Thomas Jefferson Quotes

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

We have been maintaining a standard of living by putting things on the debt of the next generation.

The only frontier now left to exploit is not a frontier in space but a frontier in time. We steal the future from our children by plunging massively deeper and deeper into debt.

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 fact is, almost every year since the founding of these United States, our government has lived beyond its means.

The debt and the deficit is just getting out of control, and the administration is still pumping through billions upon trillions of new spending. That does not grow the economy.

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.

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

I've been Secretary of the Treasury for 147 days, and in that 147 days I've written $133 billion worth of hot checks.

People who wouldn’t think of raising taxes think there’s nothing wrong with mortgaging the future of their state

A nation is not in danger of financial disaster merely because it owes itself money.

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.

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.

Debt is the fatal disease of republics, the first thing and the mightiest to undermine governments and corrupt the people.

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.

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.

Federal spending is atrocious.

For years governments have been promising more than they can deliver, and delivering more than they can afford.

To win elections, politicians have promised practically endless government spending and covered up the cost, leaving generations of taxpayers obligated to pay off the debt. That's wrong, but neither the U.S. nor Europe has a plan to stop it.

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.

No government under heaven could have prevented a people from ruin ... when they were exhausting their valuable resources in paying for superfluities, and running themselves in debt to foreigners, and to each other for articles of folly and dissipation.

Deficits aren't always bad if you invest the money.

Our national finances are in a ruinous state.

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

Republicans do not have good ideas. Borrowing two trillion dollars from your grandchildren to finance a Social Security scheme that looks like Enron is not a good idea.