“I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.”
Thomas Jefferson
“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.”
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
“[Credit is a system whereby] a person who can’t pay, gets another person who can’t pay, to guarantee that he can pay.”
Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit
“We must make our choice between economy and liberty or confusion and servitude…If we run into such debts, we must be taxed in our meat and drink, in our necessities and comforts, in our labor and in our amusements…if we can prevent the government from wasting the labor of the people, under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy.”
Thomas Jefferson
“there is a debt of service due from every man to his country, proportioned to the bounties which nature & fortune have measured to him.”
Thomas Jefferson (in a letter to Edward Rutledge, December, 27 1796)
http://tjrs.monticello.org/letter/1698
“the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding….”
Jefferson did exactly that with the financing of the Louisiana Purchase (and it was financed through a foreign bank)
“Britain’s Baring & Co. Bank, which agreed, along with several other banks, to make the actual purchase and pay Napoléon cash. The bank then turned over ownership of the Louisiana Territory to the United States in return for bonds, which were repaid over 15 years at 6 percent interest, making the final purchase price around $27 million”
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-louisiana-purchase-changed-the-world-79715124/
Are you really comparing a one time cost that doubled the landmass of the nation with financing day to day costs?
I believe Jefferson made the right call. But as an anti-federalist, it forced him stretch the power of the federal power beyond what he believed were its limits. This shows there are no simple answers. “Cut the Budget” is a platitude, not plan. If Jefferson had followed that advice, the western boundary of the US would be just past the Appalachians.
I have not owed a dime to anyone since 1973. It’s very hard to get into trouble when you are debt free, live slightly below your means and work your ass off.
muck..