Federal Debt Quotes

In order to truly get deficit spending and federal debt under control, the Trump administration is going to have to eventually address entitlement reform. If not, Trump will not only become part of the Washington status quo on the issue, but will leave burdensome and expensive problems for future generations.

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.

We need a wealth tax that on a one-time basis is going to take back at least some small fraction of the great windfall that the upper 1 percent, or 5 percent and pay down the government debt, pay back the federal debt because we can't put this on the next generation or they're going to be buried paying taxes.

Democrats can neither control nor predict whether our GOP counterparts are really ready to play chicken with the U.S. economy. But we can assure the American people that our party takes the nation's faith and credit seriously.

Thanks to decades of accumulated federal budget deficits and, more significantly, imprudent Medicare and Social Security policies, we've stolen almost $60 trillion from our children.

From the Left comes the proposition that, given the slow economy, we should defer attending to the problem of mounting obligations - and the truly delusional idea that growing federal debt doesn't matter because we owe most of it to ourselves.

America needs a new approach to boost the economy - one that does not doom future generations to being saddled with paying off today's federal deficits.

Every generation has an obligation to leave its children in a better position than it inherited. Our representatives in Washington are breaking faith with that covenant. America must reduce its federal spending and accumulation of debt for the sake of generations to come.

I have never yet had anyone who could, through the use of logic and reason, justify the Federal Government borrowing the use of its own money. I believe the time will come when people will demand that this be changed. I believe the time will come in this country when they will actually blame you and me and everyone else connected with the Congress for sitting idly by and permitting such an idiotic system to continue.

American economic history does not support the idea that a strong economy depends on chronic federal borrowing.

I have been in Washington for 22 years and have seen us kick the can down the road. Well there is no more road to kick the can down.

Perhaps the most important reason to be skeptical of government inflation numbers is that the government, like a fox campaigning to guard a hen house, has many reasons to be disingenuous. As the world's largest debtor, the Federal Government is inflation's primary beneficiary.

The bailout of Fannie Mae is completely off the books. It's going to cost us hundreds of billions of dollars. Yet nobody is placing this in any type of column in accounting for federal debt.

Part of any solution to get our economy going should include steps to free up our small businesses by peeling back unnecessarily burdensome regulations, ending the continual threats of tax hikes, and addressing the cloud of federal debt that hangs over our economy.

As boom- and bust-prone as high finance always has been and remains, the greatest systemic risk to our economy is not Wall Street. It's the growing federal debt (and weakening dollar) being enacted by those Washington politicians - the ones who want to protect us from Wall Street.

If we continue to allow the federal government to live beyond its means, we will all soon have to live beneath ours.

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.

The federal debt in this country is principally of Republican design.

President Obama has ignored or dismissed proposals that would address our anti-competitive tax code and unsustainable trajectory of federal debt - including his own bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform - and submitted no plan for entitlement reform.

I think everybody benefitted from what I am calling a bubble finance system, a bubble economy and if we're ever going to right the system, we're going to have to stop this explosion of the federal debt. We need huge spending cuts, OK? Don't get me wrong, we need to raise regular taxes too but even beyond that it's not going to hurt if we want to reset the system to ask those who have benefitted disproportionately - remember, we got $60 trillion of net worth in the household sector. $45 trillion of that belongs to the top 5 percent.

I think we're so addicted to bubble finance at the Fed that they can't get out of the corner they painted themselves into. I think the Fed is making federal debt so cheap that Congress has no interest, Washington has no incentive to ever face up to our massive fiscal gap that is going to grow, and grow as we go forward in time and so we have a paralyzed system.