If you want to know how to solve society’s problems, you start out with better public education.
Nobody’s going to go home for a year and come back. Nobody could ever enforce that. Nobody in their right mind would ever try to do it.
In New York City, a lot of people think ‘the great outdoors’ is the area between your front door and a taxi cab.
There are lots of threats to you in the world. There’s the threat of a heart attack for genetic reasons. You can’t sit there and worry about everything. Get a life.
I was the one of those students who made the top half of the class possible.
In 1975, Congress passed a law requiring fuel efficiency standards to double over 10 years, with incremental targets that auto manufacturers were required to meet. That was the responsible approach, and it worked. But since 1985, we’ve done nothing – even as technology has moved at light speed.
Any friend of fossil is a friend of mine. We’ve got to do everything we can to get people out of their automobiles and into mass transit.
What you’ve got to do is be honest. Say what you believe. Give it to them straight. Just don’t wuss out.
Leading from the front: It’s what built America. But these days, the federal government isn’t at the front – it’s cowering in the back corner of the room, ducking responsibility and hoping no one notices.
We have an expression in New York City government – “In God we trust, but for everyone else, bring data.” It’s so easy to pick up a sound byte and say, “Oh, yeah, yeah, I believe that,” without really thinking.
Mayors are very different, because mayors can’t be on both sides of every issue. Mayors have to take an explicit stance. Just go with your gut and say what you believe, and you’ll be fine. If you’re not fine, at least you’ll like what you see in the mirror.
We’re America, and we have to stop worrying about what happens overseas, and to be optimistic, even though nobody should think we’re not going to have some difficult times.
The estate taxes, on balance, are good. They get people to give money to charity, and they prevent these family dynasties which keep other people from having opportunities. It may be good for a family, but for society it’s probably not good. And I’ve always been in favor of having an estate tax.
What we shouldn’t do is let people who want to come here make the decision themselves. America should be in control of its own borders.
The mistake that was made in the ’70s is we stopped policing the streets, we stopped cleaning the streets, we stopped cleaning the graffiti off buildings, we stopped supporting our cultural institutions and building parks and schools and all those kinds of things.
I do not think that anybody should get paid for lousy performance. I’ve said that for a long time. If you work hard and you do good, you get paid well.
I have two daughters that are the loves of my life and I want to leave them a better world, a better country, a better state and a better city.
When it comes to public school education, we have been unwilling to measure our results. We’ve been unwilling to pay based on performance. We have tenure where, even if you can’t teach, you can’t get fired. We’ve been unwilling to invest in new schools.
What the Democrats have to understand is that while we do need to reform our regulation and we do need more restrictions, it is true that it is capitalism and free enterprise and companies that create jobs and wealth for every American.
If you have one farm worker, typically they create three jobs with higher compensation and higher skills – the people that pack, the people that ship, the people that inspect, the people that sell, that sort of thing.
The public wants elected officials who have character. The public wants elected officials who are willing to stand up and say things, even if they don’t agree with them.