25 Quotes by Michael Franc

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,