David Cameron Quotes

Before we give you billions more, we want to know what you've done with the trillion you've got.

Prioritizing spending and maximizing the effectiveness of taxpayer dollars is absolutely essential. We must draw the line, realigning programs when necessary and also eliminating failed programs.

To a certain extent, I have to be the president's bad cop from time to time. I have to look people in the eye and tell them, 'No, we don't have enough money for that.' That is not a very popular thing to do in Washington.

What you really remember at the beginning was that you have to throw a budget together. We made some terrible mistakes at the beginning in my own budget that took us at least a year to catch up on.

Even before he came to power in 1997, Gordon Brown promised to change the accounts to parliament from simple litanies of cash in and cash out, to a more commercial system that took notice of the public property the departments were using. This system is known as resource accounting.

We have been spending beyond our means, we are going to focus on the projects that we committed to in the election but importantly if there is additional projects or new things that come up they have to have a business case, they have to work and they can't impose financial stress on families and private individuals and businesses.

I believe the only measure of government response shouldn't be how much we spend on a situation, but rather how well we spend.

The perverse presumption that places the burden of proof on the challenger of spending must be inverted, back to the rule that applies elsewhere in life: 'Prove to me why we should.'

It's a bit ridiculous to have people who have two years of experience handling an $83 billion budget.

We have a responsibility to make sure that the limited resources we have are spent efficiently and effectively and that programs achieve their mission.

If we are to attract private investment, if we are to be able to make the legislature feel the moneys from taxpayers are being used properly, we must be ever vigilant of the duty to efficiently use all funds we receive.

I am not about to let the people who so mismanaged the state budget now try to manage local government.

Every government program needs to be more efficient. Instead of pointing out how other programs can tighten their belts, every program administrator must look inward to save money.

The American people need to know that money is being used effectively because frankly, the nation can't afford careless spending, no matter how well-intentioned.

You know, in a workplace, when you shrink the size of a workforce, there is pain there. But there is no question: we have a government that we can no longer afford. That is the cold, hard fact. So we have to make this more efficient. We have to sunset programs that no longer work. We have to eliminate waste and fraud. We must do this.

For too long it was assumed that you could completely separate out flows of money from responsibilities and accountabilities in service delivery. This flawed assumption is central to understanding many of the failures.

If you undertake to divide all these appropriations and have many committees where there should be but one, you will enter upon a path of extravagance that you cannot foresee … until we find the Treasury of the country bankrupt.

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

We can't spend money on programs just because they sound good... Meals on Wheels sounds great.

If there is wasteful spending, I will not support it.

On the Sandy bill, I did the best I could on waste, fraud and abuse, and then when the final bill comes, you don't say, 'Hell, no' because you didn't get everything you want in there.

We don't have a revenue problem in Annapolis. We have a spending problem we need to control.

The Glassco Commission was really not interested in good science. It was interested in good accounting.

The first thing we have to do is get spending under control in Washington. It's completely out of control. We Republicans came to power to change government, and government changed us.

If you were starting from scratch to invent an instrument that could impose fiscal discipline, the last one on earth you would come up with is the United States government.