Alex Pareene Quotes

No one was elected to Congress because he or she promised to cut Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid.

No major entitlement, once it has been implemented, has ever been unwound.

When you talk about entitlement programs, it's not just about - it's not about cutting those programs. It is about saving those programs. Those programs are on a path of fiscal unsustainability.

People like entitlements. That's why we spend so much on them.

The mortal enemies of Social Security and Medicare are those who, in contempt of the plain arithmetic, continue to mislead Americans that we should change nothing.

Look, of course people are scared of entitlement reform because every time you put entitlement reform out there, the other party uses it as a political weapon against you.

I don't think anybody should be expanding Medicaid. I think it's a mistake to create new and more expensive entitlement programs when we can't afford the ones we've got today. We've got to stop this culture of government dependence.

The Democrats generally recoil from the subject of entitlements.

When public spending in the form of transfer payments makes various services and benefits free of charge, work is discouraged. Yet it is precisely Social Security that legislators fear to cut.

Sometimes Republicans want to cut the social welfare programs and yet they ask for billions and billions more for the Defense Department. I don’t take that approach.

The true enemies of Social Security and Medicare are those who defend an imploding status quo.

Medicaid is essentially bankrupt, Medicare is essentially bankrupt, why the heck would we give the federal government another entitlement program to manage?

I think every program needs to stand the sunshine of righteous scrutiny. Whether it's Social Security, whether it's Medicaid, whether it's Medicare.

I don't like a lot of social programs either because it makes you non-productive.

America as we know it will end unless we end Medicare as we know it.

Social Security's not the hard one to solve. Medicare, that is the gorilla in the room, and you've got to put all of it on the table.

Most of my folks back home think Social Security and Medicare are sacred commitments stronger than the strongest contract. And yet if you look at the details here in Washington, they're not even promises. They're scheduled benefits. I think we need to do all that we can to make sure those benefits are real.

The Missourians I hear from just don't buy the idea that the only way to tackle the national debt is to drastically alter Medicare and Social Security.

I think that whether you're on the right or on the left as an economist or as a policy maker, every serious analyst I know agrees that at some point you have to deal with entitlements.

Democrats believe, plausibly, that middle-class entitlements are instantly addictive and, because there is no known detoxification, that class, when facing future choices between trimming entitlements or increasing taxes, will choose the latter.

If you throw a welfare state into the middle of a democracy, it’s very hard to get rid of the beast.

Today we are ending welfare as we know it.

Welfare is killing this country.

It is not in accordance with the genius of our Government or our country to pay pensions.

You do not have to cut finds from the elderly sick and still keep the yacht subsidy;