“Our Congress passes laws that subsidize corporations, farms, oil companies, airlines, and houses for suburbia, but when they turn their attention to the poor they suddenly become concerned about balancing the budget and cut back on funds for Head Start.”

— Coretta Scott King

Harvard class day address (1968), quoted in International Education Vol. 1, p. 28

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Coretta Scott King 24

American author, activist, and civil rights leader. Wife of… 1927–2006

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“A tax cut means higher family income and higher business profits and a balanced federal budget…. As the national income grows, the federal government will ultimately end up with more revenues. Prosperity is the real way to balance our budget. By lowering tax rates, by increasing jobs and income, we can expand tax revenues and finally bring our budget into balance.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

Source: "Radio and Television Address to the Nation on the Test Ban Treaty and the Tax Reduction Bill" (18 September 1963) http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=9413

“Cutting PBS support (0.012% of budget) to help balance the Federal budget is like deleting text files to make room on your 500Gig hard drive”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

“We must have complete and effective publicity of corporate affairs, so that the people may know beyond peradventure whether the corporations obey the law and whether their management entitles them to the confidence of the public. It is necessary that laws should be passed to prohibit the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly for political purposes; it is still more necessary that such laws should be thoroughly enforced. Corporate expenditures for political purposes, and especially such expenditures by public-service corporations, have supplied one of the principal sources of corruption in our political affairs.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1910s, The New Nationalism (1910)
Context: There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be neither a short nor an easy task, but it can be done. We must have complete and effective publicity of corporate affairs, so that the people may know beyond peradventure whether the corporations obey the law and whether their management entitles them to the confidence of the public. It is necessary that laws should be passed to prohibit the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly for political purposes; it is still more necessary that such laws should be thoroughly enforced. Corporate expenditures for political purposes, and especially such expenditures by public-service corporations, have supplied one of the principal sources of corruption in our political affairs.

“We lost -- we lost the trust of the American people when some Republicans gave in to the temptations of corruption. We lost their trust when rather than reform government, both parties made it bigger. We lost their trust when instead of freeing ourselves from a dangerous dependence on foreign oil, both parties -- and Sen. Obama -- passed another corporate welfare bill for oil companies. We lost their trust when we valued our power over our principles. We're going to change that.”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

2000s, 2008, (2008)

“We can think back no further than July of 1996, when a plane carrying several hundred people suddenly and mysteriously crashed off the coast of Long Island. Within days, Congress had passed emergency legislation calling for costly new security measures, including a controversial “screening” method which calls for airlines to arbitrarily detain passengers just because the person meets certain criteria which border on racist and xenophobic.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Emotion should never dictate policy https://web.archive.org/web/20120119215614/http://www.ronpaularchive.com/1998/01/emotion-should-never-dictate-policy/ (January 12, 1998).
Press conference regarding the impeachment of President Clinton, 1998.
1990s
Context: In the emotion of the moment, people often say and do reckless things. For the individual, that can have deep ramifications. But when it is a single individual acting unreasonably in the throes of emotion in the face of sorrow, then the consequences are borne by only that person and his family. But when the government behaves recklessly in response to a tragedy, the consequences can be felt by everyone. This is especially true when politicians get in on the act. We can think back no further than July of 1996, when a plane carrying several hundred people suddenly and mysteriously crashed off the coast of Long Island. Within days, Congress had passed emergency legislation calling for costly new security measures, including a controversial “screening” method which calls for airlines to arbitrarily detain passengers just because the person meets certain criteria which border on racist and xenophobic.

“In an ever-advancing spiral the public was made to believe that only Hollywood-style extravaganzas were worth seeing and that only they could give an accurate sense of the world of art. The resulting box-office pressure made the museums still more dependent on corporate funding. Then came the recessions of the 1970s and 1980s. Many individual donors could no longer contribute at the accustomed rate, and inflation eroded the purchasing power of funds. To compound the financial problems, many governments, facing huge deficits—often due to sizable expansions of military budgets—cut their support for social services as well as their arts funding. Again museums felt they had no choice but to turn to corporation for a bail-out.”

Hans Haacke (1936) conceptual political artist

1980s, "Museums, Managers of Consciousness," 1983

“The law of gravity thus asserts itself when a house falls about our ears.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Vol. I, Ch. 1, Section 4, pg. 86.
(Buch I) (1867)

“The social and human balance of our societies depend on the farming world.”

Jacques Delors (1925) French economist and politician

Speech to the European Parliament (23 January 1991), quoted in The Times (24 January 1991), p. 13
President of the European Commission

“• Amendment in the Miscellaneous Personnel Benefits Fund and the Pension and Gratuity Fund, requiring the DBM to submit, within the first quarter, to Congress the amounts allocated to the Judicial Branch, Legislative Branch, Constitutional Commissions, and the Ombudsman, and that in no case shall releases to the said offices exceed the amount submitted to Congress also for purposes of utilizing these as savings to augment the budget of these constitutional offices;”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2014, Speech: Sponsorship Speech for the FY 2015 National Budget

“Mr. President, you're entitled as a president to your own airplane, and to your own house, but not to your own facts. I'm not going to cut education funding. I don't have any plan to cut education funding.”

Mitt Romney (1947) American businessman and politician

Presidential debate, , * 2012-10-03
2012 presidential debate: President Obama and Mitt Romney’s remarks in Denver on Oct. 3
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/decision2012/2012-presidential-debate-president-obama-and-mitt-romneys-remarks-in-denver-on-oct-3-running-transcript/2012/10/03/24d6eb6e-0d91-11e2-bd1a-b868e65d57eb_story_4.html
2012-10-04, viewable at [2012-10-03, Special Programming : Mitt Romney zingers at first presidential debate, CNN, YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PvpBLQXEJg, 2012-10-04]
in response to President Obama's assertion, "His running mate, Congressman Ryan, put forward a budget... it wasn't very detailed (this seems to be a trend), but what it did do, if you extrapolated how much money we're talking about, you'd look at cutting the education budget up to 20%."
possibly paraphrasing "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.", attributed to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan
2012

“Our Congress passes laws that subsidize corporations, farms, oil companies, airlines, and houses for suburbia, but when they turn their attention to the poor they suddenly become concerned about balancing the budget and cut back on funds for Head Start.”

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Coretta Scott King 24

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