Michael Franc Quotes (21 Quotes)

He sees this as an opportunity to revamp the entire relationship of the federal government to the region,

What we have is a chance for Congress and president to take a really long hard look at 40 years of social welfare failure in that region and try to reverse that. You don't want to reconstitute the New Orleans school system the way it was. You don't want to reconstitute public housing projects the way they were. You want to change it.

It's going to push some people who are at the margins of being able to afford it into the consumer category.

It is once in a generation that an opportunity like this comes along, where the status quo is called into question and where the policy community and Congress can look at it, change it and improve it, ... Given how hard it is to change that status quo ... every policy organization, every think-tanker, every ex-Cabinet officer is going to have a vision, and even a plan, of what we should be doing.

If this trend continues, it suggests a very different 2006. If Republicans enter the year on the working assumption that they're not going to pick up any meaningful support on the Democratic side on anything, they're going to have to figure out whether to lean toward the middle to get the bulk on board, or get into a Lord-of-the-Flies situation where they start tossing each other off the cliff.

If government continues to do things with enormous effects on business, they'll just find another way to protect their interests. There's too much at stake to walk away.

They will not let anything stand in the way of remaining in the majority, even if it means crossing swords with the president.

My guess is this is not a time when anyone is looking at a zero-sum game between one state or another.

What you have here is a unique opportunity where the entire infrastructure of a pretty big region was decimated -- both the social infrastructure and the economic one,

I would be surprised if there's not time set aside to tell that story.

Crises cause government to grow. The test today will be how much of the federal response occurs within the existing boxes or through innovative ways.

This second round of tax cuts was probably the high point, domestically, of Bush's administration. No sooner were they put in place, then the GDP (gross domestic product) growth hit 4 percent and it's been there ever since.

In the short run, you have to have higher taxes to pay for it. Or in the long run, you run up a larger debt and at some point, the debt becomes large enough that it requires tax increases to pay off the debt. No matter how you look at the trend lines, you can't grow your way out of it.

There is a sense this year that anything is possible, that they have the rapt attention of the leadership.

Boomers always struck me as very self-centered and self-important, because there are so many of us. We're always in the middle of the next fun moment at some everlasting party, and we're not able to defer the gratification to tackle the long-term problems.

The extent to which he used the State of the Union to launch and define the 'ownership society' concept is important because if you take it to its natural extreme, the ownership society would essentially replace the 'Great Society. That's a major shift from where we've been.

You look at the relationship between 50 state sovereigns and the federal government, and the states always come out on the short end of the stick. They've consistently traded autonomy for cash, and they've consistently wound up with neither.

He needs to be cognizant of congressional egos and their involvement in decisions going forward. He's got to make up 12-15 points to be effective. He can get there.

That has created a chilling effect on the desire to move an ambitious, comprehensive agenda and may deter Republicans from engaging in a fundamental health care reform debate or tax reform debate.

They did a lot of tier-two issues that were important to certain constituencies but that, in and of themselves, were not of any great magnitude. It was not a year for, obviously, enactment or even action on tier-one issues.

In the last two or three weeks, there has been an increasing restlessness among conservatives, mostly about the open-ended (financial) response to Katrina, ... There's a growing number of conservative voters coming to the conclusion that Republicans have lost their way.