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The biggest challenge of public policy is to know when and how the world has changed. We are no longer an empty continent with endless absorptive capacity. We have a cash-wage economy that is having terrible problems finding jobs for its own people. The concern about immigration is not nativism but common sense.

Richard Lamm

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Richard Lamm
Age: 85 †
Born: 1935
Born: September 12
Died: 2021
Died: July 29
Former Governor Of Colorado
Lawyer
Politician
University Teacher
Madison
Wisconsin
Richard Douglas Dick Lamm
Richard Douglas Lamm
Jobs
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Findings
Sense
Policy
Finding
Problem
Longer
Biggest
Continent
World
Changed
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Wage
People
Challenges
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Continents
Economy
Empty
Cash
Public
Capacity
Immigration
Common
Terrible
Endless

More quotes by Richard Lamm

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The Democratic Party is not the party of reform.
Richard Lamm
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You know, 600,000 millionaires get a Social Security check every month. I think there's enough waste and inefficiency.
Richard Lamm
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America with 4% of the world's population has 50% of the worlds lawyers .... tort lawyers love to point out that 1% of America's health care cost is used to pay malpractice insurance ... but most doctors practice defensive medicine to avoid malpractice litigation ... these costs are not included in the 1% number above.
Richard Lamm
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The U.S. needs to do more than change presidents. It needs to change its political culture.
Richard Lamm
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I had a group of Hispanic Americans come into my office in 1976 who worked in a Denver packing plant. They had just been fired by their employer who turned around and hired illegal aliens for a lot less money. That had a big impact on me.
Richard Lamm
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I think that retiring the baby boomers is going to be one of the great challenges in America, that you cannot make fiscal sense out of the future of our children without taking on entitlements.
Richard Lamm
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Christmas is the time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell government what they want and their kids pay for it.
Richard Lamm
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America has to ask itself not what it wants, but what it can afford.
Richard Lamm
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I believe we all must face the fact of death. It is both gift and curse.
Richard Lamm
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We have been maintaining a standard of living by putting things on the debt of the next generation.
Richard Lamm
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A nation has its first obligation to its own workers and its own poor.
Richard Lamm
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Politics, like theater, is one of those things where you've got to be wise enough to know when to leave.
Richard Lamm
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I feel very strongly that the Democratic Party has, in the past, been the party of the future. I think when you look at Social Security and Medicare, when you look at the civil rights movement, the women's movement, I think the Democratic Party has always been in the forefront of change.
Richard Lamm
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Our globe is under new dramatic environmental pressure: our globe is warming, our ice caps melting, our glaciers receding, our coral is dying, our soils are eroding, our water tables falling, our fisheries are being depleted, our remaining rainforests shrinking. Something is very, very wrong with our eco-system.
Richard Lamm
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A nation can't get strong on political pablum.
Richard Lamm
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Peace is neither the absence of war nor the presence of a disarmament agreement. Peace is a change of heart.
Richard Lamm
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I think we're rapidly approaching the day where medical science can keep people alive in hospitals, hooked up to tubes and things, far beyond when any kind of quality of life is left at all.
Richard Lamm
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American public policy is run on a myth.
Richard Lamm