Michel Belanger Quotes

My approach to cutting spending as president, is to do a ten percent across the board cut of all federal agencies, and then ask each of my new agency heads to find another ten percent by drilling down. That's what you do in business to come up with approximately 20 percent cuts for the first fiscal year budget.

What you don't do, if you're an adult, is decide that you're going to budget things through a sequester. What does that word have to do with budgeting? It's like if you have a family budget and go, 'We really don't know what to take out economically from the budget, so we're going to whack out protein for this week.'

A budget in difficult times can and must serve the people for whom it is designed.

Austerity [in the Defense Department] meant that risks had to be managed, not eliminated.

Everyone is always in favour of general economy and particular expenditure.

In a budget this massive, there are certainly areas where I think we could do much better.

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

You may think my business is to make appropriations, but it is not. It is to prevent their being made.

As Secretary of Defense my job would be much easier if I didn't have to put up with [budget] cuts.

A behemoth budget does not mean there is much discretion in allocating it.

If you don’t have the budget, you can’t get anything done. That’s why bureaucrats are always fighting about budgets.

The revenue you take in should be enough to cover the revenue that you spend and go beyond that to get a reserve. In order to do that we [in California] need cuts and pension reforms, and taxes.

As governor, I cut $5 billion in spending.

We must go through every area of the federal budget to isolate waste and abandoned projects.

One of my main agenda right from the beginning has been cost rationalization, and we have done a lot of cost rationalization.

What you call austerity is what I might call efficiency.

Every family in America knows they have to do a budget. Every small business in America knows they have to do a budget. Every local government, every state, knows they have to do a budget.

The budget is tight, and that is exactly where we want it to be and where we need it to be.

When businesses face tough times, one of the first items they cut is overhead expenses. The government should do the same.

Time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.

I have a record as governor. I have a record of cutting spending. And I talked yesterday not only about we ought to cut spending, I talked about how we've cut spending in Mississippi and how if you did the same things in the federal government, you would save tens of billions of dollars a year.

Putting together a sustainable budget requires that we all work together, that we focus our scarce resources on key priorities, and that we strengthen our capacity to deliver the best product we can for the American people. And that takes money.

When I became mayor of New York City, I had a $2.4 billion deficit. And everybody wanted me to raise taxes. I said, 'If I raise taxes, I'll drive people out of New York City, and then I'll be raising taxes again.' So what I did was I cut expenses by 15 percent.

I've enjoyed programming on NPR, but 'we're broke' and therefore all spending must be reduced.

I've made more cuts than any governor has ever made.