Policy Outcome Quotes

If two parties with two sets of bad ideas cooperate, the result is not good policy, but policy that is extremely bad. What we really need are correct economic and politcal ideas, regardless of the party that pushes them.

It's easy to defend a policy that works. It's not so easy to defend a policy that didn't work.

Successful and unsuccessful political policies have one commonalty. The people who created the policies thought they would be successful.

Every plausible policy must be followed by the question 'And then what?'

You have to have a sense of what it looks like, not from the point of view of the policymaker but from the point of view of those who are at the receiving end of your policies.

Good policy makes good politics and what I've done has been good politics.

The crucial question for any policy is not what, are its intentions, but what are its effects?

A statesman is judged by results. If his policy fails he goes. It may be unfair, but there is a kind of rough justice about it.

Good organization does not necessarily mean it will produce good policy. But bad organization will almost never produce good policy.

Intelligence is only as good as it has an effect on policy

Good policy always trumps bad public relations and the best PR can't trump bad policy.

But no matter how big the effort to push a propaganda line might be, climate change is bigger. This, undoubtedly and regrettably, is the biggest immediate long-term environmental challenge we face. A failure to concretely come to some policy outcome on climate change has not only a negative environmental impact but also social and economic consequences for us.

I think a strong dollar is the result of policies, but I don't think the strong dollar is in and of itself a policy.

Social science has been established not to set policy but to measure its results.

It may have hastened the move of the former Minority Leader Trent Lott, to the private sector because there was such an outpouring of bitter criticism...The result, if this is successful, will not be much different from what Sen. Lott and others were trying to enact back then...It may be that we are all just older and wiser.

A good policy badly executed becomes a bad policy.

The executive branch maneuvered this result deftly.

What succeeds best politically does not always do so policy wise and vice versa.

What people demand is what the policies serve.

Central banks don't have divine wisdom. They try to do the best analysis they can and must be prepared to stand or fall by the quality of that analysis.

The proper way to make policy changes is for you to convince your fellow citizens that there is a better policy outcome than the current one. And then in state legislatures, for those state legislatures to vote that change.

The success of a particular policy prescription is always a gamble.

If zero percent of the elites support something, very low chance it's going to pass, if 100% support something, very high chance it's going to pass. Same thing for organized interest groups. But for the average voter, it's a flat line. Which says it doesn't matter whether zero percent of the public believes something or 100% of the average voters believe something - it doesn't affect the probability that that thing will be enacted.

Obviously, given the objective that we have, what I would hope is that people would be able to see that actually we had reduced the numbers of people, the net number of people, coming into the country. People would, presumably, see that, but it's difficult to say how.