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.
We have had eight years of consistent and persistent attacks on those four years in government - and on me, personally, but that does not matter - by people who were collectively responsible for those four years.
It took the national debt two hundred years to reach $1 trillion. Supply Side Economics quadrupled the national debt to over $4 trillion in twelve years (1980-1992) under the Republicans. Bill Clinton actually paid down the national debt. How did he do it? He raised taxes. It produced the longest sustained economic expansion in U.S. History.
Ultimately, we can't just keep doubling our national debt every eight years. We have got to get that under control and not spend more than we bring in.
We want a national emissions trading scheme, the Government does not and has rejected one for years. We want to boost the mandatory renewable energies target, the Government has failed to do that. We want a national demand side management strategy for the country to reduce electricity consumption and the Government, up until now, has done very little on that score.
I've criticized Republicans for their lack of fiscal discipline when they controlled Congress before 2007. However, that is no excuse to just continue with more of the same or, as the case is now, to make it worse. Under House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's budget, we will double the national debt in five years and triple it in 10.
In numerous years following the war, the Federal Government ran a heavy surplus. It could not (however) pay off its debt, retire its securities, because to do so meant there would be no bonds to back the national bank notes. To pay off the debt was to destroy the money supply.
The national debt will have increased by approximately 50% in just eight years! We will have created a new unfunded entitlement - disability and health care benefits for the huge number of disabled veterans returning from the Iraq war.
The amount of money coming into Washington is not a factor when the Democrats start spending it. Witness Obama. National debt doubled in eight years. It didn't matter what the tax revenue was. Didn't matter. He was gonna spend the money anyway.
There is a lot of fiscal conservatives in the United States senate that didn't vote for that because we understand that national security spending is not the reason why we have a debt. Our debt is being driven by the way Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid and, by the way, the interest on the debt is structured in the years to come.
No nation ought to be without a debt. A national debt is a national bond; and when it bears no interest, is in no case a grievance.
Tea Partiers hate government more than they hate the national debt. They refuse to reduce that debt with tax increases, even with tax increases on the wealthy, because a tax increase doesn't reduce the size of government.
The problem is that the way [President] Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion dollars for the first 42 presidents - number 43 added $4 trillion dollars by his lonesome - so that we now have over $9 trillion dollars of debt that we are going to have to pay back. [That's] $30,000 for every man, woman and child. That's irresponsible. It's unpatriotic.
I'm not driven to get back into politics. It's not on my top five things to do before I die, but saying that, I may be in politics in the next year or the next ten years. I've been on the front line for 12 years, four in state government, eight on the national level.
Posterity does not pay off anything of the national debt. Each administration adds to the debt left to it, and the promise of liquidation implied in every bond issue is a false promise.
The [Barack] Obama administration, from the time they've come in, is over 230 years' worth of debt, and he's topped it. He's doubled it in a course of almost eight years, seven-and-a-half years, to be semi- exact.