Alan Simpson: “I recently came upon some statements offered by Thomas Jefferson, which, I think, appear to bear some remarkable…”

“I recently came upon some statements offered by Thomas Jefferson, which, I think, appear to bear some remarkable relevance to our current predicament. To quote from one of them from 1816, in a letter to Governor Plumer, he said: ``I place economy among the first and most important of republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared.'' On another occasion, he made the same point, perhaps even more dramatically, in a letter to Samuel Kerchival, also in 1816: ``We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude.'' It is when we are having the most difficulty attending to and resolving the most vexing issues of the day that we can profit most from such reminders and that much of what confronts us today has been dealt with by so many of our greatest public servants who came before us. One simply cannot read many of the statements of our third President, Thomas Jefferson, without coming upon repeated, potent references to the necessity of eliminating public debt. I suggest that he would be horrified to learn that we would ever consider allowing our current impasse to stand and to leave deficits and mandatory spending to spiral upward unabated.”