Quips. Quotes & Tweets – 2/11/11

According to Gallup, unemployment is the most important problem facing the U.S.

Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Elmendorf confirmed yesterday that Obamacare kills jobs.

Obamacare’s high-risk pools have been a complete failure, enrolling only 12,500 through January compared to the 375,000 that were supposed to get care by the end of 2010.

Arizona is countersuing the Obama administration’s legal challenge to its immigration enforcement law, claiming the feds have failed to secure the border and protect the state from “an invasion” of illegal immigrants.

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365 Ways to Drive a Liberal Crazy > Praise Joe Biden, historian, by quoting him: "When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the, you know, princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here's what happened.'" The stock market crashed in 1929. FDR was elected in 1932. And televisions were still in the laboratory

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The Futures of America > Lessons of the NYSE-Deutsche Borse merger.
   The likely sale of New York Stock Exchange parent NYSE Euronext to Deutsche Börse of Frankfurt, Germany, is playing as a blow to America's capitalist pride, and understandably so. It's painful at first blush to imagine ownership of the famous symbol of American financial markets transferred out of New York City. Yet the merger is itself a story of inevitable capitalist change and how no country or institution can take its dominance for granted…
   For most of the last century, America could count on the size of its economy and quality of its technology to give it a competitive edge. No more. If we want the U.S. to be home to the next great financial institution, or even to keep the ones we have, our politicians need to make America a more inviting place to trade and do business.

[ This is one of the real and concrete examples of what the progressive structural changes to this country’s economy hath wrought! – JS ]

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"Regulation -- which is based on force and fear -- undermines the moral base of business dealings. It becomes cheaper to bribe a building inspector than to meet his standards of construction. A fly-by-night securities operator can quickly meet all the S.E.C. requirements, gain the inference of respectability, and proceed to fleece the public. In an unregulated economy, the operator would have had to spend a number of years in reputable dealings before he could earn a position of trust sufficient to induce a number of investors to place funds with him. Protection of the consumer by regulation is thus illusory." -- Alan Greenspan

"He who will not economize will have to agonize." – Confucius

“What a pity that so many people are living with so few friends when the world is full of lonesome strangers who would give anything just to be somebody’s friend.” Milo L. Arnold

“The only people with whom you should try to get even are those who have helped you.” John E. Southard