John Breaux Quotes

The Pentagon budget, like all government spending, is an expression of priorities.

Looking at the high cost of occupation in Iraq and the needs we have in this country, would it not have been better to have smaller tax cuts in order to keep down the deficits.

It is not for the State Department or even the Secretary of State to say when and how the resources of the American people will be spent.

What I'm not saying is that all government spending is bad. It's not - far, far from it, but there is no free lunch, as a former colleague of mine used to say. There is no public tooth fairy. Father Christmas does not work on the Treasury staff this year. You can never bail someone out of trouble without putting someone else into trouble.

Homeland Security money ought not to be allocated on a pork barrel basis.

I'm not going to deprive my constituents of money that's out there.

It is difficult even now for the President to avoid giving his approbation to any law appropriating money for a road or canal.

Under no circumstances will I allow expenditures upon works not clearly national.

Every dime spent is a political decision made.

Government spending is not wasteful. The question is, “Is it necessary?”

One person's pork barrel project is another person's wise investment in the local infrastructure.

Cost effectiveness and effectiveness are not always the same thing in government.

Who's going to do a better job of spending your money? You or the government?

Look, ideally I'd like to have free money to give to everybody. The reality is in government you have to choose and make decisions.

Government can only spend a dollar to help someone when it forcibly takes a dollar from someone else.

You can't have it both ways. You can't tell me that you're taxed enough already, and that you want constitutional government and then in the next breath say, 'Bring me home some bacon.' The pig has been picked clean.

There is a legitimate role for development education in the UK, but I do not believe these projects give the taxpayer value for money.

Let me make it clear: The Disbursement Allocation Program is not pork barrel. Of the DAP releases in 2011 and 2012, only nine percent was disbursed for projects suggested by legislators. The DAP is not theft. Theft is illegal.

If the government mandates anything with a price tag on it, then it ought to fund the project.

I believe the only measure of government response shouldn't be how much we spend on a situation, but rather how well we spend.

My friend Paul Ryan talks about fiscal responsibility, but voted to put two wars on a credit card.

What you don't do, if you're an adult, is decide that you're going to budget things through a sequester. What does that word have to do with budgeting? It's like if you have a family budget and go, 'We really don't know what to take out economically from the budget, so we're going to whack out protein for this week.'

Every time we spend a federal dollar, what we're doing is we're pulling money out of somebody's pocket, and we're giving it to somebody else.

I was able to promote a strong defense budget when it could have been cut a lot more severely.

If you could really guarantee that the money would be spent on something more worthwhile, I'd say, absolutely, scrap the space program, but it never works that way.