Leadership Quote by Bob Schaffer

"Government is just spending too much money" is the kind of sentence that pretends to be arithmetic while doing something more like stagecraft. Bob Schaffer, a Republican politician shaped by late-20th-century fiscal conservatism, isn’t offering a budget line-item critique; he’s deploying a moral frame. The word "just" is the giveaway. It flattens complexity - recessions, wars, entitlement structures, tax policy - into a single, solvable vice: excess. That rhetorical move converts policy into character. Government becomes the irresponsible spender, taxpayers the put-upon adults in the room.

The intent is disciplined and strategic: to make austerity feel like common sense rather than an ideological choice. "Too much money" sounds empirical, but it’s elastic. Too much compared to what: GDP share, historical norms, peer nations, revenue? The phrase never has to specify, because its power comes from leaving the benchmark undefined. Voters can plug in their own anxieties - deficits, inflation, bureaucracy, distrust of elites - and hear confirmation.

Context matters: this line belongs to an era when "small government" messaging became a reliable political currency, especially in debates over taxes, social programs, and regulatory power. It also sidesteps the other half of the ledger. By isolating spending, Schaffer quietly avoids saying whether the problem is expenditures or insufficient revenue - a silence that aligns neatly with anti-tax orthodoxy.

The subtext is a permission slip: if spending is the singular problem, then cuts are virtue, skepticism is patriotism, and governing becomes an exercise in saying "no" with a straight face.