Short-Term Solutions Quotes

There is always an easy solution to every problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.

I think a lot about intergenerational justice. Short-term versus long-term helps to explain a lot of the policy disagreements that happen between the parties, and I would argue that in most ways, we are the party with more long-term thinking.

I'll go to my grave saying a gimmick is not good public policy.

People are impatient. They want things to happen overnight, and have no idea of the circumstances and situations that can surround an individual at times.

Painfully often the legislation our politicians pass is designed less to solve problems than to protect the politicians from defeat in our never-ending election campaigns. They are … too frightened of us to govern.

Government is the art of the momentarily feasible, of the least bad attainable, and not of the rationally most desirable.

Impatience translates itself into a desire to have something immediate done about it all, and, as is generally the case with impatience, resolves itself in the easiest way that lies ready to hand.

No very deep knowledge of economics is usually needed for grasping the immediate effects of a measure; but the task of economics is to foretell the remoter effects, and so to allow us to avoid such acts as attempt to remedy a present ill by sowing the seeds of a much greater ill for the future.

Transactional politics requires us to be pragmatic about current realities and the state of public opinion. It's all about getting the best result possible given the circumstances here and now.

You have to separate what needs to be done to avoid the fiscal cliff and what needs to be done longer range. It's a mistake to essentially collapse those two - they're not the same. I don't think you can achieve everything at once.

If you don’t have thirty years for a problem, don’t get involved in social policy.

I'm not in favor of just taking short-term isolated situations and depleting our resources to keep our climate just the way it is today.

We keep making the same old mistake in our reconstruction planning. We assume that we can, in a few short weeks, relieve misery that goes back for years.

My senior leadership team is half people who have been at GM for a long period of time like me, and others who have joined the company within the last five years from different industries, experiences, and countries. You have a better picture of the world. The diversity of thought is where you can make better business decisions.

The acts we engage in for appeasment today, we will have to remedy at far greater cost and remorse tomorrow.

After the sale of Celtel, I really wanted to give the money back, and I had a number of choices - to go and buy masses of blankets and baby milk or to go into Darfur or Congo. That would have been very nice actually, but it's just like an aspirin: it doesn't deal with the problem.

Temporary tax cuts don't create permanent confidence, nor permanent jobs.

Expedients are for the hour, but principles are for the ages.

When you face unexpected events, you have to try to overcome those problems, but at the same time, you have to continue working according to the plan that you defined since the beginning. So that's what we have tried to do - not to avoid the urgent responses but to continue the route that we had defined.

People don't like the idea of thinking long term. Many are desperately seeking short term answers because they have money problems to be solved today.

I got into a bad jag of movies that helped pay the rent and I thought would help further me along.

It would be easier to pay off the national debt overnight than to neutralise the long-range effects of our national stupidity

The short-term vision is: I research on something which I can use tomorrow, and for some politicians it is even better if it's today. But if you do this, you can only do targeted research. If you only do targeted research, you lose the side-routes.

Incentives are not strategy, they are tactics. Defensive measures.

No one likes to see redundancies at home at the same time as he sees a surge of imports from abroad. The temptation to succumb to political pressure, to make a special case or to give respite is often overwhelming. But to do so, except in response to clearly unfair trading practices, is to court disaster. The temporary measure frequently becomes the permanent fixture and the special case, a precedent for more. And by shielding industry from fair competition in the short-term, long term decline is guaranteed.