Top 44 Quotes & Sayings by Mick Mulvaney

When you grew up in a household where mom would keep the extra ketchup packets from McDonald's and keep them in a drawer just in case there came a day when you couldn't afford to buy ketchup anymore, that gets ingrained in you.

Bad spending, to me, in terms of its economic benefit, would be wealth transfer payments. It's a misallocation of resources.

I believe, as a matter of principle, that the debt is a problem that must be addressed sooner rather than later. I also know that fundamental changes are needed in the way Washington spends and taxes if we truly want a healthy economy. This must include changing our government's long-term fiscal path, which is unsustainable.

Too often in Washington, we only look at the recipient side: How does the budget affect either those who receive or don't receive benefits.

I don't like the fact that C.F.P.B. exists, I will be perfectly honest with you.

There is absolutely no way that the U.S. will ever default on its debt. We are not going to do that.

Remember what Obamacare gave you. Obamacare gave you insurance but not health care. A lot of folks who were technically insured either couldn't afford the premiums or couldn't afford the copay.

There are jobs that American citizens will not do. We can talk about why that is. We can talk about how our welfare state is broken, how we encourage people not to work, but that doesn't help the farmer pick his peaches this summer.

We need people to go to work. If you're on food stamps, and you're able-bodied, we need you to go to work. If you're on disability insurance and you're not supposed to be, you're not truly disabled; we need you to go back to work.

We cannot have another experience like we've had in my freshman class, of people saying one thing and doing another.

You can provide better services for less if you get the federal government out of the way.

The White House would love to see Obamacare taken apart all at once, bit by bit, however we can do it.

We don't spend money properly in Washington, D.C. We jump these massive bills to massive bills.

To a certain extent, I have to be the president's bad cop from time to time. I have to look people in the eye and tell them, 'No, we don't have enough money for that.' That is not a very popular thing to do in Washington.

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

We can't spend money on programs just because they sound good... Meals on Wheels sounds great.

My dad told me something long before I was in politics, and when your dad gives you advice every single day, eventually one or two of the things stick in your mind. And he said, don't believe what people say, believe what they do.

Infrastructure is sort of that good spending in the middle, where even if you do misallocate resources a little bit, you still have something to show for it. It's tangible; it may help economic growth and so forth.

We have to end Medicare as we know it. We have to fix it.

We have to get the tax revenues up. That means we have to get back to a healthy American economy, grow the economy so that you make more money. I make more money, ordinary Americans make more money, and so does the government. That helps lessen the deficit.

My reputation is as a fiscal hawk. At least, I hope that it is.

Do you really think that Social Security disability insurance is part of what people think of when they think of Social Security? I don't think so. It's the fastest-growing program. It grew tremendously under President Obama. It's a very wasteful program, and we want to try and fix that.

It doesn't cost money to let people keep more of their own money. It costs money to spend money you don't have, but that's another issue.

Every penny we spend comes from the taxpayer. We thus owe it to the taxpayer to work as hard managing that money wisely as the taxpayer must do to earn it in the first place.

Let's talk about after-school programs generally. They're supposed to be educational programs, right? And that's what they're supposed to do; they're supposed to help kids who can't - who don't get fed at home, get fed so that they do better at school. Guess what? There's no demonstrable evidence they're actually doing that.

I would be embarrassed to tell you how many folks ran saying that they weren't going to spend a bunch of money, they weren't going to raise the debt ceiling, and then they went to Washington, D.C., and did exactly that.

I think the government, if you measure it in terms of the dollars out the door, about 83 percent of the government stays open in a government shutdown. Social Security checks go out; military still exists. The FBI still chases bad guys. I think the consequences have been blown out of proportion.

I really do feel like I'm doing what the people that elected me in the first place wanted me to do. I'm not doing it in the same fashion they thought, or that I thought, when I ran for office in 2010. But I will be doing what they wanted me to do, and that is to try to fix Washington.

The O.M.B. director puts together the budget. It handles every executive order. It is the clearing house for every single federal regulation. It has input into all the management of all of the federal agencies... It is involved with everything. And I thought, 'That's where I want to be.'

If we can get to that 3 percent grow, it is $2 trillion to $2.5 trillion worth of more government revenues. It's 12 million additional jobs. And those are 12 million jobs paying into Medicare, 12 million jobs paying into Social Security. Growth really is what's driving all of this and growth is what our focus is, which is why we're willing to accept increased short-term deficits in exchange for that long-term payoff.

Growth works. What we're doing in the administration to spur growth in terms of regulatory form work. And what we're working is to make sure that those tax cuts add to that. We do believe that sustained 3 percent economic growth is possible and that that is the way you can balance the budget long-term.

The reason we've been growing at 1.8 percent for the last eight, ten years, which is way below the historical average, is in large part because of our tax code. It is important to us to get the biggest, broadest tax reduction, tax cuts, tax reform that we can possibly get because it's the only way we get back to 3 percent growth. That's what's driving all of this, how do you get the American economy back on that historical growth rate of 3 percent and out of these doldrums of 1.8, 1.9 that we had of the previous Barack Obama administration?

We need to have the growth. If we simply look at this as being deficit-neutral, you're never going to get the type of tax reform and tax reductions that you need to get to sustain 3 percent economic growth. We really do believe that the tax code is what's holding back the American economy.

There was very polite, gentlemanly, and - and - and lady-like push-back on issues on both sides. Chuck Schumer continues to push this idea of this $30 billion tunnel under the Hudson River, um, that Donald Trump very politely pushed back on. But I thought it was cordial and productive. The president is not giving up on the wall, and he's certainly not giving up on border security.

I don't think the criticism is fair. I think the criticism is assuming that Donald Trump giving up on something. He's not. I think if you do end up seeing - if you do end up seeing - some type of agreement regarding DACA and this massive-but-not-wall border security, talking about technology and people, all the things that we need to stop drugs and illegals from coming across the border. If that does become the framework for an agreement that does not mean the president's giving up on his priorities.

We are trying to get a border wall to protect millions of low income Americans against folks who aren't supposed to be here. So, it's a national security.

Thing we're trying to add to this is that lower corporate tax rates as we try and spur the economy. So that's where the Donald Trump attention is. The president's attention is on the middle class, making sure that's simple, fair and better. And then on the corporate tax rate, to try and get folks to invest in America again. His focus has not been on the impact on the top 1 percent.

You can't look at the tax cut on a family until you realized how - how much better off they're going to be in a growing economy.

When the conversation started to move to the things that we disagreed on, Donald Trump moved it back to the things that we could agree on. I think that's the way you get deals done, right? You and I might disagree 80% of the time but that still gives us 20% opportunity to try to work things out.

We're looking for stuff everyone agrees is a complete waste of time. Many agencies have forgotten how to deregulate. It's been so long since somebody asked them to look backwards.

Why am I interested in deficits? The only way you balance the budget in this country long-term is through sustained economic growth. And that's what everything we are doing in this administration is aimed at that end goal.

I believe, as a matter of principle, that the debt is a problem that must be addressed sooner rather than later. I also know that fundamental changes are necessary in the way Washington spends and taxes if we truly want a healthy economy.

If we had 3 percent growth, which is what we're trying to get to, what we're at, by the way, right now, we're trying to maintain that 3 percent growth. If we had been at 3 percent growth over the last ten years, the budget very nearly would be balanced in 2017. That's how big a difference it makes when you grow the American economy that additional 1 percent over ten years.

American Action Network should be spending their money to try and get those Democrats to change the votes, not beating up on Republicans in the House.