Balancing the U.S. budget

By Herbert Hoover, October 17, 1938

This department of New Deal liberalism is at least consistent in one particular.  It is no longer haunted by the old ghost of a balanced budget.  These huge deficits and gigantic increase in debt have great dangers to free men.  In their mildest form debt and taxes are a limitation on the freedom of men, for then men must work for the government and not for themselves.  There is one thing you can put down both historically and economically.  There are only three ways to meet the unpaid bills of government.  The first is more taxation.  The second is more devaluation, which is repudiation.  The third is inflation in some form.  Those are the implacable dangers of profligate spending.  Let us not forget that increasing debts some day accumulate to where democracy cannot be brought to the agony of sufficient taxes to carry them.  When that day arrives, liberty dies in the gutter… You reduce economic and social security when you limit and strangle the productivity of a people.  You do not establish either economic or social security by blasting at the very foundations of free men and women.