If each of us is to feel that he or she is valued, this calls for more than public funding.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Philanthropic dollars are precious resources, so it's our responsibility to consider how we use them carefully. Yet few of us spend enough time doing so.
And if we make the process political, if we start to make it personal, we're actually going to frustrate good public policy, in terms of managing this money.
Our funding is based on our support of ideas like limited government, individual rights and a strong defense.
In the long run, the public interest depends on private virtue.
If the money we donate helps one child or can ease the pain of one parent, those funds are well spent.
In the charitable world as in the business world, opportunities should drive budgets, not the other way around.
Budgets are moral documents. Federal funding should reflect the priorities and the values of the majority of the American people.
Money is important. It is an important resource to have to help us build the life we want, but we overvalue it.
This fundraising is consuming us. It's impossible to overstate, I think, what it's doing to members and their ability to just focus on the job that they were elected to do. The collective concentration of the institution is being undermined every day by the need to fund-raise.
We have the right as individuals to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right to appropriate a dollar of the public money.