The real goal should be reduced government spending, rather than balanced budgets achieved by ever rising tax rates to cover ever rising spending.

The problem is not that people are taxed too little, the problem is that government spends too much.

When you look at how much we spend on social programs in our country, it separates us from a lot of countries. In our country, if you’re hungry, we’ll feed you. If you’re homeless, we’ll house you. If you’re too poor to be sick, we’ll pay for your doctor. But all of that comes at a cost.

If you’re worried about the deficit, pay attention to the fact that it’s almost all attributable to military spending and the totally dysfunctional health program.

Elections should be held on April 16th- the day after we pay our income taxes. That is one of the few things that might discourage politicians from being big spenders.

Don’t forget what I discovered that over ninety percent of all national deficits from 1921 to 1939 were caused by payments for past, present, and future wars.

Cutting the deficit by gutting our investments in innovation and education is like lightening an overloaded airplane by removing its engine. It may make you feel like you’re flying high at first, but it won’t take long before you feel the impact.

In liberal logic, if life is unfair then the answer is to turn more tax money over to politicians, to spend in ways that will increase their chances of getting reelected.

I don’t want to spend money the club doesn’t have; I don’t want to hold a player that doesn’t want to stay.

Money has always been in politics. And I’m not sure you’d want money to be completely out of politics.

You know people talk about federal money as if it falls from heaven. You know we thank heaven for it, but it came out of people’s pockets – and I’ve driven all over Washington, D.C., I cannot find the money tree.

I am not worried about the deficit. It is big enough to take care of itself.

The financial crisis should not become an excuse to raise taxes, which would only undermine the economic growth required to regain our strength.

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.

Something’s very wrong with a nation that would rather spend money on war than take care of its children.

Even if the government spends itself into bankruptcy and the economy still does not recover, Keynesians can always say that it would have worked if only the government had spent more.

I believe – we all pay taxes. I’m happy to pay it, but I hate to have it abused, money wasted, no accountability. That’s going to bother you.

I know it’s going to be the private sector that leads this country out of the current economic times we’re in. You can spend your money better than the government can spend your money.

We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.

It costs governments money to keep fuel prices low. Oil-rich Yemen, for instance, devotes 9 percent of its GDP to making sure its people don’t riot when oil prices rise.

The Congressional Budget Office has been embarrassed repeatedly by making projections based on the assumption that tax revenues and tax rates move in the same direction.

We need earmark reform, and when I’m President, I will go line by line to make sure that we are not spending money unwisely.

What do you think a stimulus is? It’s spending – that’s the whole point! Seriously.

We can’t get to the $4 trillion in savings that we need by just cutting the 12 percent of the budget that pays for things like medical research and education funding and food inspectors and the weather service. And we can’t just do it by making seniors pay more for Medicare.

Balanced budget requirements seem more likely to produce accounting ingenuity than genuinely balanced budgets.

A national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a national blessing.