Statements On Deficit Reduction and Reform of Social Security / Medicare
Bernanke favors reducing the U.S. budget deficit, particularly by reforming the Social Security and Medicare entitlement programs. During a speech delivered on April 7, 2010, he warned that the U.S. must soon develop a "credible" plan to address the pending funding crisis faced by "entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare" or "in the longer run we will have neither financial stability nor healthy economic growth." Bernanke said that formulation of such a plan would help the economy now, even if actual implementation of the plan might have to wait until the economic outlook improves.
His remarks were probably intended for the federal government's executive and legislative branches, since entitlement reform is a fiscal exercise that will be accomplished by the Congress and the President rather than a monetary task falling within the implementation powers of the Federal Reserve. Bernanke also pointed out that deficit reduction will necessarily consist of either raising taxes, cutting entitlement payments and other government spending, or some combination of both.
Read more about this topic: Ben Bernanke
Famous quotes containing the words statements on, statements, reduction, reform, social and/or security:
“He admired the terrible recreative power of his memory. It was only with the weakening of this generator whose fecundity diminishes with age that he could hope for his torture to be appeased. But it appeared that the power to make him suffer of one of Odette’s statements seemed exhausted, then one of these statements on which Swann’s spirit had until then not dwelled, an almost new word relayed the others and struck him with new vigor.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“The true critic is a scrupulous avoider of formulae; he refrains from statements which pretend to be literally true; he finds fact nowhere and approximation always.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“The reduction of nuclear arsenals and the removal of the threat of worldwide nuclear destruction is a measure, in my judgment, of the power and strength of a great nation.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“We must reform society before we can reform ourselves.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“The conservative assumes sickness as a necessity, and his social frame is a hospital, his total legislation is for the present distress, a universe in slippers and flannels, with bib and papspoon, swallowing pills and herb-tea.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“There is something that Governments care for far more than human life, and that is the security of property, and so it is through property that we shall strike the enemy.... Be militant each in your own way.... I incite this meeting to rebellion.”
—Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928)