Deficit Spending - Founder's View

If he were alive today, what would Thomas Jefferson have to say about public debt and taxation to pay for it? Well here are his actual words:

"I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom. And to preserve their independence, we must not let our rulers load us with personal debt. We must make our election between economy and servitude. If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, and give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts abd daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtainsubsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of fellow sufferers... This example reads us the salutary lesson that private fortunes are destroyed by public, as well as, by private extravagance. And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second, that second for a third, and son on, til the bulk of society is reduced to be mere automations of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering. Then begins indeed the bellum omnium in omnia which philosophers, observing it to be wso general in this world, have mistaken... for the natural instead of the abusive state of man. And the forehouse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression."

or in a shorter sentence:

"The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale."


In Other Words
We should NOT be spending like the IDIOTS ARE IN WASHINGTON. They are destroying the country!