Trickle-down economics doesn't work, but we need the power and innovation that comes from the free enterprise system. There's no way we're going to decarbonize the American economy without innovation and the profit motive. It's just not gonna happen.
— Tim Ryan
I think once you meet me, you realize I'm not necessarily some soft yoga guy. I've been on the picket line. I've been in the union halls. I'll drink a Miller Lite with you.
I embrace a Green New Deal; I just think we have to have public-private partnerships if we're going to get there. We have to align the environmental incentives with the financial incentives.
If we could figure out the big economic question - which really is how do we get wealth out of the coasts and into the industrial Midwest and start creating real jobs by the hundreds, if not by the thousands - in places like I represent, that's a game changer for me.
To be competitive globally, we have to reduce the corporate tax rate.
We need mental health counselors in every school that needs one.
You beat China by outcompeting them, by dominating the new technologies: wind, solar, electric vehicles, artificial intelligence, additive manufacturing. We should be reinvesting back in the United States and beating them on the economic playing field.
I have lived my whole life just outside Youngstown, Ohio. We watched the steel mills close and 50,000 jobs disappear in the late 1970s. We watched businesses move overseas throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.
Like many Americans, my family and I have spent our entire lives at the epicenter of de-industrialization.
I wrote 'A Mindful Nation' to promote the values of slowing down, taking care of ourselves, being kind, and helping each other. It seems to me that if we embrace these values individually, it will benefit us collectively. And our country will be a little bit better off as a result.
Happiness is found by deeply experiencing the exact moment we are in.
I've heard from CEOs of major corporations and members of Congress talk about their spouses getting mad at them when they're home because they're spaced out and thinking about work. It's so easy for all of us to have our mind on the last meeting or the next one.
The people I represent in Northeast Ohio and the tens of millions of workers across our country are proud to be called blue collar.
We focus sometimes too much on the minimum wage, and we should be talking about living wages and middle class wages and pensions and benefits and the kind of thing that people in the industrial Midwest talk about all the time.
I'm for increased funding for the Centers for Disease Control.
If you're a coach and your team doesn't win, at some point you've got to change the coach.
The American people need to know we understand that they elected us to fight for economic opportunity for all. We need to create America 2.0 - a multicultural, progressive, and innovative country that fights every day for ordinary people.
Globalization in the aggregate generates wealth, no question. But it gets concentrated.
I've got a really long record around progressive politics, especially when it comes to the economy. Voted against the Bush tax cuts. Voted against the Trump tax cuts. Believe in investment into lifting people up, closing the opportunity gaps that exist in our society.
You can be hostile to greed. You can be hostile to income inequality. You can be for raising raises... but you can't be hostile to businesses because 98 percent of businesses are small business people.
There's no better inside player than Nancy Pelosi, and I don't have any animosity towards her.
Trump committed crimes. It's pretty clear. Although I'm not sure how it plays out politically, I do think you have a responsibility to act when you think - and there's ample evidence to show - that the president has been engaged in criminal conduct.
We have a perception problem with the party. We are perceived as being a coastal elite, Ivy League party that does not connect to working-class people. The waitress, the teacher, the construction worker - we've lost our connection to them.
I have a chicken-wing addiction... I sometimes can't get out of a restaurant without at least trying their chicken wings. So that's my great downfall.
We need a president who doesn't just visit our forgotten communities for rallies but one who lives in them - one who knows the pain and suffering that comes with being unseen and unheard.
The mindfulness revolution is not quite as dramatic as the moon shot or the civil rights movement, but I believe, in the long run, it can have just as great an impact.
I think the idea of participating in your own health care and being responsible to the extent you can be of your own health, it seems to me a lot like self-reliance and individual responsibility. This cuts through the partisan divide.
Kids are growing up with a bombardment of information through technology.
Between the fundraising, being away from family, the environment of hyperpartisanship, Washington is really stressing people out.
My great grandfather emigrated from Italy, and my grandfather worked in a steel mill and was able to raise kids and have a family and go on vacation.
The key to - and magic of - good campaigns is when you pull people together. You unite them around a common theme.
I think social issues are always part of a presidential campaign.
I am Irish, so I do like a good fight every now and then.
I love studying different religions. For me, learning and drawing from the different religious traditions is essential to being a good public servant. And the connections between our various religious traditions become our public ethic; they tie us together.
We need to be a party saying, 'We are not going to be happy until we get those $30, $40, $50 an hour jobs back for working-class people.'
I'm a progressive who knows how to talk to working-class people, and I know how to get elected in working-class districts. Because at the end of the day, the progressive agenda is what's best for working families.
We can't green the economy without the power of the free-market system.
We can't just be the party of redistribution of wealth; we need to be the party of the creation of wealth in communities all over the country, not to just Silicon Valley, not just Wall Street, but all over.
We need social and emotional learning in our schools. I think we also need to get good food in the schools. We can't be feeding our kids Pop-Tarts and chocolate milk.
Being tough on China is one thing. Being completely erratic with no strategy and dragging businesses and farmers through the mud, using them as pawns in the game, is not the way to beat China.
The Democrats have failed to have a real robust message for working-class people in places like Ohio - these states that Donald Trump came in and won.
I'm going to lead a revolution for working people in America. This includes all workers: white, black and brown, men and women, gay and straight, urban and rural.
For most of us, starting off in the morning, your iPhone wakes you up, you immediately start checking emails or texts or whatever, and you're up and running until you go to bed.
I would think that conserving our natural resources should be a conservative position: Not to waste food, and not to throw away a lot of the food that we buy.
Mindfulness helps you to be where you are when you're there. When I'm interacting with constituents who are suffering, that matters.
Democrats must adopt a progressive economic message that focuses on large, direct infrastructure investments, affordable health care, portable pensions, and public-private investments that promote advanced manufacturing.
I traveled the country for a year and a half helping Hillary Clinton to try to become president.
We need a brand as a party that says we're the party that are going to help working-class people, white people, black people, brown people, gay people, straight people, improve opportunity for them to grow their wages, to have security, economic security.
When I talk about 'working class,' I don't talk about 'white working class,'. I talk about 'working class,' and a third of working class people are people of color. If you are black, white, brown, gay, straight, you want a good job. There is no more unifying theme than that.
Wherever you interact with people, you have the opportunity to influence people. This isn't something you necessarily jam down somebody's throat, but it is something you can - gently and over time - begin to cultivate wherever you are.
