Quotes About Government

For that purpose, partly as the result of Ranieri's persistent lobbying, two new facilities had sprung up in the federal government alongside Ginnie Mae. They guaranteed the mortgages that did not qualify for the Ginnie Mae stamp. The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (called Freddie Mac) and the Federal National Mortgage Association (called Fannie Mae) between them, by giving their guarantees, were able to transform most home mortgages into government-backed bonds.

The computer model gave the governor little choice but to shut down the entire state, and take responsibility for what should have been a national decision, because neither the Centers for Disease Control nor the president of the United States had the nerve to make it.

One day someone will write the history of the strange relationship between the United States government and its citizens. It would need at least a chapter on the government's attempts to save the citizens from the things that might kill them.

Fighting wildfires is the most visible thing the USDA does. It's the places in our government where the cameras never roll that you have to worry about most.

Even as she helped the team of software guys and former Obama officials build the model that persuaded Newsom to shut down the state, Charity had decided that she was leaving. As children, she and her older sister had a phrase to describe the unsettling sensation of fresh doubt about some situation or some person: black smoke. The black smoke had rolled into state government with the virus and never left.

American society had no ability to deal with what she felt was coming. "The United States doesn't really have a public-health system," she said. "It has five thousand dots, and each one of those dots serves at the will of an elected official.

Of the roughly $9 billion spent each year by the Commerce Department, $5 billion goes to NOAA, and the bulk of that money is spent, one way or another, on figuring out the weather. Each and every day, NOAA collects twice as much data as is contained in the entire book collection of the Library of Congress.

a surprising number of the people responsible for them were first-generation Americans who had come from places without well-functioning governments. People who had lived without government were more likely to find meaning in it. On the other hand, people who had never experienced a collapsed state were slow to appreciate a state that had not yet collapsed

The CEOs of every major Wall Street firm were also on the wrong end of the gamble. All of them, without exception, either ran their public corporations into bankruptcy or were saved from bankruptcy by the United States government. They all got rich, too.

Fighting wildfires is the most visible thing the USDA does. It's the places in our government where the cameras never roll that you have to worry about most.

There was something deeply dysfunctional about how the government worked that I never fully grasped," Joe would later say. "There's no one driving the bus.

From the point of view of a smart, talented person trying to decide whether to work for the U.S. government, the single most glaring defect was the absence of an upside. The jobs weren't well paid compared to their equivalents in the private sector. And the only time government employees were recognized was if they screwed up--in which case they often became the wrong kind of famous.

We don't really celebrate the accomplishments of government employees. They exist in our society to take the blame.

like so many United States government agencies, the Department of Commerce is seriously misnamed. It has almost nothing to do with commerce directly and is actually forbidden by law from engaging in business. But it runs the United States Census, the only real picture of who Americans are as a nation.

In Greece the banks didn't sink the country. The country sank the banks.

The government was the mission of an entire society: why was the society undermining it? "I'm routinely appalled by how profoundly ignorant even highly educated people are when it comes to the structure and function of our government," she said. "The sense of identity as Citizen has been replaced by Consumer.

After Trump took office, DJ Patil watched with wonder as the data disappeared across the federal government.

The one shot America had at behaving well, and thus saving itself, was to remove the feeling that "the government" was imposing restrictions on people and re-instill the idea that people

Fracking—to take one example—was not the brainchild of private-sector research but the fruit of research paid for twenty years ago by the DOE.

When they heard that Joel Leftwich, the guy Trump wanted to lead his USDA transition team, had been a lobbyist for PepsiCo, they brought in a mini-fridge stocked with Pepsis. That was just the way they were at the USDA. They didn't think: How the fuck can people paid to push sugary drinks on American kids be let anywhere near the federal department with the most influence on what American kids eat? Instead they thought: I hear he's a nice guy!

In the absence of a global government that could raise taxes to fund a global welfare state, the free movement of people among countries would overburden and destroy existing national welfare states, or else empower right-wing populists to defend welfare states for natives against immigrants, as is happening both in the U.S. and Europe.

We need to keep government small, but we also need to keep the influence of big business small, and we need to keep the power in the hands of the people, where it belongs. Big government and big business aren't the only two alternatives.

We don't want our politicians bending to the whims of whichever corporation has the money to pay them off.

We may not have a 1984 like George Orwell's, but if the Tories have their way we will be a very carefully controlled society indeed. All very sad, especially as Labour and the left are muddleheaded and ideologically dogmatic.