George Pataki Quotes

When completed, the budget must provide the services we have promised to our constituents.

We're going to have to control the spending of government.

If you don't get spending under control, eventually you're going to have a big tax increase.

The failure to work out sensible budgets makes it impossible for government agencies to make long-term plans, and instead leaves them scrambling to spend money in the short term.

I can’t come up here each year to the legislature and beg for money.

It is dangerous to play politics with the Budget.

Government does not have basic business sense.

If you don’t have the budget, you can’t get anything done. That’s why bureaucrats are always fighting about budgets.

The budget doesn't have much control over the government. Then again, the government doesn't have much control over the budget.

A two-year budget is not an ideology.

What's really important to me is that we have fiscally responsible balanced budgets.

We wanted to be certain they didn't have a bigger deficit, and Kennedy agreed with me.

Remarkably, there are leaders in Washington who don't understand why it's so important for us to have a budget.

I am specifically concerned about the idea that the legislative process is one that gets characterized the way it is as the 'fiscal cliff.' At the end of the day, the United States is the biggest economy in the world, and the dollar is the reserve currency in the world. I think it behooves us to act in a much more responsible way.

We'll set our approach to borrowing, to spending, to taxation, in a sensible way on a sensible timescale.

Of course we have to address the deficit if we win.

We have been spending beyond our means, we are going to focus on the projects that we committed to in the election but importantly if there is additional projects or new things that come up they have to have a business case, they have to work and they can't impose financial stress on families and private individuals and businesses.

Reviewing a government budget is much like going through the attic in an old home.

The government that came into power after the April 1994 elections was going to need a budget. It was drafted by our finance minister, Derek Keys, and he convinced them of the necessity to stay within the free-market principles that had been in force in South Africa for decades.

If it took multiple debt ceiling hikes, I'd rather achieve the savings.

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.'

I think the whole issue of a debt ceiling makes no sense to me whatsoever. Anybody who is remotely adroit at arithmetic doesn't need a debt ceiling to tell you where you are.

If we had decided on January 5, in the new House of Representatives, to make no new spending bills, the debt ceiling would've still been hit, because, those are bills that are coming in as a result of purchases and commitments made by the administration and the previous Congress.

Rather than waiting to restore fiscal responsibility after we pass legislation, we must work to ensure we remain committed to it as we draft legislation.

It's insane to try to balance the budget.