Policy Trade-offs Quotes

... the inherent conflict and disconnect between campaigning (promising people all that they can have) and governing (explaining to people why they won’t get it).

Obamacare is the wildly complex Rube Goldberg contraption it is because getting the legislation through Congress required so many political tradeoffs and so many unavoidable deals with so many vested interests. But that's no excuse.

Macroeconomic policy can never be devoid of politics: it involves fundamental trade-offs and affects different groups differently.

For Trump staffers and enablers, the dilemma is different. There are few illusions about their leader left to be shattered. Their true challenge is less about surviving Trump's eruptions than simply living with the choice they've made, convincing themselves that service to the nation - passing a tax cut, forestalling a war, reducing immigration - is worth it.

In cutting government, we cut a huge variety of programs, a lot of which I would have liked to see increase, and a lot of which I'd like to see decreased more.

Avoiding inflation is not an absolute imperative but rather is one of a number of conflicting goals that we must pursue and that we may often have to compromise.

It takes courage to set priorities because doing so is an admission that American policy cannot be all things to all people - or rather to all interest groups

All writers on the science of policy are agreed, and they agree with experience, that all governments must frequently infringe the rules of justice to support themselves; that truth must give way to dissimulation, honesty to convenience, and humanity itself to the reigning of interest. The whole of this mystery of iniquity is called the reason of state.

Government cannot be all things to all people.

My mantra about everything that has to do with public policy is: identify and reject the false choice.

There are institutional obligations I have to carry out that are important for a president of the United States to carry out, but may not always align with what I think would move the ball down the field on the issues that I care most deeply about.

We have paid a huge price for our media being unable to frame the virus as a problem with a time dimension and one necessitating trade-offs.

Our options oftentimes on foreign policy are not a choice between a good one and a bad one. It's a choice between two less-than-ideal options. And you're trying to figure out which is the least harmful of the two. And I think that's something we should be encouraged by, not something that we should be critical of.

For the tiny percentage of people who are negatively affected by our embracing of standards, they can just get their sports somewhere else in the meantime. It's not like we're denying them hospital care.

It is much more difficult to get implemented politically what might be desirable economically. Even if you came out with an economic argument in favor of equalization - and I think there are arguments on both sides - I would still come down in favour of some sort of a scheme on strict economic grounds.

In the U. S. politicians have traditionally been able to spend entire careers distributing a growing pie; thus, they're good at distributing pleasure but not at allocating pain.