Dale Bumpers Quotes

Spending on the military doesn't increase the deficit.

There's nothing magic about spending on tanks and bombs rather than roads and bridges.

National security - the military is the first thing we should spend money on. You have to fully fund that first. And then you should be paying for everything else.

Spending on programs such as national defense and funding the operating budgets of all federal agencies represent only 39 percent of our yearly budget, an all-time low.

When the greatest part of the [U.S.] budget pays for our defense and the livelihood of retirees, it is pointless to pretend that public spending is an embarrassment consisting only of welfare and waste.

Foreign policy debates are frequently segregated from domestic policy ones, so commentators who propose increasing the defense budget or sending more foreign aid are seldom asked to explain which domestic programs they’d cut or which taxes they’d raise, in order to find the money.

Republicans traditionally say, 'oh, we'll cut domestic spending, but we won't touch the military.' The liberals - the ones who are good - will say, 'oh, we'll cut the military, but we won't cut domestic spending.'

According to the National Priorities Project, military expenditures are 54% of the budget. The next biggest line item is 7%. And there are a whole bunch of 7 percents. So in short, we have a military budget surrounded by a lot of footnotes. This is not serving us well.

Domestic discretionary spending on education and health care and the environment has been growing at 2 to 3 percent a year. He says we have to rein it in, but he ignores the spending category that is the big spike in the budget.

The Pentagon budget, like all government spending, is an expression of priorities.

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

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.

The Republicans throw money at crime and military defense the way the Democrats do at poverty and welfare.

The Republicans can't say no to military spending, and the Democrats can't say no to social spending.

Too many people on the Left think that, when you move a chunk of money away from people for entitlements, that the money magically reappears and that discretionary spending will be unaffected.

We are at a crossroads over how the federal government in Washington and state legislatures and city councils across the land allocate their financial resources. Which fork we take will say a lot about Americans and our values.

The challenge for any government is how do you do two things at the same time. How do you put money forward for things like the payroll tax holiday, for things like getting a jump-start on infrastructure, for building schools, and make the decisions for long-term deficit reduction.

I cannot in good conscience vote in favor of tax cuts, irrespective of their size, or to which segment of the population they are targeted. Nor can I support any spending increases that are not related to improving our nation's defense from the obvious and serious threats facing us today.

If the government mandates anything with a price tag on it, then it ought to fund the project.

And so we go over the cliff fiscally, and our Republican friends try to pin the blame on discretionary domestic spending, including spending for security. We pass budget resolutions that fall far short.

I want to stop directing so many of resources to the military budget and focus them here at home. I believe government should invest in public infrastructure.

When people see the budget, they're going to say, 'Oh, my God, I wanted a tax cut, but I didn't know what you were going to do to health care and to Medicare and national defense.'

Every time we spend a federal dollar, what we're doing is we're pulling money out of somebody's pocket, and we're giving it to somebody else.

What I say is, national defense is the most important thing we do in Washington, but there's still waste in the military budget.

Only those who are ideologically opposed to military programs think of the defense budget as the first and best place to get resources for social welfare needs.