Pim Fortuyn Quotes
When I become prime minister, I'm going to buy one of those Margaret Thatcher handbags, and I'll bang it on the table and demand my money back from the government for past bad services.
"Profile: Pim Fortuyn." BBC News, 6 May 2002.
Most people are surprised that this quotation was from Roosevelt who has for decades been castigated by the right wing as an advocate of large, complex government. He was an advocate for eliminating ineffective programs and trying others until there was success. See {631419}. Also, his most successful programs like Social Security were very simple and not complex. The public could understand them.
This quotation pithily summarizes a common problem in politics of describing budgets. In most years there has been a national inflation. If a new budget is, in actual dollars, the same as the previous years or a little more, but the increase is less than the inflation level, the agency will not be able to provide the same level of services as the previous year. Therefore services will be cut and those who are politically in favor of more money for the program legitimately describe this as a “budget cut”. Opponents of larger funding increases, also legitimately describe the funding as a “budget increase”. One side refers to what the money can buy and the other, to the absolute dollars spent. This is an example of the classical ambiguity of political oratory.
Goldwater was the first Republican Presidential Candidate since the end of WWII who had campaigned for smaller government and reduced government spending. He actually started the modern Republican trend toward campaigning on this theme. Ronald Reagan did a much better job of campaigning on this theme, and all Republican Candidates since have campaigned on these two themes. It is not clear whether the Republicans were actually serious about this or just ran on the themes to please the political wing that Goldwater had started or meant it but were not good enough at running the government to fulfill this promise. Every Republican President from Reagan through George W. Bush increased the government spending and increased the number of government employees—more so than most Democrats ironically. Democratic President Bill Clinton was the only post WWII president to cut spending, produce a surplus and diminish the size of the government bureaucracy. Goldwater was so intellectually honest that had he won, he probably would have done everything he could to implement the policy of smaller government and less spending.
Wilhelmus Simon Petrus Fortuijn, known as Pim Fortuyn, was a Dutch politician, academic, author and businessman who formed his own party, Pim Fortuyn List (Lijst Pim Fortuyn or LPF) in 2002.
