Esther McVey Quotes

Who's going to do a better job of spending your money? You or the government?

Federal spending is atrocious.

It is a sound principle of finance, and a still sounder principle of government, that those who have the duty of expending the revenue of a country should also be saddled with the responsibility of levying and providing it.

Government can’t deliver a free lunch to the country as a whole. It can, however, determine who pays for lunch.

Staff expands to fill the office space available.... The basic obligation of Congress is to the tax payers, not to its own creature comforts.

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

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

The necessities of a nation in every stage of its existence will be found at least equal to its resources.

Governments have nothing. They can't create anything, they never have. All they can do is steal from one group and give it to another

You have got to be willing to pay for the government you want.

The money that government spends is your money, not government's, and you know how to spend it better.

If the government can afford luxury travel for its cabinet officials, then surely we can find the resources to invest in quality education, jobs skills training, and properly fund the State Department and foreign aid programs.

Look, ideally I'd like to have free money to give to everybody. The reality is in government you have to choose and make decisions.

Every government has a fixed budget and demands of all sectors have to be fulfilled in that amount.

Government has no wealth of its own. Before it gives anything to anyone, it must take from those who produced it.

Government has no resources of its own. Government can only give to us what it has previously taken from us.

The typical American-funded [foreign aid] project has American contractors who take, between overheads back home and in-the-area administrative fees, 35 to 50 percent. It used to be, by the way, that every developed country did this, but America is about the only one still doing it. And I’ve been trying to break it for a long time …. I hope I don’t have to be buried knowing that we’re still the only rich country in the world that gives this … percentage of foreign-aid money to our own people.

We in Congress have the money but we don’t have the expertise.

Venezuela’s state oil company routinely spends more on social programs then it does on exploration and production.

You make budget cuts based on what you want to accomplish. You have to decide what is our priority going forward as a country. You cannot do it on the backs of any one group of people... There has to be some balance.

Most Americans want their government to be smaller, not larger; they want their taxes to be lower, not higher.

There are always ways to make government better, always ways to make sure that the taxes of people are better spent.

In too many ways, Ohio is being run for the benefit of those who have already made it, and too many of our friends and neighbors are being left behind. Nowhere is this more evident than in the cuts to police officers, firefighters, nurses, teachers, and to our local schools, while property and sales taxes are going up.

The overall policing budget is protected.

Government always finds a need for whatever money it gets.