Aging & Wisdom Quote by David Obey

A politician’s most reliable rhetorical move is to make inevitability sound like prudence, and David Obey does it in two clean steps: first, a ritual display of seriousness ("This is a very difficult question"), then a shift to the safe terrain of demographic math. The opening clause isn’t just humility; it’s a pre-emptive shield. By naming the question as hard before answering it, Obey lowers expectations for specificity and invites the audience to reward caution as responsibility.

Then he reaches for aging and demographics, the closest thing public policy has to gravity. These forces are framed as neutral, unstoppable, and therefore beyond partisan blame. That framing matters. Instead of arguing for a particular reform, he positions the state and the country as already committed to a future where health care labor demand rises. The implied message: whether you like government spending, training programs, immigration policy, or labor protections, you’re going to need a workforce that can care for older bodies. The debate becomes not whether to act, but how quickly and with what tools.

The phrase "big increase" is purposely unspecific: large enough to feel urgent, vague enough to accommodate any policy package that follows. And "in the state and in the country" scales the problem from local to national, inviting buy-in from constituents while signaling federal relevance. It’s classic Obey-era governance language: technocratic, sober, and quietly persuasive because it treats policy as adaptation to reality, not ideology.