Political Quotes

“Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Elbridge Gerry in 1799, wrote: I am for a government rigorously frugal and simple, applying all the possible savings of the public revenue to the discharge of the national debt; and not for a multiplication of officer and salaries merely to make partisans, and for increasing by every device, the public debt, on the principle of its being a public blessing. I agree with Mr. Jefferson wholeheartedly, and I suspect that most other Americans do as well. Today, the Federal debt is in excess of $4.7 trillion and growing at a rate of $200 billion to $300 billion per year. As the CATO institute has pointed out, this is both an economic and a moral problem. The economic problem is that deficit financing is the ultimate form of hidden taxation. Federal borrowing injects a huge prospending bias into the budget process by allowing politicians to hand out a dollar of Government spending to voters, while only imposing 80 cents of taxes. Nobel Laureate James Buchanan in a 1977 book with his colleague Richard Wagner, alerted us to this problem.”