In 2008, when President Obama was then president-elect, his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, famously said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” People on the right excoriated him for taking such a Machiavellian view of politics, but he had a good point. In fact, Franklin Delano Roosevelt used the pain of the Great Depression to transform the U.S. economy, and Ronald Reagan used extremely high unemployment in the 1980s to drive through tax reform in 1981. A crisis can often be a catalyst for significant change.
…
View original:
