John Spratt Quotes

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.

Each generation should be made to bear the burden of its own wars, instead of carrying them on, at the expense of other generations.

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?

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

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

These kids understood what is not immediately obvious; that they were going to pay the bills for tax cuts that had been passed today or in the last 4 years, and for the war in Iraq, because essentially we are borrowing money to do those things.

And I have to tell you as a grandmother, I worry about the fact that my grandchildren are going to be paying for all the spending, including military spending, that has gone on and the tax cuts that have come through.

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.

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

I have three adult children, and I have four grandchildren. I want to stop the deficits. I want to make sure that we're not passing on to my children and my grandchildren deficits and that we cannot repay and that they will have to repay and maybe they won't be able to repay them.

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.

I am not disputing the need for this money. What I am disputing and calling attention to is the fact that we are taking the tab for defense in our time against terrorists in the Middle East and elsewhere and shoving this tab off onto our children.

We have sent our troops to war without paying for it. Now, we are bringing them home without saying how we are paying for it.

Every American born today owes $43,000 to the federal government the day she or he is born. And we are transferring a tremendous amount of debt to the new generation, much of it owed to overseas creditors who expect to be repaid by our children with interest.

America has to ask itself not what it wants, but what it can afford... The New Deal, in my mind, has become a raw deal for my children.

We can no longer afford the war in Iraq. Our financial costs have already passed a third of a trillion dollars; the lifetime costs for this war, in both human and economic terms, will be borne by Americans for generations to come.

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.

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.

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

We should get young people to be more concerned about our debt and point out to them that promising them more all the time is a completely unsustainable way of being and that it's a lie to say that the top one percent are going to pay for it.

One of the cruellest things of all is to have a huge deficit in this country, meaning that everyone's children will be expected to pay back for our debt today. That is unfair as well.

I refuse to leave our children with a debt that they cannot repay.

Basically, if you're a young Canadian now and Trudeau puts this country into $1.5 trillion in debt, you will never have the opportunity that I had as a young Canadian.

It is perhaps my greatest hope, Mr. President, that some day we'll consider tax and spending measures with no one else in mind but future generations of American taxpayers. We're tying a millstone of debt around their necks, and it is a grave mistake.

When I was a youngster growing up in South Dakota, we never referred to the national debt, it was always referred to as the war debt because it stemmed from World War I.