Martin L. Gross Quotes

When government programs fail, it is often because public officials are clueless about how human beings think and act.

While I can see how the government has, at times, wasted taxpayers' money, and I can admit that too often its programs are ineffective, I also can see the good that government does.

The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.

Although it was created with the best of intentions, the federal government's Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) program has become one of the worst and most costly boondoggles ever foisted on the American public.

I saw what government programs were and how they were executed. In some cases, they were executed beautifully, but in others, there was tremendous waste.

Congress, the press, and the bureaucracy too often focus on how much money or effort is spent, rather than whether the money or effort actually achieves the announced goal.

Every effort needs to be made to try and offset the costs of Katrina and Rita by reductions in other government programs, especially those that are wasteful, duplicative and ineffective.

No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth!

I am angry about the mammoth, out-of-control social welfare entitlement programs from Washington, D.C., that were supposed to solve our problems. The obvious truth is these impractical, politically motivated programs have irreparably damaged the fabric of our black society and community.

People dislike government spending in the abstract, but the like government spending when they see the benefit.

In the United States no trend ever arrives at its logical conclusion.

Government subsidies can be critically analyzed according to a simple principle: You are smarter than the government, so when the government pays you to do something you wouldn't do on your own, it is almost always paying you to do something stupid.

Theories and grand ideas are important, but they seldom unfold as planned.

… minor incidents—the kind you can never really foresee—combine to lower the general level of performance, so that one always falls short of the intended goal.

Far too many government spending programs have gone years, even decades, without being reauthorized, leaving the American people less able to effectively review, rethink, and possibly eliminate government programs.

In cutting government, we cut a huge variety of programs, a lot of which I would have liked to see increase, and a lot of which I'd like to see decreased more.

Welfare policies never attain those - allegedly beneficial - ends which the government and the self-styled progressives who advocated them wanted to attain, but - on the contrary - bring about a state of affairs which - from the very point of view of the government and its supporters - is even more unsatisfactory than the previous state of affairs they wanted to 'improve.'

Testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!

I know why elected officials want to spend money. It’s great. I can get a vote from you if I give you some money. OK but that doesn’t help your children. It just helps you.

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury

We want the benefits of government services ranging from security in our old age to the best national defense possible, but we scream when the bill for these services comes due in the form of higher taxes.

Free enterprise picks investments successfully by running millions of experiments, and the survival of a product depends on its producing more value per dollar of cost than other products do. Competition ruthlessly prunes products that fail to meet this threshold. The public sector works in the opposite way; it undertakes large investment with virtually no competition.

Spending a few hundred million dollars more a year on evaluations could save tens of billions of dollars by teaching us which programs work and generating lessons to improve programs that don’t

Cost effectiveness and effectiveness are not always the same thing in government.

Unintended Consequences