If you really believe that you're making a difference and that you can leave a legacy of better schools and jobs and safer streets, why would you not spend the money? The objective is to improve the schools, bring down crime, build affordable housing, clean the streets - not to have a fair fight.

We need to have more taxes, not less, and we need the taxes we have, certainly, to provide services - for defense and education and health care. We should not cut money here in order to cut taxes.

America is built around this premise that you can do it, and there are an awful lot of people who are unlikely to have done it who did.

Most gun dealers follow the law and run honest businesses. But the statistics show that 1 percent of dealers sell more than half of all illegal guns. Why isn't the federal government going after them? Here's one reason: unlike mayors, members of Congress don't get a phone call in the middle of the night when a cop is shot and killed. They don't deliver the eulogies.

If you don't encounter setbacks in your career, if you don't have doubts and disappointments , let me tell you, you're not dreaming big enough.

By speeding the transition to cleaner energy, we can improve the lives of billions of people, while also reducing the risks we face from a changing climate.

You don't make spending decisions, investment decisions, hiring decisions, or whether-you're-going-to-look-for-a-job decisions when you don't know what's going to happen.