For me, governing starts with people. It doesn't start with bureaucracy. It doesn't start with policy. It starts with people and what people need to thrive.
If our goal is to provide health care to our veterans, why does it need to be in the bricks and mortar of bureaucracy of the VA? Why can't you give them an insurance card and let them go to a health care provider of their choice?
Religion, to me, is a bureaucracy between man and God that I don't need.
Many Americans simply don't want the pinheads in Washington or the various state capitals to be telling us how to live. But we are absolutely going in that direction. President Obama is hell-bent on imposing a bureaucracy that levels all playing fields at great expense in coin and in freedom.
That massiveness of bureaucracy at the VA is chronic and has been chronic.
Nobody in the Washington regulatory bureaucracy gets fired for saying no.
The minute you're working with the government, you're dealing with bureaucracy, you're dealing with time lags, you're dealing with rigidity, you're dealing with a slow pace.
When I appointed the Minister of the Environment to major cabinet status, the Planning and Priorities committee, the signals that that sent through Ottawa were major, because that's what the bureaucracy understands.
The U.S. government has in recent years fought what it termed wars against AIDs, drug abuse, poverty, illiteracy and terrorism. Each of those wars has budgets, legislation, offices, officials, letterhead - everything necessary in a bureaucracy to tell you something is real.
The tax money belongs to the taxpayers. It doesn't belong to the bureaucracy. And government is not a welfare system.
