Quotes that Speak the Truth About America's National Debt

COMMENTARY | In light of President Barack Obama's recent negotiations with congressional Republicans over our national debt, I thought I'd take a look at some interesting quotes those in the GOP have made over the last decade, leading us up to our current economic situation.

* "My budget has funded a responsible increase in our ongoing operations, it has funded our Nation's priorities, it has protected Social Security and Medicare, and our surpluses are big enough that there is still money left over. ... My budget proposal pays down and unprecedented amount of public debt." -- George W. Bush on during his address to Americans on Feb. 27, 2001. Bush said that his plan would pay down $2 trillion in debt over the next 10 years, quicker than any nation has repaid in history. Instead, the Bush administration, as of September 2008, had increased the national debt greater than any administration ever had in the history of the United States. When Bush took office the national debt was $5.727 trillion. After nearly eight years in office, the debt was $9.849 trillion.

* "It's amazing I won. I was running against peace and prosperity and incumbency." -- Former President George W. Bush's comments to the Swedish Prime Minister Goran Perrson. These comments were recorded by the Swedish TV network, TVS, on June 14, 2001. Ten years later it's easy to see that, for once, these words rang true.

* "You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don't matter. We won the midterms. This is our due." -- Dick Cheney in December 2002 when former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill warned him of a looming financial crisis. Gee, and Republicans are trying to pin the poor economy on President Obama.

* "What you've seen (in Washington) is a crowd that has taken advantage of a crisis back in late '08 early '09 and spent more money than this country has spent in the last 200 years combined, in the two years since." -- Eric Cantor, R-Va., on Oct. 12, 2010, on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Cantor is wrong any way you look at it Politifact.com, the Pulitzer Prize winning fact-checker, states that from 2006 through 2008, federal spending was $8.3 million, which is higher than the $7.2 million spent in 2009 and 2010.

* "Well for one thing we didn't have these damn tea party people breathing down our necks. Those folks are crazy!" -- House Speaker John Boehner on June 1, 2011, during the ongoing budget negotiations. This was Boehner's answer to Obama's question as to why the GOP is suddenly concerned about the debt when they voted to double the national debt during George W. Bush's administration. Boehner and the Republicans voted five times to raise the debt during the Bush years, and in 2003, the same day Bush gave $350 million in tax cuts to the wealthy, Congress approved a $900 billion dollar debt limit increase.

The Republicans would like all Americans to believe the national debt is the fault of democratic administrations, and currently Obama in particular, when in reality it's the Republicans who have been largely responsible for the mess we're currently in.