VERIFIED QUOTE · reported 2026-08-20
“At that time, President [Ronald] Reagan told the nation in a televised address, 'If we as a nation needed a warning, let that be it',”
Maya MacGuineas · said date not stated · reported 2026-08-20
MacGuineas recounted President Reagan's 1981 televised warning after US debt first reached $1tn.
This quote was mechanically extracted from the cited article and verified as an exact substring of the source text before publication. Attribution follows the article's own wording.