I don't think that any person can fix FEMA. I think FEMA needs a total restructuring. I think it needs to be taken from scratch and redone. The regulations are outdated; the rules are outdated.
I don't think political reform is likely to succeed. [Senators Tom] Udall and [Ron] Wyden, on the intelligence committee, have been sounding the alarm, but they are a minority.
You can't say it's broken, but let's keep some of Obamacare. You have to start over.
Whenever a political party is out of power for a number of years and finally is back in power, they always overreach.
I think, on the foreign policy side, that there is a need for disruption. We've had three administrations follow a pretty consistent policy toward North Korea, and it really hasn't gotten us anywhere.
Offering 'comprehensive' reform usually means years of arguing and horse-trading among pressure groups to get anything done. By the time all the special interests are appeased or bought off, the resulting elephantine legislation typically looks nothing like what was intended. In short, big-government medicine usually doesn't work on big-government sickness. If President Obama wants 'comprehensive' change, it would be better simply not to spend any more money we don't have.
People are tired of the status quo. You see that in various movements in and out of our the Republicans party, but most candidates are offering hollow rhetoric, not specific solutions.
Until we reform our laws and until we fix the excesses of these old policies that we inherited in the post-9/11 era, we're not going to be able to put the security back in the NSA.
We are redefining terms and rewriting laws and removing fences everywhere you turn, and we seem to think we can do that with impunity.
The United States has to go through structural reforms in terms of improving our education system or revamping our infrastructure or, you know, looking at some regulations that weren't properly controlling excesses on Wall Street.
In the American political lexicon, 'change' always means more of the same: more government, more looting of Americans, more inflation, more police-state measures, more unnecessary war, and more centralization of power.
The safety of our country demands an end to the doctrinaire, ineffective policies that currently grip Washington. Enough is enough! A safe America - a just America - that's what we want, that's what we need.
I think the best way that we can bring people together is through change in Washington, D.C.
We will discard the failed policies and division of the past and embrace true American change to rebuild our economy, rebuild our inner cities - they need help so desperately - and rebuild our country. We will bring back our jobs, and we will not let our jobs go to other countries.
If you care about real change, deep structural change, that involves politics, and all politics is friction. It takes leadership, and the willingness to create that friction, that leads to social change.
I think the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina.
I think Donald Trump is going to find it very hard to do the kind of massive change he wants.
The Pakistani government and its allies must overhaul their policies in Pakistan.
Even though it's important for all of us to change our light bulbs and the vehicles we drive, it's much more important to change our laws and policies. I drive a hybrid and we've changed our light bulbs and windows and installed solar panels and geothermal ground source heat pumps and most everything else. But putting the burden on individuals to solve this global crisis is ultimately not going to be the most effective way to solve it.
Regulatory reform is my agenda. I intend to thoroughly work on this.
On the policy front, I just believe that Barack Obama was misguided. That he somehow sees this country as being in need of a drastic overhaul. What he tried to do actually hurt the country rather than helped it and the best example is Obamacare. It's a good idea to insure people who can't or won't buy insurance but you can't punish the working class to make it happen, which he did. Now everybody's paying higher premiums and more deductibles that's coming out of working people's pockets and that's one of the reasons that his legacy has been refuted.
Reversing structural problems in our economy that have been building up for two decades, that was gonna take time. It was gonna take more than a year. It was gonna take more than two years. It was gonna take more than one term. Probably takes more than one president.
The human species is now at a point where it has to make choices that are going to determine whether decent survival is even possible. Environmental catastrophe, including war, maybe pandemics, these are very serious issues and they can't be addressed within the current structure of institutions. That's almost given. There have to be real significant changes, and only really effective popular mass-based movements can introduce and carry forward such initiatives, as indeed did happen during the 1930s.
You can't fix a fundamentally broken law; you've got to replace it. That's why Congress can't save Obamacare with a few tweaks, despite what its defenders say. No quick fix can correct the main flaw: The law takes power away from patients and hands it to bureaucrats.
