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Quotes by Mitch Daniels

Among the weeds choking out growth and good government are the hundreds of boards, commissions, and advisory committees that have sprouted over the years. They devour time, money, and energy far beyond any real contribution they make.
– Mitch Daniels
And overhanging all our difficulties is the simple, brute fact that our state's public finances are in ruin. We have outspent our income year after year.
– Mitch Daniels
And, the time has come to stop penalizing Indiana businesses through our quirky treatment of time itself. If it were just a matter of the rest of the world's laughing at us, I'd say let them laugh. But the loss of Hoosier jobs and income is no laughing matter.
– Mitch Daniels
Every citizen who stops smoking, or loses a few pounds, or starts managing his chronic disease with real diligence, is caulking a crack for the benefit of us all.
– Mitch Daniels
Government does not create jobs, it only creates the conditions that make jobs more or less likely.
– Mitch Daniels
Our educational results lag behind other states, and other nations, but worse still, behind the potential of the kids and the devoted teachers in our classrooms.
– Mitch Daniels
So tonight I propose one more step that I would rather not propose. I ask the most fortunate among us, those citizens earning over $100,000 per year, for one year, to pay an additional one percent on the income they receive.
– Mitch Daniels
The state of our state is far from sound. The state of our state needs serious attention. The foundation is still firm, but major repairs are overdue.
– Mitch Daniels
We are a state of people who speak plainly. We are a state of people who get to the point. Let me try to do both this evening, right now.
– Mitch Daniels
We have emptied every coffee can in the backyard and maxed out all the credit cards. When your past due bills exceed your cash on hand, when your month-in, month-out expenses far exceed the size of your paycheck, when your once-hefty savings have all been run through, the average family knows what to call it.
– Mitch Daniels
When they call the slightest spending reductions 'painful', we will say 'If government spending prevents pain, why are we suffering so much of it?' And 'If you want to experience real pain, just stay on the track we are on.'
– Mitch Daniels
We Hoosiers hold to some quaint notions. Some might say we 'cling' to them, though not out of fear or ignorance. We believe in paying our bills. We have kept our state in the black throughout the recent unpleasantness, while cutting rather than raising taxes, by practicing an old tribal ritual - we spend less money than we take in.
– Mitch Daniels
We designed both our state employee health plans and the one we created for low-income Hoosiers as Health Savings Accounts, and now in the tens of thousands these citizens are proving that they are fully capable of making smart, consumerist choices about their own health care.
– Mitch Daniels
We believe it wrong ever to take a dollar from a free citizen without a very necessary public purpose, because each such taking diminishes the freedom to spend that dollar as its owner would prefer.
– Mitch Daniels
The federal government now spends one of every four dollars in the entire economy. It borrows one of every three dollars it spends. No nation, no entity, large or small, public or private, can thrive, or survive intact, with debts as huge as ours.
– Mitch Daniels
The failure of national economic policy is costing us more than jobs it has begun to weaken that uniquely American spirit of risk-taking, large ambition, and optimism about the future. We must rally them now to bold departures that rebuild our national morale as well as our material prosperity.
– Mitch Daniels
Starting a new retirement plan for those below a certain age is something tens of millions of Americans have already been through at work.
– Mitch Daniels
No enterprise, small or large, public or private, can remain self-governing, let alone successful, so deeply in hock to others as we are about to be.
– Mitch Daniels
Left to ourselves, we might pick the wrong health insurance, the wrong mortgage, the wrong school for our kids why, unless they stop us, we might pick the wrong light bulb.
– Mitch Daniels
In fact, it works the other way: A government as big and bossy as this one is maintained on the backs of the middle class and those who hope to join it.
– Mitch Daniels
If our nation goes over a financial Niagara, we won't have much strength and, eventually, we won't have peace. We are currently borrowing the entire defense budget from foreign investors. Within a few years, we will be spending more on interest payments than on national security. That is not, as our military friends say, a 'robust strategy.'
– Mitch Daniels
If freedom's best friends cannot unify around a realistic, actionable program of fundamental change, one that attracts and persuades a broad majority of our fellow citizens, big change will not come.
– Mitch Daniels
All great enterprises have a pearl of faith at their core, and this must be ours: that Americans are still a people born to liberty. That they retain the capacity for self-government. That, addressed as free-born, autonomous men and women of God-given dignity, they will rise yet again to drive back a mortal enemy.
– Mitch Daniels