Mitch Daniels Quotations | Page 2

We are tasked to rebuild not just a damaged economy, and a debt-ridden balance sheet, but to do so by drawing forth the best that is in our fellow citizens. If we would summon the best from Americans, we must assume the best about them. If we don't believe in Americans, who will?

Anything that strengthens the private sector vs. the state is protective of personal freedom.

So tonight I propose one more step that I would rather not propose. I ask the most fortunate among us, those citizens earning over $100,000 per year, for one year, to pay an additional one percent on the income they receive.

I refer, of course, to the debts our nation has amassed for itself over decades of indulgence. It is the new Red Menace, this time consisting of ink. We can debate its origins endlessly and search for villains on ideological grounds, but the reality is pure arithmetic.

All great enterprises have a pearl of faith at their core, and this must be ours: that Americans are still a people born to liberty. That they retain the capacity for self-government. That, addressed as free-born, autonomous men and women of God-given dignity, they will rise yet again to drive back a mortal enemy.

I believe that the Right to Work issue is a perfectly appropriate one for Indiana to look at.

A one-time tax does not get figured into people's investment decisions.

The federal government now spends one of every four dollars in the entire economy. It borrows one of every three dollars it spends. No nation, no entity, large or small, public or private, can thrive, or survive intact, with debts as huge as ours.

As Republicans, our first concern is for those waiting tonight to begin or resume the climb up life's ladder.

If we don't believe in Americans, who will? I do believe. I've seen it in the people of our very typical corner of the nation.

The failure of national economic policy is costing us more than jobs; it has begun to weaken that uniquely American spirit of risk-taking, large ambition, and optimism about the future. We must rally them now to bold departures that rebuild our national morale as well as our material prosperity.

And before our current legislature adjourns, we intend to become the first state of full and true choice by saying to every low and middle-income Hoosier family, if you think a non-government school is the right one for your child, you're as entitled to that option as any wealthy family; here's a voucher, go sign up.

We see government's mission as fostering and enabling the important realms - our businesses, service clubs, Little Leagues, churches - to flourish.

We don't have a prayer of defeating the Red Threat of our generation without a long boom of almost unprecedented duration.

The true enemies of Social Security and Medicare are those who defend an imploding status quo.

The public is increasingly disgusted with a steady diet of defamation, and prepared to reward those who refrain from it.

Starting a new retirement plan for those below a certain age is something tens of millions of Americans have already been through at work.

No enterprise, small or large, public or private, can remain self-governing, let alone successful, so deeply in hock to others as we are about to be.

My record is, far as I know, unimpeachable.

We designed both our state employee health plans and the one we created for low-income Hoosiers as Health Savings Accounts, and now in the tens of thousands these citizens are proving that they are fully capable of making smart, consumerist choices about their own health care.

We believe it wrong ever to take a dollar from a free citizen without a very necessary public purpose, because each such taking diminishes the freedom to spend that dollar as its owner would prefer.

We believe that government works for the benefit of private life, and not the other way around.

The days after that were really the most memorable, I suppose, of my life, because for a short time the nation came together in a way, and its politicians came together in a way, that they just aren't famous for,