Political Quotes

“I don't think we want to talk about bull. I don't know how it is in Wisconsin, but in Arizona, to have a bill that has more than 400 earmarks worth more than $300 million is not an insignificant sum. Now, you can have a chart that takes the overall amount that the bill spends and then make $300 million look pretty small. But only in Washington will people say, yeah, that looks pretty small. Anywhere else in the country they're going to say that's a pretty big amount. And everybody knows how the game works here. Earmarks are, as has been said by many, the gateway drug to spending addiction. Once you start getting earmarks, you start approving bloated appropriations bills worth $67 billion. And if you didn't have your earmark in there, you wouldn't be likely to keep increasing the amounts that we spend every year. Now, some may point out, hey, we are down this year from last year, but we were up 28 percent last year from the year before. That is what has got us into this problem where we have a deficit of $1.4 trillion and we are borrowing 42 cents on every dollar, and then we dismiss $300 million as insignificant. I mean you can use a magnifying glass and try to make it sound like it's small, but it's $300 million. And people across the country are saying if we don't start here, where do we start? If we can't do this, will we ever reform the entitlement programs we have to reform?”