On the recordMarch 3, 2015
On that point, I love keeping strange jotted notes in my office. Again, the number that you are getting at--because you are now touching on national defense--you know, Habsburg defaulted on all or part of its debt 14 times between 1557 and 1696. Pre-revolutionary France saw 62 percent of its royal revenue going to interest payments alone. Britain, between World War I and World War II, saw interest payments climb to 44 percent of the British budget. In the Ottoman Empire, interest payments and amortization rose from 15 percent of its budget in 1860 to 50 percent in 1875. In other words, this music has been played before with disastrous consequences, and that is why I think it is relevant. Keynes actually quoted Lenin, of all folks, and Lenin's quote was this: ``There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.'' What you are laying out with the chart which you so appropriately lay before the Congress is the very formula that Lenin, himself, was talking about in things that will challenge not only defense but the way in which a government sustains itself.
