Budget

When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.

A lot of Democrats have said that raising the minimum wage is both good economics and good politics. The nonpartisan CBO issued a report today saying that raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour would cost the economy about 500,000 jobs…Why should we trust Democrats on anything when they couldn’t have foreseen that this would be the case?

Standardized tests are an indicator of the kind of service taxpayers are receiving — and whether schools, educators and policymakers are doing their jobs. In the United States, taxpayers spend almost $600 billion annually on public education, so it’s not unreasonable to ask what all that money is producing. In fact, it’s irresponsible not to know.

We’re definitely blessed to get a scholarship to our universities, but at the end of the day, that doesn’t cover everything. We do have hungry nights that we don’t have enough money to get food.

My mother saved our home with a minimum wage job. But in the 1960s, a minimum wage job would support a family of three above the poverty line. Not today. Not even close. I understood right then that people can work hard, they can play by the rules, and they can still take a hard smack.

The coming firestorm over new power-plant regulations won’t be a genuine debate — just as there isn’t a genuine debate about climate science. Instead, the airwaves will be filled with conspiracy theories and wild claims about costs, all of which should be ignored. Climate policy may finally be getting somewhere; let’s not let crazy climate economics get in the way.

If we wanted a program to help the majority of the population, we’d offer loan guarantees to help poor people get access to reliable cars so that they could have a better shot at getting – and keeping – a well-paying job…A small amount of capital could make a much bigger difference in their lives than extra student loan relief for middle-class college kids would.

If you can't afford to take care of your veterans, then don't go to war.

People call me a socialist sometimes. But, no, you gotta meet real socialists. You’ll have a sense of what a socialist is.

Shutting down the government, in my view, is not conservative policy. I don’t think a two-week paid vacation for federal employees is conservative policy. A number of us were saying back in July that this strategy could not and would not work. And, of course, it didn’t. So there’ll not be another government shutdown, you can count on that.

This is why I think the shutdown was so magnificent, run beautifully. I’m so proud of these Republicans….Obamacare is very unpopular. If you want to overturn it, America, vote for more Republicans. We need to take the Senate.

It is a law of nature that everything run by the government will get more expensive and worse over time. Everything run by the private sector will get better and cheaper over time. The fact that [Obamacare] starts this badly does not bode well….We want healthcare run on the same system that gave us cell phones, flat screens, Jerry Garcia chia pets. Everything you submit to the free market…keeps getting better and better.