Generational Debt Quotes

When our most important issue is the debt that we're piling on our children and grandchildren, I think it's pretty helpful to have someone in the U.S. Senate who has actually managed billions of dollars and knows how to cut billions of dollars.

I refuse to leave our children with a debt that they cannot repay.

I think that we have a responsibility to make certain that we are fiscally responsible in order to assure, frankly, future generations don't have to pay our bills.

Every American born today owes $43,000 to the federal government the day she or he is born. And we are transferring a tremendous amount of debt to the new generation, much of it owed to overseas creditors who expect to be repaid by our children with interest.

We need a wealth tax that on a one-time basis is going to take back at least some small fraction of the great windfall that the upper 1 percent, or 5 percent and pay down the government debt, pay back the federal debt because we can't put this on the next generation or they're going to be buried paying taxes.

I think that's what activates the Tea Party Movement. What they see is the government interfering with their lives and with the inheritance of their children. Are we going to pass down liberty or deficits? And that's really what this movement is about.

Isn't it a shame that future generations can't be here to see all the wonderful things we're doing with their money?

As parents, we can have no joy, knowing that this government is not sufficiently lasting to ensure any thing which we may bequeath to posterity: And by a plain method of argument, as we are running the next generation into debt, we ought to do the work of it, otherwise we use them meanly and pitifully. In order to discover the line of our duty rightly, we should take our children in our hand, and fix our station a few years farther into life; that eminence will present a prospect, which a few present fears and prejudices conceal from our sight.

I have three adult children, and I have four grandchildren. I want to stop the deficits. I want to make sure that we're not passing on to my children and my grandchildren deficits and that we cannot repay and that they will have to repay and maybe they won't be able to repay them.

The New Deal, in my mind, has become a raw deal for my children.

Our pandering politicians compete to add names to the dependency of entitlement rolls instead of evaluating the success of these programs by how many people leave the dole and are restored to an independence. And these bulging entitlements are saddling our offspring with unsustainable generational debt.

The fact that oppressive and corrupt regimes can borrow money in the name of the whole country means that the country's future generations will be weighed down by interest and repayment burdens, even if the money has been frittered away in some frivolous way, embezzled or used for weapons to suppress the country's population.

I'd like my grandkids to be able to watch PBS. But I'm not willing to borrow money from China, and make my kids have to pay the interest on that, and my grandkids, over generations, as opposed to saying to PBS, 'Look, you're going to have to raise more money from charitable contributions or from advertising.'

It is important that we learn humility, which says there was someone else before me who paid for me. My responsibility is to prepare myself so that I can pay for someone else who is yet to come.

America needs a new approach to boost the economy - one that does not doom future generations to being saddled with paying off today's federal deficits.

Who are we to think that our generation is going to be the first generation to benefit from all the sacrifices that others have made without giving some modern-day equivalent of our own lives, fortunes, and sacred honor?

The debt of gratitude we owe our mother and father goes forward, not backward. What we owe our parents is the bill presented to us by our children.

You are where you are because the generation before you paid attention to their broken heart.

People ask how I can be a conservative and still want higher taxes. It makes my head spin, and I guess it shows how old I am. But I thought that conservatives were supposed to like balanced budgets. I thought it was the conservative position to not leave heavy indebtedness to our grandchildren.

I have younger friends who are in this pinch where they feel they've been counted out before they've had a chance to prove themselves. They've inherited a lot of debt - not just student debt but environmental debt, political debt. They really feel squeezed.

The priority of leadership is what the lobbyists and giant corporations and special interests in Washington want. It's why we're bankrupting our kids and grandkids.

We take a lot for granted as second wave feminists, what our mothers and aunts did for us.

When I think of the future, I think of my 15 year old son Connor and my 12 year old daughter Meghan. I worry about their future because your kids are as important to you as mine are to me. And I am unwilling to leave our children with so much debt.

It is a wise provision that youth cannot see what it owes the previous generation. This is a chicken that comes back to roost in heavier years.

Make no mistake: Republican tax cuts for the rich will bankrupt our country - and it's the grandkids of the middle class who will have to pay it back. This is wrong.