Warren Buffett on the Debt Ceiling
“I could end the deficit in 5 minutes,” he told Becky Quick. “You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election.”
“You really don’t have any business by playing Russian roulette to get your way in some other matter,” he said. “We should be more grown up than that.”
“We had debt at 120% of GDP, far higher than this, after World War II, and no one went around threatening we’re going to ruin the credit of the United States or something in order to get a better balance of debt to GDP. We just went about our business, and people did it in a cooperative way.”
“You’re playing with fire when you don’t need to play with fire. We don’t need to tell the rest of the world that anytime people in Congress start throwing a tantrum that we’re not going to pay our bills.”