Michael Franc Quotations

What they know is that the actual answers to increase supply or take down demand offer no quick fixes.

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

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.

One of the assumptions is that it becomes increasingly difficult to get things done in an election year, especially things where tough decisions have to be made.

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

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

If these ideas are given a fair chance in New Orleans and the gulf area, ... their popularity and success will create a momentum for expanding them elsewhere.

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.

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,

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 certainly is the perfect storm of aggravating or provoking congressional egos and the president getting his back up and saying the least diplomatic thing he could have said.

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.

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.

The conundrum they face is that they know better.

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.

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.

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.

Bad things that were going to happen have not happened,

They'd (lawmakers) would like to get a lot of these things out of the way before the end of the year.

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

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 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.

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

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.

The legislative calendar is shorter and, almost by definition in an election year, tempers will be shorter, too.