certainly one of them.
But the debt limit obviously is something that needs to and will be passed. That is not inconsistent with a process and a belief that we have to get significant deficit reduction.
