Wasteful Spending Quotes

One of the most ridiculous defenses of foreign aid is that it is a very small part of our national income. If the average American set fire to a five-dollar bill, it would be an even smaller percentage of his annual income. But everyone would consider him foolish for doing it.

I view roads as a source of boundless patronage to the executive, jobbing to members of Congress and their friends, and a bottomless abyss of public money. You will begin by only appropriating the surplus of the post office revenues; but the other revenues will soon be called into their aid, and it will be a source of eternal scramble among the members, who can get the most money wasted in their State

If you spend your own money on yourself, you care how much you spend and how well you spend it. If you spend your own money on someone else, you care how much you spend, but you don't care how well it is spent. If you spend someone else's money on yourself, you don't care how much you spend, but you do care how well it is spent. And finally, if you spend someone else's money on someone else, you don't care how much you spend, and you don't care how well it is spent. That is government.

Make no mistake: I will work with both Democrats and Republicans to cut wasteful spending and reduce our debt in a balanced, responsible way.

We are tackling the inefficiency and corruption that has long plagued the New Orleans Housing Authority.

The real problem with the government is not the deficit; it is that the government spends too much money.

I'm sick and tired - and the American people are sick and tired - of the pork barrel spending.

This career [politics] of plundering and blundering.

The Republicans are running wild with our tax dollars and it's been a mistake to let this administration continue a policy of incompetence when it comes to Iraq.

When you’re spending 24 billion dollars in pork barrel transportation projects how can you go to the American people and talk about tax increases.

Waste of time is the most extravagant and costly of all expenses.

What chiefly governs the military budget is the need to spend enormous sums of money in a useless way. The allegedly powerful Pentagon is simply a receptacle for wasteful expenditure, just as a city dump is the receptacle for the refuse of a city.

Well, Congress gave us a billion dollars to dig the hole, this gigantic hole. Bigger, much bigger than the hole in Geneva, Switzerland. Then they canceled the machine and gave us a second billion dollars to fill up the hole. Two billion dollars to dig a hole and fill it up. That is the wisdom of the United States Congress and it really makes you wonder: Is there intelligent life on the Earth? Certainly not in the United States Congress.

There's one thing which I hate about color films... people who use up a lot of their despairing producer's money by working in the laboratory to bring out the dominant hues, or to make color films where there isn't any color.

That's where all the foreign aid (which might be defined as a transfer from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries) went as well. The U.S. government still squanders about $20 billion a year this way, and European governments spend proportionally even more; it's all gone straight down a giant rat hole.

One mode of the misappropriation of public funds is avoided when appointments to office, instead of being the rewards of partisan activity, are awarded to those whose efficiency promises a fair return of work for the compensation paid to them.

The Pentagon is the Poster Child for waste in Government.

Nothing is easier than spending public money. It does not appear to belong to anybody. The temptation is overwhelming to bestow it on somebody.

Politically motivated lawsuits and prosecutions cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars every year.

Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless.

What I think is wrong is spending £9m of taxpayers' money on one particular piece of one-sided propaganda.

The Gillard government must give up its addiction to wasteful spending borrowing and taxing.

Doing good with other people's money has two basic flaws. In the first place, you never spend anybody else's money as carefully as you spend your own. So a large fraction of that money is inevitably wasted. In the second place, and equally important, you cannot do good with other people's money unless you first get the money away from them. So that force - sending a policeman to take the money from somebody's pocket - is fundamentally at the basis of the philosophy of the welfare state.

… frittered away, 9 times out of 10, in things which pertain to the body and not to the spirit; upon richer food and drink, better clothing, more extravagant living, which are beneficial neither to rich or nor poor.

I admit to wasting my life messing around with fast cars and motorcycles.