Friday, September 21

"The problem with any ideology is that it gives the answer before you look at the evidence."

From President Bill Clinton's appearance on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart:
"If I come to you and I say we have this terrible national debt and here's my opening gambit. First thing I want to do is increase it by $5 trillion over a decade by doing another round of tax cuts that mostly benefit the people we benefited in the last decade, even thought it didn't produce jobs. Now we're in a really deep hole, much bigger than this clock I just showed you. Now let me tell you how we're going to get out of it. Well, what about the details? See me about that after the election.
"So I wanted to try to explain that in very simple terms. No one else would do that; no one . Unless you were being driven by ideology instead of by evidence. This is a practical country. We have ideals. We have philosophies. But the problem with any ideology is that it gives the answer before you look at the evidence. So you have to mold the evidence to get the answer that you've already decided you've got to have. It doesn't work that way. Building an economy; rebuilding an economy is hard, practical nuts and bolts work."
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