Government Cost Quotes

The public was entirely free of the great danger and expense of a standing army.

I believe that government is too large, costs too much, spends too much, and has too much regulatory power in our lives.

Five years of Prohibition have had, at least, this one benign effect: they have completely disposed of all the favorite arguments of the Prohibitionists. None of the great boons and usufructs that were to follow the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment has come to pass. There is not less drunkenness in the Republic, but more. There is not less crime, but more. There is not less insanity, but more. The cost of government is not smaller, but vastly greater. Respect for law has not increased, but diminished.

The deficit had become a symbol of our inability to control and manage the cost of government.

Do we want more of the same regulatory mission creep that has helped to harm America's poor and middle class? Do we want more of the policies that have stifled growth? Or do we want something else, something different, something that focuses on the need to reevaluate the size, the scope, the cost, the reach of the federal government?

The mentality in Washington is, 'Look what our government - what our government can do for the American people.' We've got to get away from that mentality, and realize it's too expensive. We can't afford it.

Next time a man tells you talk is cheap, ask him if he knows how much a session of Congress costs.

People are beginning to realize that the apparatus of government is costly. But what they do not know is that the burden falls inevitably on them.

The worst thing the federal government could do is to increase the size, reach and cost of government. If government failed in its response to the hurricane, the answer is not more inefficient government.

For three long years I have been going up and down this country preaching that government . . . costs too much. I shall not stop that preaching.

I decided I ought to pick a project that would not be controversial, that would not really cost the government a lot of money.

Our domestic problems are for the most part economic. We have our enormous debt to pay, and we are paying it. We have the high cost of government to diminish, and we are diminishing it. We have a heavy burden of taxation to reduce, and we are reducing it. But while remarkable progress has been made in these directions, the work is yet far from accomplished.

As long as we're focused on spending, there are only two ways to do that: One is spend less, and Democrats have no solutions for that. Or we have pro-growth policies that make the economy grow so the dead-weight cost of government becomes a smaller percentage of the economy and therefore less expensive.