Quotes About Policy

Healthcare is a human right. No one should face bankruptcy or death because of lack of healthcare. All Americans - regardless of their health or residential status - should be able to access the healthcare they need, whenever they need it.

Whenever you're talking about using humor in politics or in a policy speech or in a serious moment, you're talking about using it as a tool to engage people. That's why putting a joke in a political speech is a luxury, and it is always a risk.

Well, certainly the Democrats have been arguing to raise the capital gains tax on all Americans. Obama says he wants to do that. That would slow down economic growth. It's not necessarily helpful to the economy. Every time we've cut the capital gains tax, the economy has grown. Whenever we raise the capital gains tax, it's been damaged.

In the middle of a recession, where we're just climbing out of it, where the economy -unemployment is still at 9.7 percent, the idea of raising taxes and reducing spending is a prescription for disaster.

When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.

Brainy folks were also present in Lyndon Johnson's administration, especially in the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's brilliant 'whiz kids' tried to micro-manage the Vietnam war, with disastrous results.

As a scientist, the starting point is always the facts of the matter, whereas often, in politics, the starting point is how does this play in the next election.

Every time you cut programs, you take away a person who has a vested interest in high taxes and you put him on the tax rolls and make him a taxpayer. A farmer on subsidies is part welfare bum, whereas a free-market farmer is a small businessman with a gun.

So that it cannot be denied, but the lowering of Interest may, and probably will keep some Money from coming abroad into Trade; whereas on the contrary, high Interest certainly brings it out.

An intelligence analyst may attribute an attack to al Qaeda, whereas a policy maker could opt for the more general 'extremist.'

We believe our hard-earned tax dollars should just go for America, not, for what? China, Russia, the Middle East, Guam, whatever, wherever.

If laws acting upon private interests can not always be avoided, they should be confined within the narrowest limits, and left wherever possible to the legislatures of the States.

It would be our policy to use nuclear weapons wherever we felt it necessary to protect our forces and achieve our objectives.

I think one of the biggest myths is that education cannot flourish with regulation. Another myth is that wherever the state sponsors education, it doesn't flourish.

The very best Labor governments in our nation's history distinguished themselves by thinking big and, wherever possible, resisting the temptation to overemphasise short-term political considerations.

I have been to China. I noticed that wherever you went, you could ask an ordinary citizen, and he would explain, in detail, about free markets and all the other jargon of liberalisation.

The government wants to be able to attack extremism and hatred wherever it occurs.

My view is regardless of whether you think prohibiting abortion is good or whether you think prohibiting abortion is bad, regardless of how you come out on that, my only point is the Constitution does not say anything about it. It leaves it up to democratic choice.

Monetary policy is a blunt tool which certainly affects the distribution of income and wealth, although whether the net effect is to increase or reduce inequality is not clear.

I would suggest the taxation of all property equally, whether church or corporation, exempting only the last resting place of the dead and possibly, with proper restrictions, church edifices.

You should be attacking the carbon emissions, period, and whether it's cap-and-trade or carbon tax or whatever, that's the realm in which we should be playing.

And I believe that if we can care about whether or not our neighbor has a good job or access to affordable health care for their children, and we move to implement the policies that can improve these situations, we will unleash vast amounts of human potential and recapture the American spirit.

I've appointed a task force to take a fresh look at the color-code system and whether we should retain it, change it or scrap it.

After 1960, anyone who wanted to discuss almost any aspect of U.S. public policy - from how to make cars safer to whether to abolish the draft, from how to support the housing market to whether to regulate the financial sector - had to speak economics.