Todd Rokita Quotes

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.

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.

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.

For too long, humanity has acted with an outrageous lack of responsibility. We wanted everything for ourselves: greed, really. We failed to look at the overall picture and did not take into consideration those with whom we share the world.

Italy has piled up huge public debt because the successive governments were too close to the life of ordinary citizens, too willing to please the requests of everybody, thereby acting against the interests of future generations.

Deficits mean future tax increases, pure and simple. Deficit spending should be viewed as a tax on future generations, and politicians who create deficits should be exposed as tax hikers.

This philosophy of something for nothing, the cult of individual and government irresponsibility is an insidious cancer that will destroy us as a people unless we recognize it and root it out now.

We shall have to fight the politician who remembers only that the unborn have no votes and that since posterity has done nothing for us we need do nothing for posterity.

American society was economically ill-run in the 1980s. Our society has been on a consumption binge. If the American people had a town meeting and said, 'What do we care about posterity? Posterity hasn't done anything for us; we're going to whoop it up now,' that is a rational judgment. But nobody ever did that.

It is pleasant to observe how free the present age is in laying taxes on the next. "Future ages shall talk of this; they shall be famous to all posterity;" whereas their time and thoughts will be taken up about present things, as ours are now.

A coldly rationalist individualist can deny that he has any obligation to make sacrifices for the future.

Why should I care about posterity? What's posterity ever done for me?

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.

People really are very concerned when they put their head on the pillow at night - they're concerned that America may cease to be what America has been because we are leveraging the future of our children and our grandchildren.

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?

I think that we have a responsibility to make certain that we are fiscally responsible in order to assure, frankly, future generations don't have to pay our bills.

Republicans profess to be against deficits, but they are experts at creating and exacerbating deficits.

The people who control the condition in which we live have no reason to think beyond more than the next five or 10 years.

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.

Liberals worry that what's best for the individual might not be better for the public at large. But that philosophy assumes something vicious about each and every one of us. It assumes we only care about ourselves.

President Obama came to office proclaiming that he aims to solve problems, not hand them on to our children. Most presidents say that sort of thing.

To add current expenses of the Government to the national debt ... and thereby pass the current cost of government to the next generation is not only bad financing but very bad statesmanship.

What Republicans have to get away from is just worrying about the next election and start thinking about what is good for the country down the road.

Modern day Americans seem loathe to do the right thing unless it is also the smart thing – even “compassionate release” has to be touted for its cost-saving virtues.

The easiest thing that is done, unfortunately, in Washington is to spend money today and send the bill to our children and grandchildren.