Warren Buffett : Congress is playing Russian roulette

Warren Buffet and Astrid Buffet head to lunch after morning sessions during the 2011 Allen and Co. Sun Valley Conference, Friday, July 8, 2011, in Sun Valley, Idaho.

SUN VALLEY, Idaho -- Billionaire investor Warren Buffett accused Congress of playing Russian roulette with the country's credit-worthiness and offered his own novel suggestion for ending the budget deficit in an interview with CNBC on Friday.

"I could end the deficit in five minutes," Buffett said in the interview from a technology and media conference in Sun Valley, Idaho. "You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3 percent of GDP all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for reelection."

"We raised the debt ceiling seven times during the Bush administration and now in this administration they're using it as a hostage," the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway said of Congress. "You really don't have any business playing Russian roulette to get your way in some other matter. We should be more grown-up than that."

Buffett said "the odds are very good" that nothing catastrophic would occur if the US misses its August 2 deadline to raise the debt ceiling.

"On the other hand," he added, "you're playing with fire when you don't need to play with fire and 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."

"It is not a great pattern to project to the rest of the world," he said.
Buffett said his message -- which he reduced to "shame on all of you" -- was directed to both Republicans and Democrats. "There's plenty of blame to go around," he said.

In the event that Congress fails to raise the borrowing limit, Buffett said an option of withholding checks from Social Security recipients would not only hurt Americans living "hand-to-mouth" but also shake the country's sterling AAA credit rating.

"If you don't send out Social Security checks, I would hate to think about the credit meeting at [rating agencies] S&P and Moody's the next morning," Buffett said. "If you're not paying millions and millions and millions of people, that range in age from 65 on up, money you promised them, you are not a triple A."