If everyone in America can easily see who and what their lawmakers are requesting taxpayer money for, we can keep elected officials honest, end the days of political, special interest favors, and reduce wasteful spending.
When George W. Bush tried to roll back taxpayer exposure to a housing crash via Fannie and Freddie, guess what two senators joined a filibuster of the Bush initiative? Yep... those saviors of the working class, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. They went to bat for the housing industry and voted to allow taxpayer exposure to escalate.
I don't know the taxpayer has perhaps much of an understanding of just how much wealth has been and is being and can be created that flows through the economy and just how many jobs depend upon it.
What liberals mean by 'goose-stepping' or 'ethnic cleansing' is generally something along the lines of 'eliminating taxpayer funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.' But they can't say that, or people would realize they're crazy.
Twenty-five years ago, I created the Taxpayer Protection Pledge at the federal level. Then I brought it to the state and local level. About 97 percent of the Republicans in the House and 85 percent in the Senate have signed on, and the number of candidates who have taken the pledge is even higher. It's become a party position.
As Americans, we shouldn't like bailouts. Where I come from, if someone takes a risk and they're going to make the profit from that risk, they shouldn't have the taxpayer pay for the losses.
The federal and state governments should ban the use of taxpayer funds to support cloning and embryonic stem cell research.
Until we can fully grasp the extent of corruption and fraud involved in the administration of the Oil-for-Food program, and until the United Nations decides to cooperate in the investigation, no American taxpayer dollars should go to the United Nations.
I am proud of my record as Colorado's State Treasurer. I have protected the taxpayer's money and grown the value of the state's investments in a very challenging economy.
Hard as it is to imagine, there's a move afoot in Congress to take away the public's free online access to tax-funded medical research findings. That would be bad for medical discovery, bad for patients looking for the latest research results, and another rip-off of the American taxpayer.
Keeping a lid on taxes is not just good for the taxpayer. It's a powerful way to force government to be more accountable, set priorities and spend smarter. Let me repeat that: more accountable, set priorities and spend smarter - that's what we need to be about.
As a businessperson, I don't have the power to change the government. That is in the hands of the political leaders. However, as a taxpayer, we have the right to be critical of the government and demand change.
As Americans, we realize that there is no taxpayer money that wasn't first earned through the sweat and toil of one of our citizens.
My slogan when I ran was that there is no such thing as government money, there is only taxpayer's money, and that cut pretty deep.
First, the security and privacy of sensitive taxpayer information is absolutely essential.
Congress has a responsibility to make sure our taxpayer dollars are being spent responsibly and effectively, and at the same time, that our men and women in uniform have everything they need to carry out the War on Terror.
My problem with public sector union leaders, the bosses, has been they stood in the way of protecting the taxpayer.
In how many lives does love really play a dominant part? The average taxpayer is no more capable of a 'grand passion' than of a grand opera.
Rather than making minor repairs to a few small leaks in the roof, the Architect of the Capitol is proposing to tear down the entire roof and replace it with something called a new vegetative roofing system. We shouldn't be wasting precious taxpayer money on a new, state-of-the-art vegetative roofing system.
Our port facilities should have the freedom to levy a market-based container fee which will provide new revenue and make our system more equitable to the American taxpayer and American manufacturers.
The Center for Immigration Studies found that illegal immigrants cost the United States taxpayer about $10.4 billion a year. A large part of that expense stems from the babies born each year to illegal immigrants.
From day one, my focus as a new-breed appropriator was to look for areas where we could save taxpayer dollars.
A criminal pipeline from Cuba to Florida threatens U.S. national security interests with Cuban migrants exploiting U.S. law, stealing from the American taxpayer, and paying the Cuban government to live large off the cash in Cuba.
There is a legitimate role for development education in the UK, but I do not believe these projects give the taxpayer value for money.
Every time you cut programs, you take away a person who has a vested interest in high taxes and you put him on the tax rolls and make him a taxpayer. A farmer on subsidies is part welfare bum, whereas a free-market farmer is a small businessman with a gun.
Demands for equal financing of sewers, streets, and garbage collection would make more sense than proposals for equal financing of the schools, since some plausible connection may be inferred between the amount of money expended, e.g., for roads, and the quality of service resulting to the taxpayer.
Prioritizing spending and maximizing the effectiveness of taxpayer dollars is absolutely essential. We must draw the line, realigning programs when necessary and also eliminating failed programs.
Our earliest evidence of government, in the ruins of Babylon and Egypt, shows nothing but ziggurats and pyramids of wasted taxpayer money, the TARP funds and shovel-ready stimulus programs of their day.
Sham marriages have been widespread; people have been allowed to settle in Britain without being able to speak English; and there have not been rules in place to stop migrants becoming a burden on the taxpayer. We are changing all of that.
We need a conservative welfare reform initiative that is focused on putting people back to work and ensures taxpayer money is only spent on programs that have been proven to work.
I never once considered that it was appropriate to put taxpayer money on the line in resolving Lehman Brothers.
I came to Congress on the promise of cutting wasteful government spending. There are plenty of examples of the government playing loose with taxpayer money, but none more so than how we spend our foreign aid dollars.
Democracy, if it meant what our forefathers said, that would be great, but unfortunately it's been corrupted by this funding and funding of campaigns. There's a much better way to do it. There could be a small amount of money given by every taxpayer to be dedicated to candidates.
If taxpayer money were limitless, we wouldn't need a budget at all.
I have never articulated a specific number, but I think a nation as great as we are, that professes to favor freedom and liberty, that we would find a way to evidence that in our criminal justice system by achieving what we know we can achieve: a reduction in crime, a reduction in taxpayer expense, and a reduction in the prison population.
Congress can protect small businesses by providing effective oversight over SBA policies and make sure they take into account the needs of small businesses while also protecting taxpayer dollars. Congress also needs to make sure that new banking regulations do not make it more costly for community banks to lend to small businesses.
