Dave Barry Quotes

They're all tied together: taxes, Medicare, Social Security, and the debt. We've got to have a setting of priorities, and looking at it - at each of them as disconnected, I think, doesn't properly address these major challenges.

We can meet the obligations of Social security and Medicare. If we stay on the path that your party has us on, we'll be in a mountain range of debt and we're gonna face hard choices.

It's like Tiger Woods' wife, we should take a nine iron to the back windshield of big government spending and smash it out.

And I just think that we're at a point in our economic life here in our state - and - and, candidly, across the country, where increased taxes is just the wrong way to go. The people of our state are not convinced that state government, county government, local government has done all they can with the money we already give them, rather than the money that we have...

Most people don't realize that two-thirds of the federal budget is Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Pentagon. The U.S. government is an insurance company with an Army.

Do you know that all of the money that we are spending, that the government is spending, must come from you? The government has no great pile of gold to which it can go to get what it gives you. The government has not one cent that it does not take from your pockets. Do not imagine, do not believe, do not go on the theory that you are not to pay this bill, unless the fundamentals of our government are to be overturned.

If you spend your own money on yourself, you care how much you spend and how well you spend it. If you spend your own money on someone else, you care how much you spend, but you don't care how well it is spent. If you spend someone else's money on yourself, you don't care how much you spend, but you do care how well it is spent. And finally, if you spend someone else's money on someone else, you don't care how much you spend, and you don't care how well it is spent. That is government.

The appropriation of public money always is perfectly lovely until some one is asked to pay the bill. If we are to have a billion dollars of navy, half a billion of farm relief, etc... the people will have to furnish more revenue by paying more taxes. It is for them, through their Congress, to decide how far they wish to go.

You can't have it both ways. You can't tell me that you're taxed enough already, and that you want constitutional government and then in the next breath say, 'Bring me home some bacon.' The pig has been picked clean.

If the economy is strained, then Social Security, like the rest of the government, will be, too.

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

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

I think we should worry about Social Security first and then tax cuts second.

The public treasure has been duly applied to the uses to which it was appropriated by Parliament, and regular accounts have been annually laid before Parliament, of every article of expense.

We should reduce total government spending as a percentage of the economy.

... the Social Security trust fund is not spare money; it is spoken for.

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.

The same prudence which in private life would forbid our paying our own money for unexplained projects, forbids it in the dispensation of public moneys.

You have got to be willing to pay for the government you want.

The most important area for spending restraint is entitlement reform.

In America ... who is to stop congress from spending too much money. They will not stop themselves, that is certain. Everybody has to think about that now. Who is to stop them.

[T]he burden of government is not measured by how much it taxes, but by how much it spends.

I can spend somebody else's money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else's money on somebody else, I'm not concerned about how much it is, and I'm not concerned about what I get. And that's government. And that's close to 40 percent of our national income.

There are some people who seem to think that the way you reduce the cost of living in this country is for the state to spend more and more taxpayers' money. It is as if somehow you measure the compassion of the government by the amount of other people's money it can spend.

Irresponsibility breeds irresponsibility. The finances of government are so central. You'd think that would be pretty obvious.