Most Americans recognize that whatever the government program is, no matter how essential it is, it's waste.
Faced with a deep recession, some say the answer is to expand the role of government.
I'll never forget working to get my college, Wayne State University, to divest from the government in South Africa. This was the beginning of my activism, and the fight for social and economic justice has been a constant thread in my life.
What we have found is that we were the principal mediators in many cases between the Iraqis and their own security forces and their own government, and so you have to almost embrace that role.
When you have corporate influence on our government outweighing the influence of citizens, that's terrifying. This is something we have to make a big, big noise about.
President Obama likes to talk about winning the future. But someone needs to tell him: You can't win the prosperity of tomorrow if you're mortgaging it to pay for the big government programs of today.
We have been mandated by the government, backed by legislation, that we have to have an inflation target of about 4%.
We ought to be allowing the private sector to pursue every form of energy because the energy of the future, it's not going to come from the government picking winners and losers.
My point is this, the Government made this decision to ban totally beef exports into Indonesia, even to compliant abattoirs and this will have enormous consequences for the beef cattle industry across Australia.
The government should help and guide the weak and small racial groups within its national boundaries toward self-determination and self-government. It should offer resistance to foreign aggression, and simultaneously, it should revise foreign treaties in order to restore our equality and independence among the nations.
Policy people suffer their own kind of agony, and no wonder. After all, what is the average life of the policy person? You go into government if you are lucky, do your best, aren't appreciated, take all the blame for policies for which you are only partly responsible, leave, realize your reputation has been damaged, maybe permanently.
We have got to protect privacy rights. We have got to protect our God-given, constitutionally protected civil liberties, and we are not doing that in the federal government. The Department of Homeland Security, as well as the TSA, is a great culprit in being a Gestapo-type organization.
We're going to have to control the spending of government.
Nothing for the Left, nothing the government does is ever about its superficial reason; it's only and always about expanding government power and control over you.
When the federal government invests in education, it should support quality education and career readiness rather than institutions that make empty promises.
I want to stop directing so many of resources to the military budget and focus them here at home. I believe government should invest in public infrastructure.
Government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people; it wasn't intended to be all things to all people.
The Republicans have lost their standards; they've lost their principles... Really, that's why the machine in the Republican Party is fighting against me... They have never really gone along with lower taxes and less government.
In response to our fast-food culture, a 'slow food' movement appeared. Out of hurried parenthood, a move toward slow parenting could be growing. With vital government supports for state-of-the-art public child care and paid parental leave, maybe we would be ready to try slow love and marriage.
As more people rely on government programs, the harder it becomes to conduct the necessary reforms to preserve them to help our society's most vulnerable.
No branch of the law is of more importance to the counsellor, the statesman, or the citizen, than a thorough acquaintance with the Constitution and laws of the Federal Government, as they are administered and as they affect the rights of the people.
Activists and geeks, standing together, are demonstrating powers beyond the reach of government control.
Throughout his remarkable business and government career, Robert Rubin, now 65, has both worked exhaustively at reaching well-founded conclusions and rejected the idea that anything - and he means anything - can be a 'provable certainty.'
Well, we have a crisis along the Mexican border right now, a state of emergency as declared by a bipartisan group of Texas House members just last fall. You know, we've had almost 200,000 OTMs - the government categorizes OT 'other, other than Mexicans' - along the Mexican border.
History teaches that the overwhelming majority of elected officials follow movement builders outside government when it comes to the new and risky... Once you recognize it, demand it and reward it, it will happen.
What is the government doing or not doing in terms of tracking you, following you, investigating you? And if you're suspicionless, it should be none of the above.
In any crass political calculation, drilling for oil will always win more votes than putting a price on carbon. But if I recall what I was taught in fifth-grade American government class, we elect presidents to do more than crass political calculations.
We believe that business is the engine that drives the car. You've got to build your business base. That means creating more jobs, better paying jobs - that's how you raise your standard of living. That's how you raise your quality of life. That's what funds all the other services people want from government.
Migration - whether emigration or return - at the micro level is an individual choice, and government both at the Centre and the states have role only to facilitate the decision of the individuals.
I like 'X-Files'-type shows with government conspiracies and extraterrestrials and all that.
One would expect that private property taken by eminent domain would become land available for public use such as parks and roads. Unfortunately, this decision creates a loophole for government to manipulate the definition of public use simply to generate greater tax revenue.
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.
The government may change faces from time to time, but it's not like we fight wars for democracy - we fight wars for capitalism and for oil.
Serving on the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight allows me to play a role making government more accountable by investigating waste, mismanagement, and improprieties.
I am going to confront the old-fashioned negative thinking which says that all government needs to do to generate growth is cut worker and environmental protections, cut taxes on the rich and stroke 'fat cats' until they purr with pleasure. I'm completely repudiating the idea that government has to get out of the way.
What the government wants is something they never had before. They want total awareness. The question is, is that something we should be allowing?
