Paul Krugman Quotes

Does it sound outrageous to you that military spending for fiscal year 2000 will be almost $290 billion and all other domestic discretionary spending, such as education, job training, housing, Amtrak, medical research, environment, Head Start and many other worthwhile programs will total $246 billion, the biggest disparity in modern times ?

More combat planes, missiles and soldiers won't provide additional bread for our families, desks for our schools, or medicine for our clinics.

The army did more to shape the pattern and direction of economic development than did any other federal agency, any state government, or any private agency.

National security - the military is the first thing we should spend money on. You have to fully fund that first. And then you should be paying for everything else.

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

I was able to promote a strong defense budget when it could have been cut a lot more severely.

[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.

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.

One person's pork barrel project is another person's wise investment in the local infrastructure.

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.

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.

Spending on the military doesn't increase the deficit.

I think we will have to spend more on defense, for infrastructure, for extension of the broadband network and also for domestic security.

Wars are made to make debt.

Defense is not like other discretionary spending.

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.

Build the roads and the jobs follow.

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.

Throughout this vast republic from the St. Croix to the Gulf of Mexico, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, revenue is to be collected and expended; armies are to be marched and supported. The exigencies of the nation may require that the treasure raised in the north should be transported to the South.

The defense budget has become a jobs program.

No state, without being soon exhausted, can maintain above the hundredth part of its members in arms and idleness.

There is something in the heart of every politician that loves a dam, or a harbor, or a bridge or a military installation.

The essence of government is making necessary choices between competing uses of public resources.

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

… war is a matter not so much of arms as of money