Pete Buttigieg in Fox News Sunday interviews during 2020


On Drugs: Incarceration does more harm than dealing with addiction

The point is not the legal niceties. The point is that we have learned through 40 years of a failed war on drugs that criminalizing addiction doesn't work. Incarceration does more harm than the offense it's intended to deal with. This is not saying that these substances are OK. It's saying that a situation where jail is the closest thing they'll ever get to inpatient treatment, shows a profound failure in our country's mental health and addiction treatment system.
Source: Fox News Sunday 2020 Presidential race interview Feb 9, 2020

On Energy & Oil: Timetable on climate set by reality, not by Congress

I'm thinking about what the world's going to look like in 2054 when I get to the current age of the current president. And if we don't act aggressively and immediately on climate, it's not going to be a pretty picture. If we can't do carbon free, then we'll do net carbon free, which means that we're taking out as much as we're putting in. The bottom line is, scientifically, the right year to do that was yesterday. We have got to do this. This timetable isn't being set in Congress. It's being set by reality. It's being set by science. And it's going to hit. Those deadlines are going to hit in our climate with or without us. What the green new deal gets right is it recognizes there's also a lot of economic opportunity in this. Retrofitting building means a huge amount of jobs for the building trades in this country.
Source: Fox News Sunday 2019 interviews for 2020 Democratic primary Mar 19, 2019

On Government Reform: Need to depoliticize Supreme Court

We need some kind of structural reform that makes the court less political. We can't go on where every time there's a vacancy, there's this apocalyptic ideological battle. One idea that I think is interesting is, you have 15 members, but only ten of them are appointed in the political fashion. Five of them can only be seated by unanimous agreement of the other ten. There are other ideas that have been floated too about term limits or about rotating justices up from the appellate bench.
Source: Fox News Sunday 2019 interviews for 2020 Democratic primary Mar 19, 2019

On Health Care: Single payer option can lead to Medicare for all

A single-payer environment is probably the right answer in the long term, but I think any politician who throws around phrases like Medicare for all has to explain how we would get there. What you want to do is you take something like Medicare, you put it on the exchanges as a public option, and if people like me are right that that is both good coverage and more cost efficient, then more and more people will buy in and it will be a very natural glide path towards the single-payer environment.
Source: Fox News Sunday 2019 interviews for 2020 Democratic primary Mar 19, 2019

On Jobs: Government must be pro-active with changing economy

We've been restoring manufacturing jobs, but we're realistic about the fact that with automation it's not going to look like the old economy. The economy is changing. The pace of change is accelerating. We've got to master those changes in order to make them work for us. Everything from making sure everybody has health care, to increasing the minimum wage, to delivering portable benefits so that when you get disrupted from your job, it's not such a disruption in the rest of your life.
Source: Fox News Sunday 2019 interviews for 2020 Democratic primary Mar 19, 2019

On Principles & Values: Progressive, but not concerned with labels

I think more and more people just want to know what your ideas are and whether they make any sense. And part of how we were able to succeed in South Bend, governing, I believe in accordance with progressive values, but also earning a lot of support from Republicans and independents wasn't by trying to manage exactly where I was on this kind of left/right spectrum, it was by trying to do the right thing. I view myself as a progressive, but these labels are becoming less and less useful.
Source: Fox News Sunday 2019 interviews for 2020 Democratic primary Mar 19, 2019

The above quotations are from Fox News Sunday interviews during 2020
(Chris Wallace and Bret Baier interviewing candidates for 2020 races).
Click here for other excerpts from Fox News Sunday interviews during 2020
(Chris Wallace and Bret Baier interviewing candidates for 2020 races).
Click here for other excerpts by Pete Buttigieg.
Click here for a profile of Pete Buttigieg.
Please consider a donation to OnTheIssues.org!
Click for details -- or send donations to:
1770 Mass Ave. #630, Cambridge MA 02140
E-mail: submit@OnTheIssues.org
(We rely on your support!)

Page last updated: Aug 25, 2021