Politics & Power Quote by Dick Armey

Armey’s line works because it pretends to be a joke and behaves like a prosecution. By stacking “children, thieves, politicians” into one breath, he collapses three very different kinds of dependency into a single indictment: spending money you didn’t earn is either immature, criminal, or political. The punch isn’t the comparison itself; it’s the moral shortcut it offers. If government is rhetorically remodeled as petty theft with better stationery, then arguments about budgets, taxes, and public investment don’t need to be debated on their merits. They can be dismissed as a character flaw.

The subtext is classic small-government conservatism, delivered in a folksy triad that’s easy to repeat on talk radio or in a stump speech. “Other people’s money” is the trigger phrase: it reframes taxation as personal loss rather than collective choice, and it turns beneficiaries of public spending into suspicious dependents. The final clause, “All three need supervision,” is the real tell. It casts the audience as the responsible adult in the room, invited to “supervise” politicians the way you’d watch a toddler with a cookie jar. It’s a flattering role assignment that converts resentment into civic identity.

Context matters. Armey rose as a leading House Republican voice during the 1990s anti-Washington wave, when deficit panic and welfare politics made “waste” a cultural obsession. The line is designed less to persuade skeptics than to bond believers through a shared sneer: government doesn’t just make mistakes; it can’t be trusted with the keys.