Coolidge cut the budget, and even better, cut it during peace and prosperity. He left a federal budget lower than the one that greeted him when he arrived in office. He managed to freeze or cut the budget over more than five years in office. If you look at charts of presidents - Nixon, Ike, and Reagan - you see them failing on this score.

The lucky biographers find themselves drawn into a sort of friendship with their subject.

I'm not sure Roosevelt was quite a monster, he just did a poor job on the economics.

Coolidge thought budgets were virtuous. He had his econ straight. He didn't just cut taxes, he also cut the budget.

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.

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.

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.