In a memo Thursday designed to rally his Republican caucus, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) invoked Abraham Lincoln’s admonition about government debt. But as HuffPost’s Luke Johnson reported, Boehner conveniently omitted Lincoln’s call for new tax revenues.
In the memo, Boehner used Lincoln’s words, as quoted in the book “Congressman Lincoln.”
The book Congressman Lincoln by Chris DeRose, which I recently read, includes a chapter focused on Abraham Lincoln’s efforts to help craft a new national agenda. At one point in the book, young Lincoln warns that government debt is “growing with a rapidity fearful to contemplate.”
“[Government debt] is a system not only ruinous while it lasts, but one that must soon fail and leave us destitute,” Lincoln warns his countrymen in Congressman Lincoln. “An individual who undertakes to live by borrowing, soon finds his original means devoured by interest, and next no one left to borrow from – so must it be with a government.”
But as Johnson pointed out, Boehner left out Lincoln’s lamentation that the debt was created by an “unwillingness either to increase the tariff or resort to direct taxation.”
Read Johnson’s entire report at HuffPo.
