By Donna Westfall – January 31, 2017 – Just for grins, can you guess who said this and when?

“You know, for years before I became President, I heard others say they would cut government and how bad it was, but not much happened. We actually did it. We cut over a quarter of a trillion dollars in spending, more than 300 domestic programs, more than 100,000 positions from the federal bureaucracy in the last two years alone. Based on decisions already made, we will have cut a total of more than a quarter of a million positions from the federal government, making it the smallest it has been since John Kennedy was President, by the time I come here again next year.”

“…our initiatives have already saved taxpayers $63 billion. The age of the $500 hammer and the ashtray you can break on “David Letterman” is gone. Deadwood programs, like mohair subsidies, are gone. We’ve streamlined the Agriculture Department by reducing it by more than 1,200 offices. We’ve slashed the small business loan form from an inch thick to a single page. We’ve thrown away the government’s 10,000-page personnel manual.”

“There’s going to be a second round of Reinventing Government. We propose to cut $130 billion in spending by shrinking departments, extending our freeze on domestic spending, cutting 60 public housing programs down to three, getting rid of over 100 programs we do not need, like the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Helium Reserve Program. And we’re working on getting rid of unnecessary regulations and making them more sensible. The programs and regulations that have outlived their usefulness should go. We have to cut yesterday’s government to help solve tomorrow’s problems.”

“And we need to get government closer to the people it’s meant to serve. We need to help move programs down to the point where states and communities and private citizens in the private sector can do a better job. If they can do it, we ought to let them do it. We should get out of the way and let them do what they can do better. Taking power away from federal bureaucracies and giving it back to communities and individuals is something everyone should be able to be for.”

“Nothing has done more to undermine our sense of common responsibility than our failed welfare system. This is one of the problems we have to face here in Washington in our New Covenant. It rewards welfare over work. It undermines family values. It lets millions of parents get away without paying their child support. It keeps a minority but a significant minority of the people on welfare trapped on it for a very long time.”

“And after that, there ought to be a simple, hard rule: Anyone who can work must go to work. If a parent isn’t paying child support, they should be forced to pay. We should suspend drivers’ license, track them across state lines, make them work off what they owe. That is what we should do. governments do not raise children, people do. And the parents must take responsibility for the children they bring into this world.”

“All Americans, not only in the states most heavily affected but in every place in this country, are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country. The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants. The public service they use impose burdens on our taxpayers. That’s why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens. In the budget I will present to you, we will try to do more to speed the deportation of illegal aliens who are arrested for crimes, to better identify illegal aliens in the workplace as recommended by the commission headed by former Congresswoman Barbara Jordan. We are a nation of immigrants. But we are also a nation of laws. It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years, and we must do more to stop it.”

These excerpts were from Bill Clinton’s State of the Union Address January 24, 1995.