Quotes About Government

I think, in effect, in most of the European countries, the total marginal tax rate is over 50 percent; that's to say, add on other taxes like VAT to the income tax.

Put simply, the rich pay a lot of taxes as a total percentage of taxes collected, but they don't pay a lot of taxes as a percentage of what they can afford to pay, or as a percentage of what the government needs to close the deficit gap.

I think it's disingenuous for people to talk in their living rooms about government collapsing, the possibility of total anarchy, but when someone says it in public, it's so terrifying they have to persecute that person.

Expenditures have gone rampant in Puerto Rico: lack of accountability - total lack of accountability.

Nobody - myself included - believes that we could ever achieve total information awareness. But the government needs to set goals and long-range objectives. Total information awareness is a good goal.

I knew from the beginning that privacy was going to be a huge issue, especially with regard to applying Total Information Awareness in counterterrorism. Because if the technology development was successful, a logical place to apply it was inside the United States.

You watch television and see what's going on on this debt ceiling issue. And what I consider to be a total lack of leadership from the President and nothing's going to get fixed until the President himself steps up and wrangles both parties in Congress.

We should reduce total government spending as a percentage of the economy. The left wants to focus on the deficit so they can take us away from the focus on spending as a percentage of the economy.

The question is: How do we reduce spending from 25% of GDP, which is where Obama put us? The focus is on total government spending. Can we bring it down, in a reasonable and politically acceptable way? That's what the Paul Ryan plan does. It puts us on a gradual reform path to reducing the size of government.

What the government wants is something they never had before. They want total awareness. The question is, is that something we should be allowing?

One could argue the GOP made no progress on limiting government in their four years of total control from 2002 to 2006. If anything, government expanded like never before.

The 'Total Information Awareness' project is truly diabolical - mostly because of the legal changes which have made it possible in the first place. As a consequence of the Patriot Act, government now has access to all sorts of private and commercial databases that were previously off limits.

I really don't think our school system is an evil borg force. It's sort of like the government. It's not even efficient enough to be a borg of total evil, even if it wanted to be.

In New York, the average total state and local tax burden is $5,260 for every man, woman and child. That's by far the highest in the country.

'End strength' - the total number of government employees you can have at the end of the year. That's a separate exercise and requires independent energy, independent effort with the Congress to get the ceiling of your government employees raised.

Nobody should have the right to eavesdrop, or you become a totalitarian state - the kind of state I escaped as a kid to come to this country where you have democracy and freedom of speech.

Democracy is like a totalitarian.

Putin set out to build a mafia state. He didn't set out to build a totalitarian regime. But he was building his mafia state on the ruins of a totalitarian regime. And so we end up with a mafia state and a totalitarian society.

There are so many people that are offended by debate and free speech that sometimes governments cower. It's just way easier to play into the hands of people who are totalitarian.

We do not want to see a Hong Kong that enjoys freedoms on paper, but whose autonomous status conceals the workings of a totalitarian state beneath.

Calls for the simplification of abstract or allusive art have always come from governments suspicious of artists themselves. This is why totalitarian regimes have always legislated some form of realism.

Is privacy about government security agents decrypting your e-mail and then kicking down the front door with their jackboots? Or is it about telemarketers interrupting your supper with cold calls? It depends. Mainly, of course, it depends on whether you live in a totalitarian or a free society.

I think the Americans have it right. The idea of having guns is essentially to protect yourself from a totalitarian government.

We do not want to see a Hong Kong that enjoys freedoms on paper but whose autonomous status conceals the workings of a totalitarian state.