Thomas S. Foley Quotes

Local groups demand that their representatives and senators bring home the "bacon" or else .... They want economy practiced on the other fellow but not on themselves.

What these peckerwoods call pork is infrastructure.

Infrastructure is sort of that good spending in the middle, where even if you do misallocate resources a little bit, you still have something to show for it. It's tangible; it may help economic growth and so forth.

Infrastructure investment can boost economic growth and employment, and, in fact, it is fiscally neutral.

I object to you using words like squander and pork. What is pork in one part of the country is an essential project in another part.

Republicans know that government spending creates jobs. They just want that spending to be funneled to their projects and districts... and they certainly don't want to say it out loud.

Infrastructure is one of the core responsibilities of government and one that cannot be shortchanged by other controversial spending. I believe investment in infrastructure pays dividends for decades and is a wise investment of taxpayer dollars.

Throughout U.S. history, competent public investments have been an essential complement to private investments - from the Louisiana Purchase, to land-grant colleges, to the Interstate Highway System, to the Internet.

Homeland Security money ought not to be allocated on a pork barrel basis.

If you build a stadium, you don’t build a school. Indeed, you don’t build fifty schools.

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.

We don’t care what the cost-benefit is. We’re going to build it somehow because Congress says it’s going to be built.

The fact is, Canada needs investment, particularly in infrastructure.

Provision of facilities to the masses is linked with the collection of taxes.

Too many politicians seem to reach for 'infrastructure' as the default answer to investment, as if roads and bridges were the answer to everything. Even the IMF and the World Bank seem to mainly offer infrastructure spending as an alternative to austerity, although they are right to focus on the need for investment.

There's nothing magic about spending on tanks and bombs rather than roads and bridges.

The world has shown that if you provide capital and expertise to an area that is starved for capital and expertise, really good things will happen.

We have managed to acquire $13 trillion of debt on our balance sheet. In my view we have nothing to show for it. We haven't invested in our roads, our bridges, our waste-water systems, our sewer systems. We haven't even maintained the assets that our parents and grandparents built for us.

Chronic deficits drastically reduce government's ability to make those infrastructure investments that business needs to grow and create jobs.

So if we are really concerned about generating more taxes, we ought to be investing in our people, not taking away the kinds of resources that contribute to their ability to become greater taxpayers in this country.

Spending is not caring. Spending is what politicians do instead of caring. Spending more does not guarantee success. Politicians like to measure spending because it is easier than measuring actual metrics of accomplishment.

Build the roads and the jobs follow.

Since taking office, President Obama has signed into law spending increases of nearly 25 percent for domestic government agencies - an 84 percent increase when you include the failed stimulus. All of this new government spending was sold as 'investment.'

What I'm not saying is that all government spending is bad. It's not - far, far from it, but there is no free lunch, as a former colleague of mine used to say. There is no public tooth fairy. Father Christmas does not work on the Treasury staff this year. You can never bail someone out of trouble without putting someone else into trouble.

I'm sort of suspicious of most economic development projects, but the ones that encourage taxpayer-funded relocation bidding wars should be declared unconstitutional.