Quotes About Policy

Today, poverty in America means whatever government statisticians in Washington say it means.

The feeling that the government should "do something" has seldom been based on a comparison of what actually happens when government does and when it does not "do something.

The welfare state contributes to this disparity by (1) reducing the need for people at the bottom to earn income and (2) by penalizing their earning of income, since higher income leads to a reduction in eligibility for government benefits.

A cynic once said that there is nothing more permanent than a temporary government policy.

Eventually, however, the fact that many once-poor places like Hong Kong, South Korea, and Singapore achieved prosperity through freer international trade and investment became so blatant and so widely known that, by the end of the twentieth century, the governments of many other countries began abandoning their zero-sum view of economic transactions.

In 1962, Democratic President John F. Kennedy, like both Democratic and Republican Presidents and Secretaries of the Treasury in earlier years, pointed out that "it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now.

The ending of the slave trade was one of many European policies imposed upon Africa by the conquerors.

Bajo un gobierno electo popularmente, los incentivos políticos son hacer lo que es popular, a pesar de sus posibles consecuencias negativas, o hacer algo tan popular como sea posible

How can this be, when the whole purpose of rent control is to keep rents down? First of all, the purpose of any policy tells you absolutely nothing about what will actually happen under that policy. Too many disastrous laws get passed because those who pass them win political points for their good intentions and nobody bothers to check up later to see what actually happened.

For most of the period of the boom, only Moody's, Standard & Poor's and Fitch were recognized by the SEC. It was not the particular choices of rating-agencies selected by the SEC that is in question but the policy of giving those agencies a captive market.

Complex and time-consuming international economic transactions, including long-term investments, are particularly dependent on a reliable framework of law, so that changes of government policy or of individuals in power, do not create large uncertainties as to whether commitments will be honored or foreigners treated on an equal plane with the natives involved in commercial and financial transactions.

In summary, a policy intended to make housing more affordable for the poor has resulted in resources being redirected to the construction of houses that are only affordable for the rich or wealthy, since generally , luxury homes are not subject to rent control, and neither are office buildings and other commercial properties. This illustrates, among other things, the crucial importance of making a distinction between intentions and consequences

One of the reasons for the political success of price control is that part of its costs are hidden. Even the dire consequences of the shortage are unable to show the whole picture.

One of the main problems of price control is to define the appropriate price of what is being controlled

Drawing up policy blueprints is a task for which there has never been a shortage of eager candidates. We can only hope that those policies will be based on hard facts about the real world, rather than on rhetoric or preconceptions.

an especially effective way to reduce abortions is to promote access to long-acting contraception.

prominently placed "In God We Trust" signs in every public school building are now mandatory.

More than half of Detroit's children now attend charters—second in the nation only to New Orleans (and possibly Flint, Michigan)—and 80 percent of these are for-profit.

Multiple studies show that increased contraceptive access, including better insurance coverage policies, over-the-counter availability, and comprehensive sex education, dramatically reduces rates of both unintended pregnancy and abortion. If antiabortion activists were truly interested in lowering abortion rates, they would champion such measures. Instead, they support measures that interfere with access.

One of the really positive things about minority government is that there is the necessity to broker policy positions. What happens is you get a hybrid of what a single party might do. And I don't think that is a bad thing.

It is unconscionable that we ration health care by the ability to pay.... your heart breaks. Health care should be a given.

Had the Ellwood plan passed, perhaps her downward spiral into $2-a-day poverty, and her repeated spells of homelessness, could have been avoided. No one will ever know for sure.

At the old welfare program's height in 1994, it served more than 14.2 million people—4.6 million adults and 9.6 million children. In 2012, the year Modonna took her trip to the DHS office, there were only 4.4 million people left on the rolls—1.1 million adults (about a quarter of whom were working) and 3.3 million kids. That's a 69 percent decline. By fall 2014, the TANF caseload had fallen to 3.8 million. Before

This book is about what happens when a government safety net that is built on the assumption of full-time, stable employment at a living wage combines with a low-wage labor market that fails to deliver on any of the above. It is this toxic alchemy, we argue, that is spurring the increasing numbers of $2-a-day poor in America.