Howard Dean Quotes

Massive Federal Budget Deficits are only the most conspicuous sign of a society that has promised itself more than it could afford.

Last year 100,000 people gathered on The Mall to Protest the deficit. We Republicans, over and over, castigated President Obama for creating a Trillion dollar deficit. I was against big deficits then, and I am agaist them now. Just because it is now Republicans doing all the spending, I am still opposed.... Those Republcians who voted for a tax cut and a spending increase are hypocrites.

The Republicans in the House and the Bush administration are bankrupting this country.

Spending when the math's not there and the numbers aren't there and if they look in the social security trust fund, it's filled with IOUs because the government's been pilfering it for years on end. We have to do something. We have to start having this discussion.

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.

We are spending a little more than we are raising each year and you wonder how long it can go on. It is too easy for us to borrow.

I've been Secretary of the Treasury for 147 days, and in that 147 days I've written $133 billion worth of hot checks.

To add current expenses of the Government to the national debt ... and thereby pass the current cost of government to the next generation is not only bad financing but very bad statesmanship.

Those who say we can continue to indefinitely borrow from our children and grandchildren and generations to come in fact are eroding our ability to do what we ought to do in education, in health care and in other things.

Social spending is going up at a tremendous rate. The irony is that it went up even faster during the “prudent” years of Republican administration more so than it did under the “spendthrift” Democratic administrations….

To avoid large and unsustainable budget deficits, the nation will ultimately have to choose among higher taxes, modifications to entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, less spending on everything else from education to defense, or some combination of the above.

What's just about a generation of people who rack up government debt for their own health care and retirement - while leaving their children and grandchildren to foot the bill?

One of the cruellest things of all is to have a huge deficit in this country, meaning that everyone's children will be expected to pay back for our debt today. That is unfair as well.

For the last 4 years, our Federal Government has produced the four biggest deficits in history, and the estimated 2006 deficit of $423 billion is projected to be the largest of all.

Republicans profess to be against deficits, but they are experts at creating and exacerbating deficits.

No one can reasonably deny that Medicare is headed for insolvency, and that Medicare's insolvency, if not rectified, will lead to the federal government's insolvency.

Could we do without the social safety net, without Social Security, without Medicare, without farm subsidies, without unemployment compensation, without school lunch programs, without housing assistance? Of course we could. But we would not be a civilized society and we would not be an American nation any of us would be proud of.

In a great financial emergency nearly every country has, at one time or another, been tempted to confuse the monetary with the fiscal functions of the Treasury. To borrow by the issue of money seems to have a seductive charm hard to resist.

If you leave the Republicans alone in a dark room, you know that there are going to rob the Social Security Trust Fund.

Let us all be happy and live within our means, even if we have to borrow the money to do it with.

People who wouldn’t think of raising taxes think there’s nothing wrong with mortgaging the future of their state

Social Security is on the books. We’ll pay for it as long as we have money or can borrow it.

There are only three ways to meet the unpaid bills of a nation. The first is taxation. The second is repudiation. The third is inflation.

The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale

The banks have discontinued themselves. We are now without any medium … necessity, as well as patriotism and confidence will make us all eager to receive Treasury notes if founded on specific taxes. Congress may now borrow of the public, and without interest, all the money they may want … by merely issuing their own promissory notes ….