Taxpayers Money Quotes & Sayings

We're not going to spend taxpayers' money on abortion. This is an issue that divides America. But certainly reasonable people can agree on how to reduce abortions in America. — George W. Bush

Public employees contribute real value for the benefit of all citizens. Public-union bosses collect real money from all taxpayers for the benefit of a few. — Mark McKinnon

Do we really want to invest $50 billion of hard earned taxpayers money in what is essentially a video entertainment system? — Tony Abbott

Those of us who believe in the right of any human being to belong to whatever church he sees fit, and to worship God in his own way, cannot be accused of prejudice when we do not want to see public education connected with religious control of the schools, which are paid for by taxpayers' money. — Eleanor Roosevelt

It is important to remember that government interference always means either violent action or the threat of such action. The funds that a government spends for whatever purposes are levied by taxation. And taxes are paid because the taxpayers are afraid of offering resistance to the tax gatherers. They know that any disobedience or resistance is hopeless. As long as this is the state of affairs, the government is able to collect the money that it wants to spend. — Ludwig Von Mises

I just don't see the social good in using taxpayer money to fund a network that provides more television and bandwidth for illegally downloading files. — Rocky Anderson

The tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 - and extended for two years in 2010 - in 2011 saved the richest 1.4 million taxpayers (the top 1 percent) more money than the rest of America's 140.89 million taxpayers received in total income. — Robert B. Reich

The Scots are subsidy junkies whingeing like a trampled bagpipe as they wait for their next fix of English taxpayers' money. — Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton Of Brenchley

[M]y conception of liberty does not permit an individual citizen or a group of citizens to commit acts of depredation against nature in such a way as to harm their neighbors and especially to harm the future generations of Americans. If many years ago we had had the necessary knowledge, and especially the necessary willingness on the part of the Federal Government, we would have saved a sum, a sum of money which has cost the taxpayers of America two billion dollars. — Franklin D. Roosevelt

While I can see how the government has, at times, wasted taxpayers' money, and I can admit that too often its programs are ineffective, I also can see the good that government does. — Tony Campolo

In politics, throwing the taxpayers' money at disasters is supposed to show your compassion. But robbing Peter to pay Paul is not compassion. It is politics. — Thomas Sowell

Every year I write a tax advice column and I used to always make fun of that. One year, one of my favorite IRS commissioners, I think his name was Roscoe somebody, wrote that one of the most often-asked questions by taxpayers was, "How can I contribute more?" Well, I tell ya, ol' Roscoe's really been doing situps under parked cars again. I've heard a lot of people ask a lot of questions about taxes, but I never heard anybody say, "How can I, the ordinary person, send more money for no reason?" — Dave Barry

Mandatory minimums have been shown to be discriminatory and waste the taxpayers' money. — Bobby Scott

The President must stop gambling with taxpayers' money and get the country back on the path of fiscal sanity. — Tom Harkin

In California, there was Atascadero State Hospital, constructed in 1954 at the cost to taxpayers of over $10 million (almost $110 million in today's money). Atascadero was a maximum-security psychiatric prison on the central coast where mentally disordered male lawbreakers [including homosexuals] from all over California were incarcerated. Inmates were treated at Atascadero by a variety of methods, including electroconvulsive therapy; lobotomy; sterilization, and hormone injections. Anectine was used often for 'behavior modification.' It was a muscle relaxant, which gave the person to whom it was administered the sensation of choking or drowning, while he received the message from the doctor that if he didn't change his behavior he would die (10). — Lillian Faderman

See, when the GOVERNMENT spends money, it creates jobs; whereas when the money is left in the hands of TAXPAYERS, God only knows what they do with it. Bake it into pies, probably. Anything to avoid creating jobs. — Dave Barry

It is your tax which pays for public spending. The government have no money of their own. There is only taxpayers' money. — Margaret Thatcher

Both individuals and companies are using the Netherlands as a haven for productive activity ... This is good news for all taxpayers. The rich directly benefit, since greedy politicians are unable to seize as much of their money. And the rest of us benefit, since this puts downward pressure on tax rates as governments try to keep the geese that lay the golden eggs from flying away. — Daniel J. Mitchell

If the goal is to lower emissions, that's disconnected to most people. If the goal is to save taxpayers' money, now the public has some interest. — Mark Begich

The administration has proved that it is addicted to wasting taxpayers' money ... — Doug Bandow

[T]ax cuts are not just something that all taxpayers deserve, but also the best way to curb government spending. It is the best kind of tax reform. If the money never reaches the table, Congress can't gobble it up. — Zell Miller

[Illegal immigration] costs the taxpayers of the United States a lot of money. And it's unfair to Americans who are working every day to pay their own bills. It's also unfair to a lot of people who have waited in line for years and years in other countries to be legal immigrants. — William J. Clinton

It's tax day and while many Americans are filing their taxes with a groan, taxpayers in the Badger State have reason to cheer. In Wisconsin, we have enacted more than $2 billion in tax cuts, giving our citizens much-needed relief, call us crazy Midwesterners but we think you know how to spend your money better than the government. — Marco Rubio

It will be a great day when taxpayers keep the money they earned and DC has to hold a bake sale to to raise the debt limit. — David Burge

Deficits, as I've often said, aren't caused by too little taxing, they are caused by too much spending. Presidents don't create deficits, Congress does. Presidents can't appropriate a dollar of taxpayers' money; only congressmen can - and Congress is susceptible to all sorts of influences that have nothing to do with good government. — Ronald Reagan

Corporate crime kills far more people and costs taxpayers far more money than street crime. — Anita Roddick

Disasters redistribute money from taxpayers to construction workers, from insurance companies to homeowners, and even from those who once lived in the destroyed city to those who replace them. It's remarkable that this redistribution can happen so smoothly and quickly, with devastated regions reinventing themselves in a matter of months. — James Surowiecki

What I'd do is not have USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy working with U.S. taxpayers' money to knock off an elected government in Ukraine, which is what they did. I wouldn't try to force the people of Ukraine into a deal with NATO against their interest or into a deal with the European Union, which is against their economic interest. — Dennis Kucinich

The Government should create, issue, and circulate all the currency and credits needed to satisfy the spending power of the Government and the buying power of consumers. By the adoption of these principles, the taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest. Money will cease to be master and become the servant of humanity. — Abraham Lincoln

Some champions of ever-greater governmental power and spending invent the theory that the taxpayers, left to themselves, spend the money they have earned very foolishly, on all sorts of trivialities and rubbish, and that only the bureaucrats, by first seizing it from them, will know how to spend it wisely. — Henry Hazlitt

Under the California desert and subsidized by the taxpayers' money, someone had finally invented a chain letter that really worked. A very lethal chain letter. — Stephen King

The war has ended with every one owing every one else immense sums of money. Germany owes a large sum to the Allies, the Allies owe a large sum to Great Britain, and Great Britain owes a large sum to the United States. The holders of war loan in every country are owed a large sum by the States, and the States in its turn is owed a large sum by these and other taxpayers. The whole position is in the highest degree artificial, misleading, and vexatious. We shall never be able to move again, unless we can free our limbs from these paper shackles. — John Maynard Keynes

Billions of taxpayers' money has been wasted in bad deals. The London Underground modernisation, personally negotiated by one of Gordon Brown's team, was a disaster, as the National Audit Office has confirmed. — Vince Cable

I have long believed taxpayers make better use of their money than the government ever could. — Kay Bailey Hutchison

Follow the money, Washington reporters like to say. The money is this case comes from taxpayers, present and future, who are the source of every penny of dues paid to public employee unions, who in turn spend much of that money on politics, almost all of it for Democrats. In effect, public employee unions are a mechanism by which every taxpayer is forced to fund the Democratic Party. — Michael Barone

However, even a strong government can't perform miracles. It needs money from the taxpayers. — George Soros

I learned to do with little. And that's why today, I only spend the taxpayers' money like I spend my own, which is seldom. The people of Mississauga love that. — Hazel McCallion

You can't take money from the taxpayers out of the treasury to give it to pay off your political donors. That's corruption to do that. — Michele Bachmann

Standardized tests are an indicator of the kind of service taxpayers are receiving - and whether schools, educators and policymakers are doing their jobs. In the United States, taxpayers spend almost $600 billion annually on public education, so it's not unreasonable to ask what all that money is producing. In fact, it's irresponsible not to know. — Michelle Rhee

The next big accelerator might be the ILC in Japan, a linear collider which might be able to probe the boundaries of string theory. So we physicists have to learn how to engage the public so that taxpayers money is used to explore the nature of the universe. — Michio Kaku

For a theory to be scientific it must be capable of being refuted by the evidence. Given that we have had three decades of rising temperature followed by a decade of stable and slightly falling temperatures worldwide, how many decades would you require before you are convinced that the theory on which you are committing £400bn of taxpayers' money might be slightly wrong? — Peter Lilley

What did the taxpayers get out of the Obama stimulus? More debt. That money wasn't just spent and wasted - it was borrowed, spent, and wasted. — Paul Ryan

Because of the power that we have given money: The government would rather have taxpayers who do not vote, than voters who do not pay tax. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

TARP is funded by taxpayers, so there are many rules about how that money can and can't be used. The result: GM spends an awful lot of time checking in with the people who administer TARP over everything from hiring to executive compensation and management. For a global company, that adds up to a lot of distraction. — Edward Whitacre Jr.

The status quo is unacceptable, and it is costly. Whatever money the province may feel it is losing with revenue sharing will be more than paid off by the revitalization and empowerment of Aboriginal communities. To put matters of dignity in blunt economic terms: healthier communities cost less to taxpayers. — Bob Rae

Tell me why the limousine fleet has increased by 42 percent since Barack Obama took office. Why are we spending taxpayers' money on that? Limos should be for weddings and proms, certainly not for government officials to be riding around in. — Mark Neumann

The dominant orthodoxy in development economics was that Third World countries were trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty that could be broken only by massive foreign aid from the more prosperous industrial nations of the world. This was in keeping with a more general vision on the Left that people were essentially divided into three categories - the heartless, the helpless, and wonderful people like themselves, who would rescue the helpless by playing Lady Bountiful with the taxpayers' money. — Thomas Sowell

The British did little, very little, of such things. They basked in the Indian sun and yearned for their cold and fog-ridden homeland; they sent the money they had taken off the perspiring brow of the Indian worker to England; and whatever little they did for India, they ensured India paid for it in excess. And at the end of it all, they went home to enjoy their retirements in damp little cottages with Indian names, their alien rest cushioned by generous pensions supplied by Indian taxpayers. The — Shashi Tharoor

The growing role that the government has played in financing and administering schooling has led not only the enormous waste of taxpayers money but also to a far poorer educational system. — Milton Friedman

But the fact is, it's illegal for the Administration to spend North west taxpayers' money to develop this rate hike proposal, just so it can turn around and raise their energy rates. — Maria Cantwell

Being willing to donate the taxpayers' money is not the same as being willing to put your own money where your mouth is. — Thomas Sowell

Medical research is needed, and I just saw there was a need for help that the government - state or federal - was not spending the taxpayers' money on helping people get through college. — Joe Jamail

Our loyalty lies with little taxpayers, not big spenders. What our critics really believe is that those in Washington know better how to spend your money than you, the people, do. But we're not going to let them do it, period. — Ronald Reagan

When we leave money in the hands of taxpayers, they buy things, they pay taxes, they grow government. — Ken Buck

We don't need new taxes. We need new taxpayers, people that are gainfully employed, making money and paying into the tax system. And then we need a government that has the discipline to take that additional revenue and use it to pay down the debt and never grow it again. — Marco Rubio

I created jobs and saved the taxpayers money on every road I built. — Steve King

Because it is a monopoly, government brings inefficiency and stagnation to most things it runs; government agencies pursue the inflation of their budgets rather than the service of their customers; pressure groups form an unholy alliance with agencies to extract more money from taxpayers for their members. Yet despite all this, most clever people still call for government to run more things and assume that if it did so, it would somehow be more perfect, more selfless, next time. — Matt Ridley

The real reason to abolish departments like Energy and Education is not to promote efficiency, nor even to save taxpayers' money. It is that many agencies perform functions that are not Federal responsibility. The founders delegated to the Government only strictly defined authority in Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution. Search the entire Constitution, and you will find no authorization for Congress to subsidize the arts, finance and regulate education or invest tax revenues in energy research. — David Boaz

If raising money is critical to getting reelected, so is spending taxpayers' money to reward those who help get us reelected. — Congressman X

What I think is wrong is spending £9m of taxpayers' money on one particular piece of one-sided propaganda. — Michael Gove

I'm not living off of any taxpayer money. If I am - if it's food stamps, it's a temporary resource. — Nadya Suleman

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. — Bob Hope

That's why you never hear politicians talking about 'citizens,' it's all 'taxpayers,' as though the salient fact of your relationship to the state is how much you pay. Like the state was a business and citizenship was a loyalty program that rewarded you for your custom with roads and health care. Zottas cooked the process so they get all the money and own the political process, pay as much or as little tax as they want. Sure, they pay most of the tax, because they've built a set of rules that gives them most of the money. Talking about 'taxpayers' means that the state's debt is to rich dudes, and anything it gives to kids or old people or sick people or disabled people is charity we should be grateful for, since none of those people are paying tax that justifies their rewards from Government Inc. — Cory Doctorow

For taxpayers, however, it's [pay equity] a rip-off. And it has nothing to do with gender. Both men and women taxpayers will pay additional money to both men and women in the civil service. That's why the federal government should scrap its ridiculous pay equity law. — Stephen Harper

The risk was spread across the globe from American state pension funds to public health networks in Australia and even to town councils beyond the Arctic Circle. In Norway, for example, the municipalities of Rana, Hemnes, Hattjelldal and Narvik invested some $120 million of their taxpayers' money in CDOs secured on American subprime mortgages. — Niall Ferguson

If taxpayers want to keep more of the money they earn, they must also work to become less dependent on a government check. We look to government too often and to ourselves not enough. — Cal Thomas

I think it would be interesting to know about the Federal Reserve. I think we should audit the Federal Reserve. It's taxpayers money that is being used there — Harry Reid

If there was any loose money lying around, the people in government would find a way to spend it. The worst sin in the bureaucracy was to give money back because it meant the bureaucracy's budget could be reduced the following year. If at the end of the fiscal year they hadn't spent all the money in their budget, there would be a rush to buy new office furniture, take a trip at the taxpayers' expense, or spend the money on something else, just to assure their budget wouldn't be smaller in the future. The idea of returning money to taxpayers once it had been collected from them had never come up before. — Ronald Reagan

With all that IMF money, the Thailand's and Mexico's are spared the consequences of their fiscal incompetence, and Wall Street's heavy hitters are spared the consequences of their stupid investments. The global economy is a rigged game, rigged so Third World politicians, rich investors and global corporations win - and U.S. taxpayers lose. — Pat Buchanan

The belief that public works necessarily create new jobs is false. If the money was raised by taxation, we saw, then for every dollar that the government spent on public works one less dollar was spent by the taxpayers to meet their own wants, and for every public job created one private job was destroyed. — Henry Hazlitt

By the standards of honest, if unorthodox, accounting, government workers don't pay taxes, but are paid out of taxes. In other words, they pay taxes out of money confiscated from taxpayers, who, in turn, pay taxes twice: on their own income and on the income of members of the bureaucracy. At the very least, this should disqualify state workers from voting. — Ilana Mercer

Rather than following through on the proven crime and violence prevention techniques that work, we are back to tough-talking sound byte policies that have been proven to not only fail to reduce crime but actually increase crime, waste taxpayers' money and discriminate against minorities. — Bobby Scott

We have investigative staff who are charged by law and this committee under the Constitution of the United States has a responsibility, taxpayers' money, and an agency which we fund from the government, they bought weapons, we believe and we think that - I don't know who did what. — John Mica

To finance 'entitlement' programs, the government threatens force against the taxpayers who provide the money. Why are people who favor compulsion called humanitarians, while those who favor freedom are stigmatized as greedy? — John Stossel

There are some people who seem to think that the way you reduce the cost of living in this country is for the state to spend more and more taxpayers' money. It is as if somehow you measure the compassion of the government by the amount of other people's money it can spend. — David Cameron

Part of America's greatness is its willingness to care for those who are truly in need. But those who defraud the system take money and resources away not only from American taxpayers but also from those who truly need help. — Gary Bauer

Our bailout of Detroit will be remembered as the equivalent of pouring billions of taxpayers' money into the mail-order catalogue business on the eve of the birth of eBay. — Thomas Friedman

I've never understood the allure of putting your name on a building that was built with taxpayers' money. — Mick Mulvaney

I sued the City for "excessive force" and got a million bucks. Not one dime of which, by the way, came out of the pockets of the cops who planned the raid. As always, it came from the taxpayers. The criminal charges against Sonny were later dismissed, so the raid was a complete waste of time, money, and energy. — John Grisham

We can't constantly explain to our voters that taxpayers have to be on the hook for certain risks, rather than those who make a lot of money taking those risks. — Angela Merkel

The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of Government, but it is the Government's greatest creative opportunity. By the adoption of these principles, the long-felt want for a uniform medium will be satisfied. The taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest, discounts and exchanges. The financing of all public enterprises, the maintenance of stable government and ordered progress, and the conduct of the Treasury will become matters of practical administration. The people can and will be furnished with a currency as safe as their own government. Money will cease to be the master and become the servant of humanity. Democracy will rise superior to the money power. — Abraham Lincoln