John Thune Quotes

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

The problem is that the economy isn't growing fast enough to accommodate the level of spending produced through the democratic process.

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.

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.

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.

The federal government now spends one of every four dollars in the entire economy. It borrows one of every three dollars it spends. No nation, no entity, large or small, public or private, can thrive, or survive intact, with debts as huge as ours.

The debt they ran up in the first year of the Obama administration is bigger than the last four years of the Bush combined.

There's no debt limit in the Constitution.

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.

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.

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.

A national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a national blessing.

Spending on programs such as national defense and funding the operating budgets of all federal agencies represent only 39 percent of our yearly budget, an all-time low.

Have you noticed the debt is exploding? And it's not all because of Medicare.

It's the old Washington fiscal game of Jenga. You try to build as much debt as you can take, as much tax as you can take, until you topple the entire economy.

Mr. Obama plans to boost federal spending 25 percent while nearly tripling the national debt over 10 years. Americans know that this kind of spending will have economic consequences, including new taxes being imposed by the new progressives.

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.

Trillions of dollars are being spent in the name of 'saving' the economy: bailouts, 'stimulus,' omnibus spending bills, budgets, government takeovers of the auto, health care and energy industries, all of which require ever more spending.

After the $700 billion bailout, the trillion-dollar stimulus, and the massive budget bill with over 9,000 earmarks, many of you implored Washington to please stop spending money we don't have. But, instead of cutting, we saw an unprecedented explosion of government spending and debt, unlike anything we have seen in the history of our country.

For one thing, one of the wonderful things that we now have is instead of the huge budget surpluses that President Clinton left us with, we now have these huge deficits that we're going to be facing into the future.

For the first time in history, we declared war without financing it. Americans have not been asked to pay for it through taxes.

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.

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.