Wasteful Expenditure Quotes

Every dollar needlessly spent on our military … diminishes our overall security.

It's not fair to say that Congress spends money like a drunk sailor. At least the sailor is spending his own money!

First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?

What chiefly governs the military budget is the need to spend enormous sums of money in a useless way. The allegedly powerful Pentagon is simply a receptacle for wasteful expenditure, just as a city dump is the receptacle for the refuse of a city.

The purchase of unnecessary military hardware is undoubtedly the most wasteful element in American government.

I cannot consent to act the part of a mere financier, to become a contriver of taxes, a dealer of loans, a seeker of resources for the purposes of supporting useless baubles, of increasing the number of idle and dissipated members of the community, of fattening contractors, pursers, and agents, and of introducing … patronage, corruption, and rottenness which you so justly execrate.

Three groups spend other people's money: children, thieves, politicians. All three need supervision.

I can never believe how much time and energy and money and talent and everything else is being poured into horrible ideas.

The Gillard government must give up its addiction to wasteful spending borrowing and taxing.

[We are] persuaded to spend money we don't have on things we don't need to create impressions that won't last on people we don't care about.

Las Vegas is the only place I know where money really talks--it says, Goodbye.

I spent ninety percent of my money on wine, women and song and just wasted the other ten percent.

The poor taxpayer may wipe his shoes on a $3 doormat when he goes home, but not the Navy. It is, damn the cost, full feet ahead on a doormat you would be ashamed to get muddy.

It costs a lot to build bad products.

The proof of liberal virtue is generousity with other people's money.

You're asking the government to control individual morality. This is a government that can't buy a toilet seat for under $600.

In Westminster, we can sometimes forget just how much the public hate their money being wasted.

You can look at that by comparing Medicare's growth rates to the private insurance world, to the other Federal programs that we run, by looking at the billions of dollars, not millions but billions of dollars, we waste every year.

If you throw money around like confetti, it just becomes shallow and meaningless.

A fool and his money are soon parted.

Lord, the money we do spend on Government and it's not one bit better than the government we got for one-third the money twenty years ago.

I think the reality is that, that money was probably badly spent.

I can't understand what's holding up our missile program. It's the first time the government ever had trouble making the taxpayers' money go up in smoke.

We have a nation with great wealth, willing to spend its money freely for the procurement of arms and munitions of war and supplies of all kinds. Nevertheless, no one can fail to see that there has been in the past, in the administration of the army, something which was out of joint. It is not necessary for me to go into the specification of details; for every one of us knows that whenever an exigency has come, confusion has come

Building weapons that we don't need, don't work, and aren't necessary, and have no mission — that's not bad politics, that's robbery.