“While a Treasury surplus is not the greatest evil, it is a serious evil. Our revenue should be ample to meet the ordinary annual demands upon our Treasury, with a sufficient margin for those extraordinary but scarcely less imperative demands which arise now and then. Expenditure should always be made with economy and only upon public necessity. Wastefulness, profligacy, or favoritism in public expenditures is criminal.” - President Benjamin Harrison, Inaugural Address, March 4, 1889.
“There is a spirit, which, like the father of evil, is constantly ‘walking to and fro about the earth, seeking whom it may devour;’ it is the peril of FALSE philanthropy. The persons whom it possess do not, indeed, throw themselves into the flames, but they are employed in lighting up the torches of discord throughout the community. Their first principle of action is to leave their own affairs, and neglect their own duties, to regulate the affairs and duties of others. Theirs is the task to feed the hungry, and clothe the naked, of other lands, while they thrust the naked, famished, and shivering begger from their own doors; to instruct the heathen, while their own children want the bread of life. When this spirit infuses itself into the bosom of a Statesman (if one so possessed can be called a statesman), it converts him at once into a visionary enthusiast. Then it is that he indulges in golden dreams of national greatness and prosperity. He discovers that ‘Liberty is power,’ and, not content with vast schemes of improvement at home, which it would bankrupt the treasury of the world to execute, he flies to foreign lands, to fulfill obligations to ‘the Human Race.’ .... It is the spirit of which the aspiring politician dexterously avails himself.” - Robert Young Hayne, speech in the U.S. Senate, January 26, 1830.
Sound like any politicians we know?