Evan Thomas Quotes
Congress will compromise to give stuff away to people, but you won’t find them compromising to take things away from people.
Evan Thomas, Historian & Journalist, Editor & Commentator, PBS Inside Washington, June 20, 2008
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
of requests from conservative Congressmen who want pork projects added to appropriation bills In one of the great ironies of Washington, Dyer was named “Porker of the Year” yet there was no pork placed in appropriations bills that were not specifically requested (insisted upon) by a member of Congress.
Some politicians tell their constituents that they compromise but not on principles. This is illusory and often disingenuous as well. In a democracy there are many sets of principles that conflict with others just as deeply and frequently held. Even many of the principles of the U. S. Constitution conflict with other constitutional principles. If politicians never compromised on principles and ideals, there would be no operational government unless it were a theocracy or a dictatorship where there were only one set of principles in the society. The more democratic a society is the more its politicians must compromise with their fundamental principles and ideals.
She was the first Black woman to be elected to Congress and was the first Black woman to actively campaign for the Presidency
In 1964 the treasury secretary asked the president how to sell the proposed budget to Congress:
This quotation pithily summarizes a common problem in politics of describing budgets. In most years there has been a national inflation. If a new budget is, in actual dollars, the same as the previous years or a little more, but the increase is less than the inflation level, the agency will not be able to provide the same level of services as the previous year. Therefore services will be cut and those who are politically in favor of more money for the program legitimately describe this as a “budget cut”. Opponents of larger funding increases, also legitimately describe the funding as a “budget increase”. One side refers to what the money can buy and the other, to the absolute dollars spent. This is an example of the classical ambiguity of political oratory.
Goldwater was the first Republican Presidential Candidate since the end of WWII who had campaigned for smaller government and reduced government spending. He actually started the modern Republican trend toward campaigning on this theme. Ronald Reagan did a much better job of campaigning on this theme, and all Republican Candidates since have campaigned on these two themes. It is not clear whether the Republicans were actually serious about this or just ran on the themes to please the political wing that Goldwater had started or meant it but were not good enough at running the government to fulfill this promise. Every Republican President from Reagan through George W. Bush increased the government spending and increased the number of government employees—more so than most Democrats ironically. Democratic President Bill Clinton was the only post WWII president to cut spending, produce a surplus and diminish the size of the government bureaucracy. Goldwater was so intellectually honest that had he won, he probably would have done everything he could to implement the policy of smaller government and less spending.
Evan Welling Thomas III is an American journalist, historian, and author. He is the author of nine books, including two New York Times bestsellers.
