Richard Lamm Quotes

So when I look at spending more dollars, I look at the fact, do I really want my kids and your kids and everybody else's kids in this country to have to pay that bill?

Those who say we can continue to indefinitely borrow from our children and grandchildren and generations to come in fact are eroding our ability to do what we ought to do in education, in health care and in other things.

I urge the Congress to avoid running up large costs for future generations of Americans.

Interest groups are not the same as individuals. Through false nostalgia for the New Deal, you are taking the younger generation hostage. They are the ones who are going to have to pay far greater taxes. They are the future's forgotten men.

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.

Every generation has an obligation to leave its children in a better position than it inherited. Our representatives in Washington are breaking faith with that covenant. America must reduce its federal spending and accumulation of debt for the sake of generations to come.

If we don't change the way Washington operates we're going to bankrupt our children and grandchildren.

John F. Kennedy asked us what we could do for America. This Democratic Party asks what can government give you. Don't worry about paying the bill, it's on your kids and grandkids.

The real number of the US' obligations, unfunded obligations that we're passing on to our future generates is more like $70 trillion to $75 trillion. The vast majority of that is health entitlements - Medicare, Obamacare, Medicaid. There's also Social Security, interest on the debt. But fundamentally, health entitlements are the thing that will bankrupt our kids. We need to fix that for the long-term.

For decades, we have piled deficit upon deficit, mortgaging our future and our children's future for the temporary convenience of the present. To continue this long trend is to guarantee tremendous social, cultural, political, and economic upheavals. You and I, as individuals, can, by borrowing, live beyond our means, but for only a limited period of time. Why, then, should we think that collectively, as a nation, we are not bound by that same limitation?

The biggest change we have to tackle that's out there is that we're digging the hole deeper and deeper and spending is totally out of control. And that's something that, quite frankly, is affecting future generations. You're giving a lot of debt to them and you can't keep doing it. It's not helping anybody.

What we are effectively doing, I say this to the young people of America whom my colleagues represent, is leaving our children and grandchildren the tab for fighting a war, letting them pay for the lion's share of it by simply adding it to the national debt.

I don't want to leave my successor and my children to pay for France's debt.

You know, we have a fiscal train wreck before us. And unless we act, and act deliberately, we're not going to enable our kids to have what we have. It's plain and simple as that.

Christmas is a time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell the government what they want—and their kids pay for it.

I'll fight with every breath in my body to stop the out of control spending and debt that are bankrupting our kids and grandkids.

I don't see any need to unduly burden the taxpayer.

It is perhaps my greatest hope, Mr. President, that some day we'll consider tax and spending measures with no one else in mind but future generations of American taxpayers. We're tying a millstone of debt around their necks, and it is a grave mistake.

The truth is we need to build an economy going forward with all of us, when we all move forward and the payment of a national debt is not the responsibility of one group of Americans versus another.

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.

I have three adult children, and I have four grandchildren. I want to stop the deficits. I want to make sure that we're not passing on to my children and my grandchildren deficits and that we cannot repay and that they will have to repay and maybe they won't be able to repay them.

You cannot go out and say, oh, I am going to raise all this spending, but it's not going to cost anybody any money.

President Obama is a utopian at heart. He wants to improve the lives of the downtrodden, which is a good thing. But, he doesn't understand that damaging the free marketplace in pursuit of 'social justice' will eventually harm those whom he wants to help. The nation's crushing debt is a tsunami brewing off shore.

Every American born today owes $43,000 to the federal government the day she or he is born. And we are transferring a tremendous amount of debt to the new generation, much of it owed to overseas creditors who expect to be repaid by our children with interest.

We have managed to acquire $13 trillion of debt on our balance sheet. In my view we have nothing to show for it. We haven't invested in our roads, our bridges, our waste-water systems, our sewer systems. We haven't even maintained the assets that our parents and grandparents built for us.