George McGovern Quotes

For the first time in history, we declared war without financing it. Americans have not been asked to pay for it through taxes.

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.

Debt is the fatal disease of republics, the first thing and the mightiest to undermine governments and corrupt the people.

The federal government now spends one of every four dollars in the entire economy. It borrows one of every three dollars it spends. No nation, no entity, large or small, public or private, can thrive, or survive intact, with debts as huge as ours.

Well, I think what we need to remember is that budget deficits can impede economic activity.

The party in power almost always unapologetically engages in deficit spending, while the other party argues passionately against the evils of debt and deficits.

I know that my Republican colleagues are as ashamed as I am that the United States is forced to borrow over $1 trillion from foreign nations to pay for our national priorities like reconstruction of the gulf coast and the war in Iraq.

I really truly worry that the debt is one of the single biggest threat to the United States of America, that we're talking about a problem that is multi-trillion in its depth and I think we ought to be cutting more.

We have mountain of debt that isn't going away and all the problems are here to stay, and anybody who tells you that is a good thing ought to get out of the business of helping the government down the road.

To date, every American citizen has nearly $27,000 in public debt riding on our backs.

These kids understood what is not immediately obvious; that they were going to pay the bills for tax cuts that had been passed today or in the last 4 years, and for the war in Iraq, because essentially we are borrowing money to do those things.

A public debt is a public curse and in a representative government greater than any other.

American economic history does not support the idea that a strong economy depends on chronic federal borrowing.

Finance ministers the world over, responsible for assuring the service of the internal debts by forcing down the standards of living, do not find the matter so simple. They observe that the average man today finds the problem of making both ends meet a serious one. They are well aware that he demands something out of life over and above the bare necessities, and they have a realistic view of the situation created when a government demands this margin in taxes or takes it by inflation.

We have, during his regime, during President Obama's regime, we've doubled our national debt. We're up to $20 trillion.

The debt they ran up in the first year of the Obama administration is bigger than the last four years of the Bush combined.

There's no debt limit in the Constitution.

You know, Hoosiers recognize pork when we see it. And they recognize what bailing out every failing business in America means - We're burying generations under a mountain range of debt.

If we continue to allow the federal government to live beyond its means, we will all soon have to live beneath ours.

From the Left comes the proposition that, given the slow economy, we should defer attending to the problem of mounting obligations - and the truly delusional idea that growing federal debt doesn't matter because we owe most of it to ourselves.

It's the old Washington fiscal game of Jenga. You try to build as much debt as you can take, as much tax as you can take, until you topple the entire economy.

The federal debt in this country is principally of Republican design.

If the U.S. Government was a company, the deficit would be $5 trillion because they would have to account by general accepted accounting principles. But actually they encourage government spending, reckless government spending, because the government can issue Treasury bills at extremely low interest rates.

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

The American people want a balanced budget. They want Congress to stop this barbaric practice of perpetual deficit spending. It really, if you think about it, is a form of taxation without representation. We fought a war over that issue and we won that war.