When the object is to raise the permanent condition of a people, small means do not merely produce small effects; they produce no effect at all.
In order to truly get deficit spending and federal debt under control, the Trump administration is going to have to eventually address entitlement reform. If not, Trump will not only become part of the Washington status quo on the issue, but will leave burdensome and expensive problems for future generations.
Temporary solutions often become permanent problems.
Problems of 35 years cannot be resolved in a short period of time.
I really think the single most important thing to remember about trying to fix the schools is that there is no such thing as an instant result.
When I came into office, I could have kicked the can down the road for a little while, or I could do the right thing.
This is not the time for knee jerk populist reactions to problems. These will only discourage foreign investment and make matters worse.
We keep saying, 'No more 'band aid' solutions.'
Violence never solves problems. It may cover them up temporarily because of the fear it is intended to inspire, but it is part of a cycle, not the end of a cycle.
The entire political elite has mismanaged the Indian economy for the last 50 years. You cannot solve a crisis that is borne as a symptom of mismanagement in just five minutes or in a week. It will involve significant sacrifices and pain, and I doubt that in India there is the political will to face the music.
Too often, as a global community of humanitarians, we meet the needs of the same families, the same individuals, the same communities crisis after crisis, when we are focused on meeting crisis needs but not on building resilience.
The humanitarian aid system is built on a concept that when disaster strikes, outside agencies provide a temporary helping hand until people can take back control of their own lives. But across the world, we see millions of people caught in semi-permanent crises. As each year goes by, they are less and less likely to break free.
I am not running for president in order to put Band-Aids on our problems.
There is a marked tendency among policy makers to deal with the economic and political crises of today, leading them to repeat old mistakes
Subsidies should never be a permanent feature of any market. They should be introduced only to address market failure and they should be withdrawn gradually as those distortions in the market are addressed.
There are no simple solutions to today’s problems.
There is no quick technical fix for a social problem.
The politicians are all useless individuals. Nobody is reducing the problems in the U.S. or Europe, just putting on a Band-Aid and postponing the problems endlessly.
If we're still talking about the same thing 40 or 50 years later, then that means we're not doing anything about it.
I don’t believe in subsidized programs because by and large they are not sustainable.
One wonders whether the Obama re-election campaign may be on the right track as it seeks to apply the you-break-it-you-own-it rule to Bush and the American economy. Hardly a day goes by without President Obama or his surrogates arguing that it takes longer than four years to recover from an economic crisis so long in the making.
The intelligence bureaucracy is in a pathological state of dysfunction, and has been for decades. To fix the critical problems, we need to face them in a serious and thoughtful way. Neither party has done that well at all.
Patched-up diplomatic solutions designed to answer the needs of the moment rarely last, and as they unravel they can actually make things worse.
It is our job above all in politics to tackle the big issues and to explain them, and have the honesty to say to people, 'There are no easy solutions here.'
I don't think you expand entitlements when so many people are dependent on government and when the money the federal government is offering is going to be taken away from you after just a couple of years.
