National Finances Quotes

During the 2016 presidential campaign, candidate Donald Trump pledged to eliminate our national debt 'over a period of eight years.' Now two years into his administration, our national debt has increased, surpassing $21 trillion for the first time in American history.

Berlin has traditionally backed a rules-based eurozone in which every member state is responsible for its own finances, including bank bailouts, with political union limited to a fiscal overlord's possessing veto power over national budgets that violate the rules.

Our national finances are in a ruinous state.

Borrowing 40 cents out of every dollar we spend for missiles or food stamps is unsustainable. And being indebted for generations to China and OPEC does not make American a stronger nation.

If a company can declare bankruptcy, why can't a country do so?

Our country has tremendous problems. We're a debtor nation.

My hope is that we're going to be more strategic and focused as we look for a way to address the long-term deficit and debt issues that are affecting this nation.

Our present financial condition is without parallel in history. No nation has ever before been embarrassed from too large a surplus in its Treasury.

What our Republican friends are doing, if we look at what they do and not what they say, they have decided that the most important thing in this country is to increase payments for interest on the national debt.

No one would look just at a firm's revenues to assess how well it was doing. Far more relevant is the balance sheet, which shows assets and liability. That is also true for a country.

And as the vicissitudes of Nations beget a perpetual tendency to the accumulation of debt, there ought to be in every government a perpetual, anxious, and unceasing effort to reduce that, which at any times exists, as fast as shall be practicable consistently with integrity and good faith.

I refer, of course, to the debts our nation has amassed for itself over decades of indulgence. It is the new Red Menace, this time consisting of ink. We can debate its origins endlessly and search for villains on ideological grounds, but the reality is pure arithmetic.

The nation’s founding fathers deferred many of their own cherished plans until the nation paid off its debts.