The latest installment of The Liberty Quiz has closed. The true/false question was: "The founding fathers considered it the patriotic duty of the next generation to pay off the national debt of the present generation."
72.7% of you voted FALSE.
27.3% of you voted TRUE.
The correct answer is FALSE. The founding fathers considered debt to be the equivalent of voluntary servitude. They believed that in the normal course of things, our nation should never function on borrowed funds.
"The maxim of buying nothing without the money in our pockets to pay for it would make our country one of the happiest on earth. Experience during the [revolutionary] war proved this; and I think every man will remember that, under all the privations it obliged him to submit to during that period, he slept sounder and awoke happier than he can do now." ~Thomas Jefferson
The founders understood that extraordinary circumstances sometimes warranted the use of debt, but they were emphatic that the wars, economic problems, and debts of one generation should be paid for by the generation that incurred them. They wanted the rising generation to be genuinely free - both politically and economically. And they felt that the passing on of federal debt from one generation to the next would be a means of imposing on the next generation the curse of taxation without representation - the very thing the founders freed us from. The paying off of debt by the generation in which it was incurred happened from our founding up until this current generation.
The United States federal debt for 2006 was $8,366,862,634,494. Thanks to our current out-of-control government, many generations will be taxed without representation. And both Republicans and Democrats want to implement new multi-billion dollar programs to add to this debt.
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