What we are effectively doing, I say this to the young people of America whom my colleagues represent, is leaving our children and grandchildren the tab for fighting a war, letting them pay for the lion's share of it by simply adding it to the national debt.
Our national debt after all is an internal debt owed not only by the Nation but to the Nation. If our children have to pay interest on it they will pay that interest to themselves. A reasonable internal debt will not impoverish our children or put the Nation into bankruptcy.
Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that 'the buck stops here.' Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership.
Now we are raising the debt limit 3 times, up to $8 trillion, so that our children and our grandchildren will have to pay for the cost of our expenditures.
The use of our military in combat should first require declaration of war. I have long called for reinstating the military draft, simply because I believe strongly that a national decision to go to war must also include a broad commitment to share its burdens. Whenever Congress decides to fund a war or other U.S. combat activities, it must provide a means to pay for it-then and there-not later. If we don't have the will to fully share the burdens of war, then we have no right to send our sons and daughters into harm's way.
Our platform calls for a balanced deficit reduction plan where the wealthy pay their fair share. And when your country is in a costly war, with our soldiers sacrificing abroad and our nation facing a debt crisis at home, being asked to pay your fair share isn't class warfare - it's patriotism.
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?
There are two definitions of deflation. Most people think of it simply as prices going down. But debt deflation is what happens when people have to spend more and more of their income to carry the debts that they've run up - to pay their mortgage debt, to pay the credit card debt, to pay student loans.
When you run a company, you want to hand it off in better shape than you found it. In the same way, just as we shouldn't leave our children or grandchildren with mountains of national debt and unsustainable entitlement programs, we shouldn't leave them with the economic and environmental costs of climate change.
Turning away women and children in grave danger; warehousing children in cages; deporting people whom we promised to protect - these actions are not reflective of the America I want to live in. They do not represent the values our country claims to hold.
My first generation of young readers now have not only children, but some of them have grandchildren to whom they're introducing their old passion.
We should get young people to be more concerned about our debt and point out to them that promising them more all the time is a completely unsustainable way of being and that it's a lie to say that the top one percent are going to pay for it.
Debt ceiling is something that, you know, any time the president asks for the authority to increase the debt ceiling, the debt burden on our children and grandchildren, I think that requires a pretty serious discussion, robust debate.
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 young patriots now returning from war in Iraq and Afghanistan and other deployments worldwide are joining the ranks of veterans to whom America owes an immense debt of gratitude.
I've been pretty clear about saying that I think that the No. 1 threat to our national security is our debt. And we've got to get our arms around that and head it in another - head it in the right direction - that we have to pay our fair share of this.
We're doing terribly. We're leaving these unborn children trillions of dollars of debt, which is just horrific. We're leaving nuclear weapons - enough to end life as we know it - all over the planet. We're leaving a legacy of violence and killing and guns.