Grover Norquist
Government should enforce rule of law. It should enforce contracts, it should protect people bodily from being attacked by criminals. And when the government does those things, it is facilitating liberty. When it goes beyond those things, it becomes destructive to both human happiness and human liberty.Collection: Government
Our goal is to shrink government to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub.Collection: Government
My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.Collection: Government
A lot of young people just starting out unskilled, as all Americans do when they're born here, come to this country, and so the business community is for immigration. Big businesses, small businesses, high-tech, low-tech, the communities of faith, and the Republican leadership.Collection: Leadership
The goal is to reduce the size and scope of government spending, not to focus on the deficit. The deficit is the symptom of the disease.Collection: Government
My wife and I have what's known as mixed marriage. I am a Methodist, she is a Muslim. So we're keeping it in the M's.Collection: Marriage
Compromise is moving in the right directlon more slowly than one might like.
It is wrong to divide the nation white against black, native born against immigrant or one religion against another. It is also wrong to divide people by income. East Germany was not an improvement over South Africa. Obama divides Americans against each other. This is wrong.
Income should be taxed one time at one rate, not again and again.
Someday I hope Americans will not believe that anyone had to spend his or her days fighting for limited government because everyone they know wants maximum freedom and minimum statism.
The Democratic Party is made up of trial lawyers, labor unions, government employees, big city political machines, the coercive utopians, the radical environmentalists, feminists, and others who want to restructure society with tax dollars and government fiat.
People learn their politics at a young age and tend to stick with it.
As more and more Americans own shares of stock, more and more Americans understand that taxing businesses is taxing them. Regulating businesses is taxing them. They ought to be thinking long-term about their ownership, not just their income, and that they should pay taxes on capital, as well as taxes on labor.
The problem is government spends too much. So raising taxes is what politicians do, instead of reducing spending.
Most Republicans have made it very clear they're not interested in raising taxes. They want to reform government.
If you have to change the law to get more money, that's a tax increase, and Americans for Tax Reform supports all efforts of tax reform, getting rid of deductions or credits, or something that's misclassified, as long as you at the same time reduce rates so that it's not a hidden tax.
I'm for tax reform, not tax increases.
The American taxpayers are a powerful force. They don't want their taxes raised.
I was an anti-communist before I was political in other ways.
What's hurting the U.S. economy is total government spending. The deficit is an indicator that the government is spending so much money that it can't even get around to stealing all of the money that it wants to spend. But the tip of the iceberg is not what hit the Titanic - it was the 90 percent of the iceberg under water.
The Republican Party and the conservative free market movement have been presidentially focused for too long.
The taxpayer group in every state is always - always referred to as nuts.
People who are willing to stick to a strong pro-life position aren't going to be pushed off a strong anti-tax position. For people who like to think in ideologically cohesive ways, it makes no sense, but that's the way it is.
Every time we've cut the capital gains tax, the economy has grown. Whenever we raise the capital gains tax, it's been damaged. It's one of those taxes that most clearly damages economic growth and jobs.
I was a math guy as a kid. I was really good at math. I wasn't particularly interested in it.
Less government, less regulation, lower taxes.
Our job is to make people free.
Stupider than France is not where we want to be on tax policy.
If you raise taxes, it won't reduce the deficit. The other team will simply spend the resources.
I'm not for no taxes. That would be an anarchist. I am for lower taxes.
Everyone would have bigger and safer cars if they didn't have those CAFE standards: corporate average fuel economy.
If you let people own their land, they take care of it. That's why privately owned land is always taken care of, and the parks look like cesspools. Nobody takes care of what everybody owns.
It would be unwise for the modern Republican Party to come across as hostile to immigration. That has been the losing position in American history for 200 years.
Historically, opposition to immigration in the United States has been racially and religiously motivated in the ugliest, nastiest way possible.
My goal in life is to get the federal government down to half its present size and under control, and then I can write murder mysteries.
Tax increases slow economic growth. Why would you raise taxes? We need to reform spending, the tens of trillions of unfunded liabilities can never be funded by tax increases, that can only be fixed by reducing spending.
The central issue of our time - of all times - is the size, power and scope of government.
The welfare state creates its own victim/client constituency. By making individuals free and independent, we reduce the need for 'charity' to those truly needy citizens what we can certainly afford to help through real charity.
Taxation is not charity. It is not voluntary. As we shrink the state and make government smaller, we will find that more and more people are able to take care of themselves.
We have to have a conversation about whether Obama's plan to increase spending to occupy Afghanistan helps make America a safer country, or not. I think at some point, we may decide that we don't have to have that size military and cost footprint in the country. You look at what you want to accomplish, how many soldiers you need.
Tax reductions are usually simpler and less distortive. I'm certainly willing to look at getting rid of tax deductions/credits, and go to dramatically reduced rates.
There are 100 different doors to come into the conservative movement. You can disagree with 99 of them, as long as you agree on one: more-limited government.
Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.
Clinton and Obama practice this politics known quaintly as the Richard Speck strategy: if you cannot take on everyone in the room at once, take them out of the room one at a time.
Smaller government, more individual responsibility, more individual control creates more Republicans. More state power and ownership and control and top-down decision-making creates more Democrats.
I know the activists I deal with, we sort of try and check each other to make sure that we haven't gone native, that you come to Washington thinking it's a cesspool, you don't want to end up thinking it's really a hot tub and getting used to it. So that's something one has to keep an eye on all the time.
Reforming Social Security to make it fully funded and independently held, that's compassionate because it allows people to control their own lives; cutting taxes on families and all Americans to let people have more control over their lives.
Spending an extra dollar on the D.C. public school system isn't spending an extra dollar on education. Spending an extra dollar with the Pentagon doesn't buy you an extra dollar on defense. Republicans need to look skeptically at military spending.
Americans for Tax Reform is a national taxpayer organization dedicated to opposing any and all tax increases. We work at the national, state and local level for lower taxes, less government spending and limited government.
We want to reduce the size of government in half as a percentage of GNP over the next 25 years. We want to reduce the number of people depending on government so there is more autonomy and more free citizens.