Quotes About Our National Debt

#1. President Obama has almost doubled our national debt to more than $19 trillion, and growing. And yet, what do we have to show for it? Our roads and bridges are falling apart, our airports are in Third World condition, and forty-three million Americans are on food stamps.

Donald Trump

#2. Our national debt after all is an internal debt owed not only by the Nation but to the Nation. If our children have to pay interest on it they will pay that interest to themselves. A reasonable internal debt will not impoverish our children or put the Nation into bankruptcy.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#3. When George Bush came into office, we had surpluses. And now we have half-a-trillion-dollar deficit annually. When George Bush came into office, our national debt was around $5 trillion. It's now over $10 trillion. We've almost doubled it.

Barack Obama

#4. The only way to reduce our national debt is to grow the economy and cut spending. We have no idea how our money is being spent. As president, I will move all agencies to zero-based budgeting so that every agency has to justify every dollar that they spend.

Carly Fiorina

#5. My pan plays down an unprecedented amount of our national debt.

George W. Bush

#6. Because Social Security has not contributed to our debt, Americans should be skeptical of any politician who says that benefits Americans have earned must be reduced in order to address our national debt.

Hank Johnson

#7. I think that when we look out with our underfunded liabilities and our national debt over $14 trillion, I think if we are part of that movement to get our government spending under control, I think that would be a tremendous legacy to leave.

Ben Quayle

#8. At the time we were funding our national debt, we heard much about "a public debt being a public blessing"; that the stock representing it was a creation of active capital for the aliment of commerce, manufactures and agriculture. This paradox was well adapted to the minds of believers in dreams.

Thomas Jefferson

#9. We may casually talk of all sorts of new programs and 'stimulus,' but the vast trillion-dollar collective national debt and rising annual deficits will insidiously hamstring almost everything we plan to do.

Victor Davis Hanson

#10. What our Republican friends are doing, if we look at what they do and not what they say, they have decided that the most important thing in this country is to increase payments for interest on the national debt.

Tom Allen

#11. A sagging economy, a soaring national debt, and an increasingly restive Congress pushed Obama to order troop reductions that are both deeper and faster than recommended by his military commanders.

Ron Fournier

#12. He could melt glaciers with that smile. End wars. Resolve the national debt crisis.

Kristen Proby

#13. The important lesson of the deficit is - and the national debt - is we have to be careful about how we're spending money.

Joseph Stiglitz

#14. Examine the legacy that we inherited and what we did. We had boom-and-bust economics and a doubled national debt.

Tony Blair

#15. Obama and his Democrats need to be placed on the defensive. They are the primary drivers of this spending; they are the obstructers of entitlement reform and the national debt continues to burn while they fiddle.

David Limbaugh

#16. Solvency is maintained by means of a national debt, on the principle, If you will not lend me the money, how can I pay you?

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#17. The Citizen's Petition reflects Vermont's spirit of pragmatism and across-the-board cooperation. I applaud the 'Campaign to Fix the Debt' for calling attention to one of the country's most pressing problems, our ballooning national debt, and for urging policymakers to find practical solutions.

Peter Welch

#18. The refunding of the national debt at a lower rate of interest should be accomplished without compelling the withdrawal of the national-bank notes, and thus disturbing the business of the country.

James A. Garfield

#19. 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.

Mike Lee

#20. In numerous years following the war, the Federal Government ran a heavy surplus. It could not (however) pay off its debt, retire its securities, because to do so meant there would be no bonds to back the national bank notes. To pay off the debt was to destroy the money supply.

John Kenneth Galbraith

#21. Mr. Obama denounced the $2.3 trillion added to the national debt on Mr. Bush's watch as 'deficits as far as the eye can see.' But Mr. Obama's budget adds $9.3 trillion to the debt over the next 10 years. What happened to Obama the deficit hawk?

Karl Rove

#22. When I left Washington, we actually had a balanced budget and we paid down the most amount of the national debt in modern history and cut taxes and created jobs. And I was the chief architect of that plan in '97.

John Kasich

#23. 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.

Glenn Hubbard

#24. We ought to pay down the national debt, ... The American people are tired of people who make promises about cutting taxes that they cannot keep.

John McCain

#25. There isn't much a pan of warm Brownies and a glass of milk will fix. In less it's low grain prices. Or poverty. Or the national debt. I guess there are a few things, but nothing you have to worry about right this minute.

Lois Greiman

#26. I was on the national Pentathlon team for a few years, but there was no funding for athletes in Canada. I was in a massive amount of personal debt at the age of 21, so I joined a little modelling and talent agency to get a some work, to do anything so that I didn't have to drop out of school.

Kris Holden-Ried

#27. When George W. Bush entered office, the national debt was $5 trillion. When he left, it was $10 trillion. I think the administration spent too much money.

Ted Cruz

#28. No nation ought to be without a debt. A national debt is a national bond; and when it bears no interest, is in no case a grievance.

Thomas Paine

#29. I never stopped feeling abject terror until I got on television and went on a national ad campaign and realized, "I will be able to feed my children. I have somehow averted the destiny that awaited me, which is endless, crippling debt forever."

John Hodgman

#30. Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt.

Herbert Hoover

#31. The teachers never explained what this debt was all about, but we knew it was an embarrassment on the level of a national bedwetting.

Euny Hong

#32. The greatest threat to our national security is our debt. We borrow a million dollars a minute.

Rand Paul

#33. During the Reagan years the left fretted about "two hundred billion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see." What were annual deficits under Reagan became monthly deficits under Obama. In less than eight years, Obama has doubled the national debt.

Dinesh D'Souza

#34. I think if we give Glenn Beck the numbers, he can solve this [the national debt].

Michele Bachmann

#35. It would be easier to pay off the national debt overnight than to neutralise the long-range effects of our national stupidity

Frank Zappa

#36. Although federal revenues nearly doubled during the Reagan years, federal spending far exceeded that pace and drove the national debt from $909 billion to $2.6 trillion between 1980 and 1988, by far the highest it had ever been.

Douglas Brinkley

#37. Our nation stands at the crossroads of liberty. Crushing national debt, rampant illegal immigration, insane business regulations and staggering national unemployment are pushing our nation into unchartered territory.

James Lankford

#38. What we are effectively doing, I say this to the young people of America whom my colleagues represent, is leaving our children and grandchildren the tab for fighting a war, letting them pay for the lion's share of it by simply adding it to the national debt.

John Spratt

#39. After everyone has had a chance to bluster, posture, and pontificate, we are left with one basic question: under any foreseeable circumstance, would it be in our national interest to default on our debt? The answer is unequivocally no.

John Sununu

#40. Our health-care morass is like the problems of global warming and the national debt - the kind of vast policy failure that is far easier to get into than to get out of. Americans say that they want leaders who will take on these problems.

Atul Gawande

#41. You remember had this gigantic clock in the arena showing the size of the national debt. And Paul told America, if you elect Republicans, we can fix that. But, if Paul Ryan was being honest, he would've pointed to the debt clock and said, we built that.

Chris Van Hollen

#42. It was at the graduate school at Columbia University that I first met Wesley C. Mitchell, with whom I was associated for many years at the National Bureau of Economic Research and to whom I owe a great intellectual debt.

Simon Kuznets

#43. The [Donald] Trump plan would increase the national debt a little over a $1 trillion a year, the Trump plan would reduce taxes at all income levels with, of course, the biggest tax cuts going to the richest taxpayers as they always do.

Lawrence O'Donnell

#44. When President Obama asked Congress to raise the debt ceiling $2 trillion and offered sequestration as an offset, I opposed it. I did not believe we should put the country $2 trillion deeper in debt and impose irresponsible massive cuts to our national security.

Mike Turner

#45. The national debt has given rise to joint stock companies, to dealings in negotiable effects of all kinds, and to agiotage , in a word to stock-exchange gambling and the modern bankocracy .

Karl Marx

#46. We don't have a trillion-dollar debt because we haven't taxed enough; we have a trillion-dollar debt because we spend too much.

Ronald Reagan

#47. On any measure, Spain's bank rescue has been a disaster. A hundred million euros have been added to the national debt, ten-year bonds are at a record high and the country's credit rating has been downgraded three notches.

Daniel Hannan

#48. So it's still standing?" he managed to get out between his snickers. "I would've thought you two had knocked it to rubble by now. What were you doing last night? Discussing the national debt?" Emmett howled with laughter.

Stephenie Meyer

#49. When he had explained why investors who wanted low risk and moderate returns should put their capital into national debt shares, Daisy had interrupted him by asking, Father, wouldn't it be wonderful if hummingbirds had tea parties and we were small enough to be invited?

Lisa Kleypas

#50. What were you two doing last night, discussing the national debt?

Stephenie Meyer

#51. Our middle class majority, deeply in personal debt, elects political leaders who increase our benefits. Then we vote them out because we dislike the soaring national debt.

Oliver DeMille

#52. I am one of those who do not believe that a national debt is a national blessing, but rather a curse to a republic; inasmuch as it is calculated to raise around the administration a moneyed aristocracy dangerous to the liberties of the country.

Andrew Jackson

#53. Counting obligations under Medicare and Social Security, the real debt of the United States is more than 10 times the reported national debt.

Addison Wiggin

#54. 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.

George McGovern

#55. In FY 2006, interest payments alone on the national debt cost us $406 billion ... What a waste ... That $406 billion is pathetically squandered on interest, just because we lacked the discipline to pay our bills when due.

Bill Press

#56. By making this wine known to the public, I have rendered my country as great a service as if I had enabled it to pay back the national debt.

Thomas Jefferson

#57. Donald Trump got himself very far to the left. When he was considering running for president in 2000, he was for a 13 percent wealth tax on wealthy people to retire the national debt.

Chris Hayes

#58. The Missourians I hear from just don't buy the idea that the only way to tackle the national debt is to drastically alter Medicare and Social Security.

Claire McCaskill

#59. Both on an individual and a national scale, debt imprisons.

Tom Hodgkinson

#60. A responsible government does not triple the national debt in eight years.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

#61. Posterity does not pay off anything of the national debt. Each administration adds to the debt left to it, and the promise of liquidation implied in every bond issue is a false promise.

Frank Chodorov

#62. It is known, to the force of a single pound weight, what the engine will do; but, not all the calculators of the National Debt can tell me the capacity for good or evil, for love or hatred, for patriotism or discontent, for the decomposition of virtue into vice, or the reverse.

Charles Dickens

#63. The debt is being cynically exploited by the far right, with collusion of the Democrat establishment, to undermine what remains of social programs, public education, unions, and, in general, remaining barriers to corporate tyranny.

Noam Chomsky

#64. I would suggest to my honourable Friend that the foreign investor is at least as discouraged by high national debt for that, as all example shows, is the surest precursor of high taxation.

John James Cowperthwaite

#65. 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.

Richard M. Daley

#66. I've been pretty clear about saying that I think that the No. 1 threat to our national security is our debt. And we've got to get our arms around that and head it in another - head it in the right direction - that we have to pay our fair share of this.

Michael Mullen

#67. Anyone could see the ticker tape. It was more frightening than the that never stopped calculating the national debt. This one said '27 SHOPPING DAYS TO CHRISTMAS'.
It might as well have said '27 DAYS TO ARMAGEDDON'.

Jeanette Winterson

#68. The truth is we need to build an economy going forward with all of us, when we all move forward and the payment of a national debt is not the responsibility of one group of Americans versus another.

Paul Sadler

#69. I found this national debt, doubled, wrapped in a big bow waiting for me as I stepped into the Oval Office.

Barack Obama

#70. Obama does not need to worry as much as past Democratic presidents about being labeled soft on national security - not after giving the order that led to the assassination of Osama bin Laden. No, his biggest concern is being labeled tone deaf on joblessness and debt.

Ron Fournier

#71. 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.

Matt Taibbi

#72. We now have a president who tries to save money by turning off lights in the White House, even as he heads toward a staggering addition to the national debt. "L.B.J." should stand for Light Bulb Johnson.

Barry Goldwater