Arthur S. Flemming Quotes

Without sufficient funds, nothing could be efficiently done.

Government spending is not wasteful. The question is, “Is it necessary?”

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

Ideas are cheap. The difficult part is finding the team to execute them.

There's no shortage of projects we want to build. There's a shortage of money.

Where is the money?

You only decide once how to dedicate the surplus.

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

There are but two ways of paying debt—increase of industry in raising income. increase of thrift in laying out.

The appropriation of public money always is perfectly lovely until someone is asked to pay the bill.

I make sure that New York gets more than its fair share.

This county [Fairfax County, Virginia] is the wealthiest county in America in terms of average income, but the school system is not getting the money .... Many of our politicians give lip service to education as a priority, but when it comes to the money, it’s not there.

Budgets are not bottomless pits.

Cost reduction and cost control are by their very nature sort of anti-social activities.

Everyone has a different perspective and they all want their perspective to be addressed within the limited resources you have.

The House of Representatives cannot only refuse, but they alone can propose the supplies requisite for the support of the government. They, in a word, hold the purse: that powerful instrument by which we behold in the in the history of the British constitution an infant and humble representation of the people, gradually enlarging the sphere of its activity and importance, and finally reducing, as far as it seems to have wished, all the overgrown prerogatives of the other branches of the government.

Very few governments have the money to meet the needs of their people….The private sector has most of the resources.

The budget is about day-to-day lives.

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

I have seen the ravages of unemployment.... The government will never refuse to go as far as the resources of the country will permit [in order to help]. But do not ask it to commit acts that risk to compromise the balance of the budget.

What concerns you and me is simply who is putting the money in, who is getting it out, and what good it does

A budget is a moral document of a nation’s priorities.

Health care is the Pac-Man of the budget.

It cost money to fix things so that I would know his bill would not pass. I believe that with $200,000, I can pass our bill.

Budgets are moral documents. When you put your budget on the table, we see what you really are.