Government spending and frugality

For three long years I have been going up and down this country preaching that government—federal, state and local—costs too much.  I shall not stop that preaching.  As an immediate program of action, we must abolish useless offices.  We must eliminate unnecessary functions of government.

We must consolidate subdivisions of government and, like the private citizen, give up luxuries which we can no longer afford.

I propose to you my friends, and through you, that government of all kinds, big and little, be made solvent and that the example be set by the President of the United States and his Cabinet.

—Franklin Delano Roosevelt, acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination for President in 1932.