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Debt QUOTES

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"AARP strongly opposes these proposals [to divert Social Security payroll taxes to private accounts]. Private accounts in place of Social Security are risky, expensive to administer, and require huge increases in the federal debt. AARP believes there are better and more responsible ways to strengthen the system. To compensate for the loss of Social Security revenue sent into private accounts, the federal government would have to borrow significant sums for the next several decades in order to continue to pay promised benefits to currently retiring beneficiaries. One prominent proposal would require $1 billion in the first 10 years the private accounts were in place. Then, $3.5 trillion would be needed in the following decade. Younger workers would have to bear much of the burden for paying this debt. That's not right, and it's not fair to them. Social Security is an insurance program, not an investment program. The essence of Social Security is that it has always been risk-free for all of us. It's also inflation-proof - something neither investments, nor even many pensions, can guarantee. Private accounts within Social Security would add a large measure of personal risk. AARP has publicly stated many times that there are places in retirement planning that are appropriate for taking risks, such as 401(k) plans, Individual Retirement Accounts, and mutual funds, but they should be in addition to the guarantee of Social Security."
-- AARP

millions of our fellow human beings continue to live as contemporary slaves, victims of abominable practices like human trafficking, forced labour and sexual exploitation. Countless children are forced to become soldiers, work in sweat shops or are sold by desperate families. Women are brutalized and traded like commodities. Entire households and villages labour under debt bondage.
-- Ban Ki-moon

You can't build hospitals or schools, you can't spend money educating or immunizing your people, whilst there is this burden of debt sitting on your head. It effects the lives of about a billion people who are living on less than a dollar a day. We're trying to get them a fresh start... It is a moral as well as economic imperative that we come to their aid right now... That's what we're asking for these poorest nations of the world - Give them a fresh start. Cancel those old debts. Let them get up off their knees and take care of themselves...
-- Bono

A huge part of our power came from our moral authority ... the moral issue of debts as being killers of millions of poor people around the world...I think our power is also rooted in our intellectual power. I think there are a lot of strong leaders around the world who have made very convincing arguments about the weakness of corporate-led globalization and the compelling nature of alternatives.
-- John Cavanagh

“Simply put, unsustainable debt is helping to keep too many poor countries and poor people in poverty.”
~ Bill Clinton

The debt that each generation owes to the past it must pay to the future.
-- Abigail Duniway

“A man in debt is so far a slave.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

To the generous mind the heaviest debt is that of gratitude, when it is not in our power to repay it.
-- Benjamin Franklin
"If you help others, you will be helped, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps in one hundred years, but you will be helped. Nature must pay off the debt...It is a mathematical law and all life is mathematics."
-- Gurdjieff

“When you get in debt you become a slave.” -- Andrew Jackson

If you look internationally over the last 50 years there have been improvements in the third world, but in the last 20 years the reverse has happened, with debt crises and increased poverty.
-- David Korten

 

* "We must work to repeal trade agreements that impede access to affordable generic drugs. We must work to cause the IMF and the World Bank to reduce and eventually eliminate the debt that takes poor nations' resources away from crises like AIDS. We must focus America's leadership on addressing and ending this epidemic."
-- Dennis Kucinich

Multinational companies now run water systems for 7 per cent of the world's population, and analysts say that figure could grow to 17 per cent by 2015. Private water management is estimated to be a $200 billion business, and the World Bank, which has encouraged governments to sell off their utilities to reduce public debt, projects it could be worth $1 trillion by 2021. The potential for profits is staggering: in May 2000 Fortune magazine predicted that water is about to become 'one of the world's great business opportunities', and that 'it promises to be to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th'.
-- John Louma

* "Of course I am frustrated with regard to extreme poverty, to violence that never seems to cease. Greed is the key. It’s easy to sit in relative luxury and peace and pontificate on the subject of the Third World debts. Not many of us are willing to give up everything we have. We can however give some, and millions of people do, governments do, but there is so much more to be done."
-- Sir Roger Moore

Debt is the fatal disease of republics, the first thing and the mightiest to undermine governments and corrupt the people.
-- Wendell Phillips

Worrying is like paying on a debt that may never come due. -- Will Rogers

"This law represents a cornerstone in a structure which is being built but is by no means completed--a structure intended to lessen the force of possible future depressions, to act as a protection to future administrations of the Government against the necessity of going deeply into debt to furnish relief to the needy--a law to flatten out the peaks and valleys of deflation and of inflation--in other words, a law that will take care of human needs and at the same time provide for the United States an economic structure of vastly greater soundness."
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt (August 14, 1935)
In order more deeply to affect the minds of the citizens of the United States with the blessings of peace, by contrasting them with the evils of war, let the following inscriptions be painted upon the sign which is placed over the door of the War Office: 1. An office for butchering the human species. 2. A Widow and Orphan making office. 3. A broken bone making office. 4. A Wooden leg making office. 5. An office for the creating of public and private vices. 6. An office for creating a public debt. 7. An office for creating speculators, stock Jobbers, and Bankrupts. 8. An office for creating famine. 9. An office for creating pestilential diseases. 10. An office for creating poverty, and the destruction of liberty, and national happiness. -- Benjamin Rush

* The time has come to end this charade. The debts are unaffordable. If they won't cancel the debts I would suggest obstruction; you do it yourselves. Africa should say: 'thank you very much but we need this money to meet the needs of children who are dying right now so we will put the debt servicing payments into urgent social investment in health, education, drinking water, control of AIDS and other needs.'
-- Jeffrey Sachs

People should watch out for three things: avoid a major addiction, don't get so deeply into debt that it controls your life, and don't start a family before you're ready to settle down.
-- James Taylor

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