Pete Hegseth Quotes

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

I do think a focus on fiscal restraint is a central element of the Tea Party, and thank goodness for it!

If you refuse to acknowledge that there is any waste that can be culled from the military budget, you are a big-government conservative, and you cannot lay claim to balancing the budget.

I never defended the Bush administration's spending.

The American people know that we cannot spend our way to prosperity.

Defense spending as a share of the economy dropped significantly during the early 1990s, and that was one of the things, along with other policy changes, that put us back on the path to a balanced budget.

Only in Washington does a decrease in the proposed increase equal a spending cut.

In a clean break from the Obama years, and frankly from the years before this president, we will keep federal spending at 20 percent of GDP, or less. That is enough. The choice is whether to put hard limits on economic growth, or hard limits on the size of government, and we choose to limit government.

While our nation faces many challenges that must be met regarding homeland security and our military readiness, it is imperative that we live within our means and wisely spend taxpayer dollars.

We laugh at liberals who declare that their favorite spending programs should be exempt because the spending is for a noble cause.

Even with not having a balanced budget at this time, I support tax cuts. That will help limit spending.

States, virtually all of them, have a constitutional requirement to operate on a balanced budget.

I am a deficit hawk.

Republicans went off track. We were spending too much money.

There is no real justification for a requirement that a budget of any sort should be balanced, except as a rallying point for those who seek to hamstring government.

Normally, when politicians talk about 'cutting the budget,' they really mean reducing the amount of increase. Actual spending goes up while the politicians claim to have 'cut the budget.'

I've been amazed at the degree to which Democrats, in particular, have expressed their enthusiasm for the president's manner with which he handled this budget.

The best thing to hold down spending is to have a Democratic President and a Republican Congress.

Sound principles will not justify our taxing the industry of our fellow citizens to accumulate treasure for wars to happen we know not when, and which might not, perhaps, happen but from the temptations offered by that treasure.

I personally do not worship at the alter of a balanced budget.

Like Ike [President Eisenhower] did. Talk economy and then spend away.

Those who make the most and loudest speeches about deficit reduction are least likely to vote against spending.

Only in Washington do you hear a budget increase described as a cut.

The Federal Government has no fiscal policy, for the tail of political expediency has long wagged the dog of prudent policy in Washington.

The function of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, as I understand it, is to resist all demands for expenditure made by his colleagues and, when he can no longer resist, to limit the concession to the barest point of acceptance.