Tim Johnson Quotes

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.

The amount of U.S. debt held by countries such as China and Japan is at a historic high, with foreign investors holding half of America's publicly held debt. This dependence raises the specter that other nations will be able to influence our policies in ways antithetical to American interests.

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

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.

Ron Paul's crazy talk about the Federal Reserve makes more sense these days. Right now, every - all this debt issued by the United States people assume the Chinese are buying, no they don't want any more American debt. Ron Paul has a point there.

I really truly worry that the debt is one of the single biggest threat to the United States of America, that we're talking about a problem that is multi-trillion in its depth and I think we ought to be cutting more.

I think Mr. Obama is a disaster for business and a disaster for the United States. Not that Mr. Romney would be much better, but the Republicans understand the problem of excessive debt better than Mr. Obama, who basically doesn't care about piling up debt.

We need to understand as a nation that you can't forever expect somebody out there, whether it's China or somebody in England, to say, 'I will always take America's debt no matter what.'

The American people will eventually get hurt by this accumulated deficit. That's the problem. We have too much deficit. We have to find a solution.

I do not want America to default on its debt.

Essentially, when we run a deficit, we are borrowing money to buy things that are made overseas.

Well, the problem of the federal government is that they print money and go in debt. That's their national policy, Democrats and Republicans it doesn't matter. And this is where I differ.

Does it make any sense to borrow money from China to give it to the unemployed I America? This weakens us.

We borrow 40 cents out of every dollar that we spend. We borrow most of it from countries like China. They have become major creditors of the United States and have more power over our economy than we want them to. So dealing with this is not only the right thing economically, it's certainly right from a moral viewpoint.

When President Bush left office, the deficit was approximately $500 billion. It is now approximately now $1.5 trillion. In other words, President Obama has essentially tripled the deficit.

The US Debt is the single biggest threat I see to innovation in American business.

I think if we give Glenn Beck the numbers, he can solve this [the national debt].

The top threat that gets very little focus from Washington these days is what Adm. Mike Mullen identified as the biggest threat to the U.S.: the American debt.

What we also have to recognize is that the deficit levels that I'm inheriting, over a trillion dollars, coming out of last year, that that is unsustainable. At a certain point, other countries stop buying our debt, at a certain point, we'd end up having to raise interest rates, and it would end up creating more economic chaos and potentially inflation.

I know economists will say well, we could run a small deficit but the problem is that once you cross that line as we see in the United States, nothing stops deficits from getting larger and larger and spiralling out of control.

The president has borrowed more money to spend to less effect than anybody on the planet.

We have, during his regime, during President Obama's regime, we've doubled our national debt. We're up to $20 trillion.

It took the first 204 years of our Nation's history to accumulate $1 trillion in debt. And now we are doing that every 2 or 3 years.

Ronald Reagan felt very great regret about the deficits to which he contributed on his watch.

The Obama administration's large and sustained increases in debt raise the specter of another financial crisis and large future tax increases, further chilling business investment and job creation.