MICK MULVANEY

My dad told me something long before I was in politics, and when your dad gives you advice every single day, eventually one or two of the things stick in your mind. And he said, don't believe what people say, believe what they do.

I've never understood the allure of putting your name on a building that was built with taxpayers' money.

There are jobs that American citizens will not do. We can talk about why that is. We can talk about how our welfare state is broken, how we encourage people not to work, but that doesn't help the farmer pick his peaches this summer.

We cannot have another experience like we've had in my freshman class, of people saying one thing and doing another.

I would be embarrassed to tell you how many folks ran saying that they weren't going to spend a bunch of money, they weren't going to raise the debt ceiling, and then they went to Washington, D.C., and did exactly that.

This [Washington DC] is the people's city, and the people of South Carolina have almost as much vested here as the people who live here.

If we don’t take defense spending seriously, it undermines our credibility on other spending issues

The only way to get universal health coverage is to put people in jail who refuse to buy health insurance, and we're not going to do that.

The President [Donald Trump] asked me to look you square in the eye and to say taht he hoped you voted no on this bill so he could run a primary challanger against you in 2018,

Infrastructure is sort of that good spending in the middle, where even if you do misallocate resources a little bit, you still have something to show for it. It's tangible; it may help economic growth and so forth.

We need people to go to work. If you're on food stamps, and you're able-bodied, we need you to go to work. If you're on disability insurance and you're not supposed to be, you're not truly disabled; we need you to go back to work.

It doesn't cost money to let people keep more of their own money. It costs money to spend money you don't have, but that's another issue.

Remember what Obamacare gave you. Obamacare gave you insurance but not health care. A lot of folks who were technically insured either couldn't afford the premiums or couldn't afford the copay.

I don't like the fact that C.F.P.B. exists, I will be perfectly honest with you.

Let's talk about after-school programs generally. They're supposed to be educational programs, right? And that's what they're supposed to do; they're supposed to help kids who can't - who don't get fed at home, get fed so that they do better at school. Guess what? There's no demonstrable evidence they're actually doing that.

When you grew up in a household where mom would keep the extra ketchup packets from McDonald's and keep them in a drawer just in case there came a day when you couldn't afford to buy ketchup anymore, that gets ingrained in you.

There is absolutely no way that the U.S. will ever default on its debt. We are not going to do that.

My reputation is as a fiscal hawk. At least, I hope that it is.

We can't spend money on programs just because they sound good... Meals on Wheels sounds great.

I really do feel like I'm doing what the people that elected me in the first place wanted me to do. I'm not doing it in the same fashion they thought, or that I thought, when I ran for office in 2010. But I will be doing what they wanted me to do, and that is to try to fix Washington.

We have to get the tax revenues up. That means we have to get back to a healthy American economy, grow the economy so that you make more money. I make more money, ordinary Americans make more money, and so does the government. That helps lessen the deficit.

I believe, as a matter of principle, that the debt is a problem that must be addressed sooner rather than later. I also know that fundamental changes are needed in the way Washington spends and taxes if we truly want a healthy economy. This must include changing our government's long-term fiscal path, which is unsustainable.

Too often in Washington, we only look at the recipient side: How does the budget affect either those who receive or don't receive benefits.

We have to end Medicare as we know it. We have to fix it.

We don't spend money properly in Washington, D.C. We jump these massive bills to massive bills.