Dan Glickman Quotes

The 2013 Congress was one of those that was politically polarized and unresponsive to party leaders. This presented gridlock in legislation that was needed to appropriate the money to maintain the needed level of air traffic controllers. So they were required to take unpaid furloughs reducing the number of air traffic controllers each day. Some critics wanted the Department of Transportation to try and control the usual number of aircraft flights with the reduced workforce. The Secretary refused.

The bipartisan Presidential Commission had unanimously made 41 recommendations to prevent future terrorist attacks. While the Bush Administration and Congress implemented a few many of the more critical ones were left unaddressed. The commission on its final day issued a report card giving failing grades to both the White House and the Republican-controlled Congress.

He and others believe that no matter what regulatioms government officials might impose, Wall Street, the banks and financeers will find a way around the reulations.

The mantra was not heard much after the collapse of the ‘smart’ markets in 2008 and the ‘dumb’ governments had to come to the rescue of the economy all over the industrialized world.

For many general government regulations—labor, environment, non discrimination—the small business has a proportionately heavier burden of compliance. So large businesses have always been able to count on small business to lobby against regulation and for deregulation. However, when it comes to financial regulation such as the Dodd-Frank regulations essentially apply to large businesses. As a matter of fact, small businesses were on many ways the most frequent victims of the large banks and investment bank excesses in the Meltdown of 2008. Before most of the regulations could even take effect, the financial industry was already trying to get small business to lobby to roll back the protective regulations preventing future meltdowns and bank failure resulting from loose regulation and greedy irresponsible financial industry behavior. The President campaigned to convince the small business not to support the finance industry over their usual “knee jerk” reaction to any regulation.

The economic law of supply and demand does not really operate in most of the health care system as most people cannot place an economic value on their life and/or health. If we need an appendectomy to prevent death from infection, we do not consider doing the operation for $5,000 but say that if the price were $25,000 we would prefer to die. We will pay whatever we have to. Existential issues do not lend themselves to economics.

The “folks” were private corporations want to run schools and have won some contracts to operate Charter Schools. They argue that the free market should prevail when it comes to education and schools should not necessarily be run by local governments. Corporations should be given a chance in a “free market.” However, as Molnar observes, there is more than a little hypocrisy in the these educational corporations totally depend on public, tax dollars for the existence. Ironically, there is a sound market for elite private schools which are in a free market which are funded with private money. However, these educational corporations have chosen NOT to compete in this private arena. They only want public money. Critics argue that they are not very good at operating schools but are quite skilled at politically obtaining taxpayer money. So far there is no data from objective studies which shows that these educational corporations can operate better or less expensive schools.

He was the first American that who was assassinated by the Central Intelligence Agency by means of a drone attack. He was a major recruiter for Al Qaeda and he preached to 3 of the 9-11 terrorists.