Thomas Jefferson Quotes
Nineteen years is the term beyond which neither the representatives of a nation nor even the whole nation itself assembled can validly extend a debt ... one generation is to another as one independent nation to another.
Thomas Jefferson, 1743-1826, 3rd President of the United States (Democratic Republican, VA), Letter to James Madison, September 6, 1789
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
See {604501} for another of his statements. It was Alexander Hamilton who called the national debt a national blessing. See {207891}. Jackson was convinced that a moneyed class who held the national debt could dictate to any administration by threatening to not renew their bonds. The same concern was expressed at the beginning of the 21st century regarding the Chinese and the Middle Eastern countries which held do many of our bonds.
This is the kind of advice that Presidents have given the Congress for years. What makes this quotation noteworthy is the person who made the statement, President George W. Bush. It was made in the 7th year of his Presidency which had in those 7 years, at his urging, gone from a balanced budget and a national surplus projected, to the largest deficit of any nation in history and a projected deficit that even dwarfed that. So the irony of the quotation was that the politician who produced the largest economic burden on future generations was lecturing other politicians on the evils of doing exactly what he himself had been doing. Bush, if nothing else, was one of the most audacious politicians in this respect, though his most severe detractors claim that he did not have the intellectual perspective to even understand the hypocrisy of his quotation,
Historically, this is the occasion where the war debt from the Revolution and the War of 1812 was paid off. It was one of the few times that the nation was debt free.
This remarkable quotation illustrated the historical hatred aroused by the concept of government debt. Bryan, a religious man, states that debt is worse than murder. But a little over 100 years later, George W. Bush, also a very religious man, incurs a debt larger than all Presidents before him combined. Yet he thought it virtuous and best for the country. Both men were fundamentalist Christians.
Thomas Jefferson was an American statesman, diplomat, lawyer, architect, philosopher, and Founding Father who served as the third president of the United States from 1801 to 1809. He had previously served as the second vice president of the United States under John Adams between 1797 and 1801. The principal author of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson was a proponent of democracy, republicanism, and individual rights, motivating American colonists to break from the Kingdom of Great Britain and form a new nation; he produced formative documents and decisions at both the state and national levels.
