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.

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

Coolidge showed that the best government was the one that got out of the way. When he refrained, the economy grew, the Ku Klux Klan faded, and Americans got Model A's and automobiles.

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.

Coolidge and his treasury secretary Mellon loved new technology. Like JFK, C.C. divined that a new technology could lift the nation out of its doldrums; the only difference was that JFK's new technology was space travel, and Coolidge's travel by airplane.

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.

The difference between recession and depression is simple. Recession, goes the saying, is when you lose your job; depression is when I lose mine.