Leadership Quote by Herb Kohl

“Bankruptcy is a serious decision that people have to make” reads like a bland PSA, but its real work is political triage: it strips moral heat out of a topic that usually arrives loaded with shame, blame, and easy talking points. Kohl, a businessman-turned-senator from Wisconsin, isn’t trying to sound poetic. He’s trying to sound safe. The sentence is designed to be unarguable, and that’s the point.

Calling bankruptcy a “decision” quietly pushes back against the caricature of debtors as reckless or opportunistic. Yet it also avoids naming the forces that corner people into that “decision”: medical bills, layoffs, predatory lending, divorce, a safety net with holes. The subtext is: don’t treat filers as villains, and don’t treat bankruptcy as a casual hack. In one line, Kohl is balancing two constituencies who hate each other’s stories: creditors who want discipline and consumers who want mercy.

The phrase “people have to make” is the tell. It implies compulsion without assigning fault. Politicians love that construction because it offers empathy without committing to a policy remedy. It’s a rhetorical airbag in debates over bankruptcy reform, where the stakes are concrete: who gets protected, who gets paid, and how much suffering counts as “personal responsibility.”

Kohl’s intent, then, is less to illuminate than to de-escalate. It’s a sentence built to survive a floor speech, a committee hearing, and a campaign ad - neutral enough to travel, pointed enough to signal that bankruptcy is about lived consequence, not just balance sheets.