Wealth & Money Quote by Ronald Reagan

Government, in Reagan's framing, behaves less like a steward and more like a sponge: whatever you give it, it will absorb and still insist it's thirsty. The line is engineered to feel like common sense, the kind you can say over dinner and have everyone nod. "Always" does the heavy lifting. It's not a critique of one wasteful program or one bad budget cycle; it's a claim about the nature of the state itself. That absolutism turns a technical question (how much revenue? which priorities?) into a moral one (can you trust government at all?).

The sly subtext is that "need" is not discovered but manufactured. Reagan collapses a sprawling mix of agencies, constituencies, and crises into a single actor with appetites, suggesting that new funds don't solve problems so much as create reasons to spend. It's a preemptive strike against tax increases and an argument for starving the beast: limit revenue and you force discipline. Conveniently, it also reframes public investment as self-perpetuating indulgence rather than collective choice.

Context matters. Reagan rose in the late-1970s backlash to inflation, taxes, and the perceived bloat of Great Society liberalism. He sold tax cuts not as bookkeeping but as liberation from an overreaching bureaucracy. The quote's rhetorical power comes from how it turns resentment into principle: if government "always" expands to meet its means, then austerity isn't a policy preference; it's the only rational defense. The cynicism is clean, portable, and politically durable because it makes the future feel rigged.