We don't know what proportion of public funds is regularly lost to collusion and corruption. Is it 25 per cent? 30 per cent? We do know that a portion of these public funds are feeding organized crime.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Political corruption is endemic all over this country, in some places worse than others, right? On crime, you have all the major American cities where the crime rates at different points in their histories, have spiked dramatically.
Well, the role of money in politics is pretty corrupting right now.
The American public is rightfully asking, 'Hey, all those funds are coming out of my pocket, so I want to know where they're going.'
There is no question that we are in a period in which we are going to have to use those sources to fund about 35 million dollars a year that used to be paid for by the federal government.
In large commercial cities, the money power is, I fear irresistible. It is not by open corruption that it always, or even most generally, operates.
After almost 50 years in which federal spending averaged about 20 percent of GDP, Joe Sestak and Nancy Pelosi took federal spending to 25 percent. You know, that's a 25 percent increase in the size of the government overnight. That's what we - that's what we've got to rein in.
The GAO just released a report that said 22 percent of federal programs fail to meet their objectives. The truth is we don't know how taxpayer money is spent in Washington, D.C., which is why I think we ought to put every agency budget up on the Internet for everyone to see.
I'm very interested in how corruption works - and it's not necessarily the way one might expect.
The unending chase for money, I believe, threatens to steal our democracy itself. I've used the word 'corrupting,' and I want to be very clear about it: I mean by it not the corruption of individuals, but a corruption of a system itself that all of us are forced to participate in against our will.
I think money laundering is giving oxygen to organized crime.
No opposing quotes found.