Quotes About Policies

There's a feeling among some people that the Republican party is harsh on some things.

Why is it that able, public-spirited people produce such different results according to whether they operate in the political or the economic market? Why is it that if a random sample of the people who read this essay and are not at present in Washington were to replace those who are in Washington, our policies would very likely not be improved? That is the real puzzle for me.

It was in 1982 that Milton Friedman wrote the highly influential passage that best summarizes the shock doctrine. Only a crisis-actual or percieved-produces real change. When the crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.

Too often, when politicians introduce climate policies divorced from a broader agenda of economic justice, the policies they introduce are actively unjust.

Why develop policies that punish, encumber and restrict human contact in humane/analog (unsurveilled, unmediated) spaces? Because human contact is the great revolutionary force underlying human freedom.

I am anxious that, in some areas, changes across Government departments are making things worse for our nation's mental health.

All governments could do more on mental health.

We can send all the blame to any government we like. We can say President Trump's policies are wrong. We can say Mexico's policies are wrong. But, what about our blame?

We need policies that will benefit the middle class because you will not have a strong society without a strong middle class, fundamentally.

Real Democrats don't abandon the middle class.

The Clinton administration cared a lot about the middle class and the poor. But it also cared a lot - too much, in retrospect - about the rich.

Loggers and mills in Maine and across the country deserve fair trade policies and more support from our federal government.

Coal miners work hard and deserve our respect. They also deserve a governor who fights for policies that will give them a fair shot to support their families and get ahead. That's exactly what I'll deliver as governor.

No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems—of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind.

Nada es más fácil que tener buenas intenciones. Pero cuando no se entiende cómo funciona una economía, las buenas intenciones pueden llevar a consecuencias desastrosas

Statistics compiled from what people say may be worse than useless, if they lead to a belief that those numbers convey a reality that can be relied on for serious decision-making about social policies.

Only after that political support is strong enough to cause fallacious ideas to become government policies and programs are the missing or ignored factors likely to lead to "unintended consequences," a phrase often heard in the wake of economic or social policy disasters.

Who, after all, is in favor of unfairness? Similarly with "social justice," "equality," and other undefined terms that can mean wholly different things to different individuals and groups—all of whom can be mobilized in support of policies that use such appealing words.

Another central premise of the civil rights vision is that belief in innate inferiority explains policies and practices of differential treatment, whether expressed in overt hostility or in institutional policies or individual decisions that result in statistical disparities. Moral defenses or causal explanations of these statistical differences in any other terms tend themselves to fall under suspicion or denunciation as racism, sexism, etc.

many poverty-stricken countries were unable to obtain much-needed capital because of their undependable laws and confiscatory policies toward foreign investors.

When laws and policies make honesty increasingly costly, then government is, in effect, promoting dishonesty. Such dishonesty can then extend beyond the particular laws and policies in question to a more general habit of disobeying laws, to the detriment of the whole economy and society.

It is not surprising that industry leaders may look to a certain kind of religion for answers—not in the sense of praying for rain (although speaker Sonny Perdue, the secretary of agriculture, has done that, too) but in the sense of working with religious nationalists to elevate the policies and politicians that work to their benefit.

Let us remember, he said animatedly, that the Religious Right did not come together in response to the Roe decision. No, Weyrich insisted, what got us going was the attempt on the part of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to rescind the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University because of its racially discriminatory policies."34

They need policies and visions that speak to their own interests and circumstances and not to be reduced to data points in some abstract political competition.