Naomi Klein Quotes

The deficit is the symptom, but spending is the disease.

Those who pay no taxes, disposing by their votes of other people's money, have every motive to be lavish and none to economize.

We don't spend money properly in Washington, D.C. We jump these massive bills to massive bills.

This country doesn't have a revenue problem - it has a spending problem.

We could say the government spend like drunken sailors, but that would be unfair to drunken sailors, because the sailors are spending their own money.

Every American knows there are government expenses that are absolutely not necessary. I disagree with the very idea that our government is spending $2.4 trillion in the most efficient manner.

A trillion here, a trillion there and pretty soon you're talking about real money.

Politicians are addicted to spending and revenue extraction. As with an addict, there's little pause for moral or legal contemplation.

One of the most lethal mistakes a public official can make is raising taxes and not paying your own.

Federal spending is atrocious.

Italy has piled up huge public debt because the successive governments were too close to the life of ordinary citizens, too willing to please the requests of everybody, thereby acting against the interests of future generations.

We couldn't spend $91 billion if we wanted to.

The president's budget request today demonstrates his unwillingness to come clean on the true costs of his agenda. A penny saved is not a penny earned if at the end of the day you still owe a quarter.

The real problem with the government is not the deficit; it is that the government spends too much money.

Remember that every dollar spent by the federal government is spent in somebody's district.

I've been Secretary of the Treasury for 147 days, and in that 147 days I've written $133 billion worth of hot checks.

Our system of keeping the federal government's books is a monument to the creativity of mankind ... We've cut government spending for 15 years in a row, and yet have spent more money in each of those years.

You spend a billion here and a billion there. Sooner of later it adds up to real money.

The deficit had become a symbol of our inability to control and manage the cost of government.

If you undertake to divide all these appropriations and have many committees where there should be but one, you will enter upon a path of extravagance that you cannot foresee … until we find the Treasury of the country bankrupt.

Politicians have a natural inclination to spend in general, even as they disagree fiercely about what, specifically, to spend on.

Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people's money.

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.

The easiest thing that is done, unfortunately, in Washington is to spend money today and send the bill to our children and grandchildren.

We ought to prioritize national disasters... in a fiscally responsible way.