Amity Shlaes Quotes

Anyone who experienced World War I close-hand was grossed out by it forever. It just was so awful.

Disillusionment can come as fast as a gust, but building faith that the government won’t inflate again is like building a new sailboat, a project of years.

People value Halloween, like Valentine’s Day, because they can tell themselves that it’s not merely secularized but actually secular, which is to say, not Christian, Jewish, Hindu or Muslim.

In my view, if you have one in 10 unemployed – something is wrong with the economy whether you call it recession or not.

Anti-parent music seems to be all the pop-rock market wants.

What’s wrong with the auto industry isn’t that it failed to create jobs. What’s wrong is that it emphasizes jobs over general growth itself.

Grades can matter, especially for those students and parents who live for the next round of applications to graduate or professional schools. But there’s a problem with the grade emphasis. Math or science graduates earn more than students majoring in the humanities.

The New Deal exists principally on an emotional plane for Obama. To him, the New Deal is something you play like a song, to make you or your constituents feel better.

Young parents in America are holy and not to be messed with. If they say something is correct, we all acquiesce. And is there any man, woman or canine who doesn’t leap out of the way when one of those giant, all-terrain Bugaboo strollers comes barreling down the sidewalk?

We’re in a kind of vicious cycle where the media tell the politicians, and the politicians tell the people, that perception is reality, and the perception of saving dooms a politician. I don’t believe perception is reality, or that all Americans think that.

It takes only a few seconds to make history new again.

In the end, all new schools, public or private, snobby or not, add value to the education market, making it bigger and more efficient, in the same way that Zuckerberg added wealth to the economy even for non-Facebook fans.

If expectations of lifetime earnings drop, then so will spending.

Although unions may be good for a worker, singular, they are not always good for workers, plural. Especially when it comes to finding a job.

Interest groups are not the same as individuals. Through false nostalgia for the New Deal, you are taking the younger generation hostage. They are the ones who are going to have to pay far greater taxes. They are the future’s forgotten men.

Anything can be done if you find friends to do it with. The lucky biographers find themselves drawn into a sort of friendship with their subject.

Coolidge believed that government officials who tell themselves that spending benefits the economy delude themselves and the citizens. Government budgets promote human freedom.

By playing on people’s desire to belong to groups, Facebook creates a new, inclusive society. After all, Facebook is not like Harvard College. Anyone with access to the Internet can sign up.

Many writers, including myself, have detailed how irresponsible government actions slow economic recoveries. Similar behavior by individuals impedes growth, too. If you can’t find someone reliable to do a deal with, you simply don’t do the deal at all.

The donning of the ear buds marks the beginning of teen life, when children set off on their own for the passage through adolescence.

The most remarkable thing about Calvin Coolidge is that he served for 67 months, and when he left office, the budget was lower than he came in. In real terms – in nominal terms with vanilla on top – he cut the budget year over year.

Everybody should pay some tax, just as everybody should vote.

To investors, job creation is a second-order effect. Market participants care first about interest rates, exchange rates, bond prices and the one great factor that affects all three: the long-term solvency of a bond company called the U.S. government.

When you see government leaders really bullying business, you know that government’s economic policy is failing. They get angry and they get desperate.

The Grand Old Party’s abiding affection for a ‘bigger and better’ presidency isn’t entirely logical. After all, the Obama presidency commenced with an effort to reenact the Hundred Days. Yet President Obama’s first-term economic performance itself was not ‘big’ but mediocre – tiny, even.

Entitlements seem to grow with prosperity; not only because they are indexed to inflation or GDP, but also because a prosperous country tells itself it can afford more benefits.

Europe unified its monetary policy through the euro before it unified politically, therefore sustaining member countries’ abilities to pursue the kind of independent fiscal policies that can strain a joint currency.

Seems like Americans just want it to be Halloween all year. The holiday just keeps getting more popular.

If you do a serious presidential bio, you want to supply the reader with maximum material because otherwise you’re offending the reader. A president for many people is a serious thing and they want to know everything.

There’s something unsettling about the education of a child who comfortably enumerates the rules for surviving zombie apocalypse but finds it uncomfortable to enumerate the rules of his grandparents’ faith, if he knows them.

A while ago I did a story comparing the change in employment rates in recessions in the U.S. and in Europe, and what I found was that America fired a lot of people and rehired a lot of people faster than Europe. That difference is disappearing, and that is a problem.

Politicians generally act as if there is no cost to reconnecting with voters by building new New Deals. But the whole exercise of writing law out of New Deal nostalgia is a form of national narcissism. Call it New Deal narcissism.

Eventually the dollar won’t always rule. Eventually there will be a challenge to the United States and it will have to be like other countries that are a bit concerned about their currency, and then have to ratchet back in order to – right, in order to sustain. We just haven’t reached that point yet.

I’m always for lower taxes because lower taxes make people want to do things. Less burden, more fun, and economics is about people wanting to have fun. Growth is fun for people in the marketplace.

Democrats who see virtue in the estate tax are doing the equivalent of aborting future enterprises. They deprive businesses of oxygen with their support for capital gains taxes and disregard for contracts.