Todd Tiahrt Quotes

The pork part of the budget is reaching new highs.

Politicians like to confuse congressional spending with earmarks. There is a difference.

Budgets are moral documents. Federal funding should reflect the priorities and the values of the majority of the American people.

Spending on the military doesn't increase the deficit.

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.

There's a lot of politics over who gets the next allocation of Congressional funding.

There is no question that we are in a period in which we are going to have to use those sources to fund about 35 million dollars a year that used to be paid for by the federal government.

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

George W. Bush is a big spender…. When Congress sends up a bill with big. fat, crackling pork, he says, “Where’s the barbecue sauce?”

Remember that every dollar spent by the federal government is spent in somebody's district.

It is difficult even now for the President to avoid giving his approbation to any law appropriating money for a road or canal.

A budget is a moral document of a nation’s priorities.

55 percent of the national budget consists of entitlements. These are established by law but do not get funds appropriated annually—not part of the usual give and take of the Congress and the administration. If you meet the criteria of the law, you get the money.

The way our federal agencies are funded, the way the authorizing of these programs are done, I think needs to be completely revamped.

Completing annual appropriations bills would be an important step in responsible federal budgeting.

Politicians have a natural inclination to spend in general, even as they disagree fiercely about what, specifically, to spend on.

Spending programs always and immediately create powerful political pressures to maintain and expand them generated by those who are the direct beneficiaries.

Nations in general, even under governments of the more popular kind, usually commit the administration of their finances to single men or to boards composed of a few individuals, who digest and prepare, in the first instance, the plans of taxation, which are afterwards passed into laws by the authority of the sovereign or legislature.

There is spending in the tax code.

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.

Earmarks are the gateway to corruption.

Government spending is not wasteful. The question is, “Is it necessary?”

I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.

I think Americans all across this country want more of those types of delaying tactics to slow down this runaway train of massive Federal spending.

Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid account for half the Federal spending.