Peter DeFazio Quotes

To finance this trade deficit, the U.S. has to borrow from the rest of the world or sell American assets like stocks, businesses, and real estate to the rest of the world.

I want to share with the American people that President Bush and the Republican majority in just 4 years have borrowed $1.05 trillion from foreign nations. That is selling our country to other nations because of the spending that is going on.

I think it's important that people know what raising the debt ceiling is. It's Congress giving permission to the federal government to borrow more money that we don't have, and we borrow it for the purpose of spending it.

If the U.S. Government was a company, the deficit would be $5 trillion because they would have to account by general accepted accounting principles. But actually they encourage government spending, reckless government spending, because the government can issue Treasury bills at extremely low interest rates.

Well, the U.S. is running a current account deficit; we are creating lots of investment opportunities in the United States that exceed our own domestic savings rates, so the issue here is to encourage higher savings rates in the United States.

And so we have to be careful with looking at additional stimulus that we don't provoke an increase in the bond rate and then offset a lot of the stimulus we've already got.

Right now, a majority of the debt is owed to foreign interests, Japan being the largest purchaser of government debt today, soon to be surpassed by China as the number one purchaser of our debt in this Nation.

Well, I think what we need to remember is that budget deficits can impede economic activity.

I know that my Republican colleagues are as ashamed as I am that the United States is forced to borrow over $1 trillion from foreign nations to pay for our national priorities like reconstruction of the gulf coast and the war in Iraq.

The national debt is totally unlike a family budget for about a gazillion reasons, not the least of which being that families cannot raise money by fiat or deflate the size of their debt unilaterally and that family members die instead of existing infinitely.

Slow growth and inflation have a tendency to accompany large deficits and increasing debt as a percentage of GDP.

For the last 4 years, our Federal Government has produced the four biggest deficits in history, and the estimated 2006 deficit of $423 billion is projected to be the largest of all.

As a matter of fact, if you do not take into account, as Congressman Ross just stated, the Social Security surplus, our fiscal deficit, ladies and gentlemen, is over $700 billion today.

When the federal government spends more each year than it collects in tax revenues, it has three choices: It can raise taxes, print money, or borrow money. While these actions may benefit politicians, all three options are bad for average Americans.

We've used up a lot of bullets. And we talk about stimulus. But the truth is, we're running a federal deficit that's 9 percent of GDP. That is stimulative as all get out. It's more stimulative than any policy we've followed since World War II.

As we all know, the budget decisions which give rise to increased debt are what counts, and the debt is just a by-product of those budget decisions.

In a great financial emergency nearly every country has, at one time or another, been tempted to confuse the monetary with the fiscal functions of the Treasury. To borrow by the issue of money seems to have a seductive charm hard to resist.

China, Japan, and Asia in general have been happy to hold U.S. debt instruments in recent decades, but they will not prop up our spending habits forever…. The greatest threat facing America today is not terrorism, or foreign economic competition, or illegal immigration. The greatest threat facing America today is the disastrous fiscal policies of our own government, marked by shameless deficit spending and Federal Reserve currency devaluation.

We must get rid of deficit spending which finances the political schemes of today by mortgaging the future of tomorrow.

The single biggest threat to our national security is our debt.

Financial markets will tolerate a Republican deficit but will run screaming in panic from a Democratic deficit a fraction its size.

A stable currency and an excessive external debt are incompatible. A similar relation holds as between a country's currency and an excessive internal debt

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have left us with $19 trillion in debt.

It's very difficult to explain to a normal working citizen the implications of what $18 trillion in debt means and what it means when the Federal Reserve buys the U.S. Treasury bonds to finance our loss every month.

We should, as a country, be very concerned about our borrowing cost.