Vicky Hartzler Quotes

Being a defense hawk and a budget hawk are not mutually exclusive.

If we can't find cuts in the defense budget, we're not looking carefully enough.

The function of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, as I understand it, is to resist all demands for expenditure made by his colleagues and, when he can no longer resist, to limit the concession to the barest point of acceptance.

We can't have deficit spending in Texas. You have to balance your budget every two years.

It is being alleged that the Federal Government is 'cutting' spending. In fact, we are not 'cutting' anything. Defense spending under this budget would rise by 4.3 percent over last year. Other discretionary spending would also rise.

States, virtually all of them, have a constitutional requirement to operate on a balanced budget.

The most remarkable thing about Calvin Coolidge is that he served for 67 months, and when he left office, the budget was lower than he came in. In real terms - in nominal terms with vanilla on top - he cut the budget year over year.

[The] up-and-down pattern of [defense] spending over the last 18 years averages out to below zero percent real growth. In other words, if defense spending had followed a path of zero percent real growth, the U.S. probably could have obtained more defense for its dollar.

At a time of tight budgets, unless something is really broken and not working, they [his congressional colleagues] just don't get excited about it.

Those who make the most and loudest speeches about deficit reduction are least likely to vote against spending.

Contrary to … conventional wisdom, the consequence of past U. S. Defense cuts were not bad …. austerity can be useful in forcing Washington to think strategically, something it rarely does when times are flush.

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.

We are the ones that are trying to get Washington spending under control so it can live within its means.

To simply argue that public spending must always go up and never be cut is irresponsible.

How does one leave Social Security and Medicare untouched, grow defense by more than $50 billion, slash taxes, launch a $1 trillion infrastructure program - and not explode the deficit and national debt?

A lawmaker cannot be pro-sequester while also purporting to be pro-national security or supportive of a strong economy.

Balanced budget requirements seem more likely to produce accounting ingenuity than genuinely balanced budgets.

You know, even people who talk about cutting spending and they go 'That's not the spending that I was actually talking about that you're supposed to be cutting.' Well, we have to be looking across the board.

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

The American people know that we cannot spend our way to prosperity.

I have said, with respect to authorization bills, that I do not want the Congress or the country to commit fiscal suicide on the installment plan.

Defense spending as a share of the economy dropped significantly during the early 1990s, and that was one of the things, along with other policy changes, that put us back on the path to a balanced budget.

As American families and businesses have been forced to tighten their belts, Washington has refused to do the same.

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

I'd be a lot more excited about eliminating earmarks if we reduced all of the spending by whatever the earmarks used to be, but nobody's, apparently, going to talk about doing that.