Democrats will play the old Washington game of calling reductions in the rate of growth of spending for any program a 'cut'.

So I think we shouldn't be overly concerned about the decline in personal saving at this particular moment and time, but it's something we certainly need to keep an eye on.

The growing inequality of wealth and income distribution is both a moral and economic problem. If the wealthy are unwilling to pay more taxes, then this is going to lead to spending cuts. And if you put off the table things like national defense, then you're going to end up cutting more and more out of programs that aid the poor. So, I think there are consequences to this idea that tolerance for inequality requires us to - to just do nothing to make the wealthy contribute a higher share of resources to fund the government.

Democrats will play the old Washington game of calling reductions in the rate of growth of spending for any program a 'cut'.

Many of my sharpest critics have decided to take a position of ignoring me - because they feel that by attacking me, they would draw attention to my book and give me more publicity and help me sell more books. So I think that they decided that the best thing for them to do is to say nothing. Also, I think that some of my critics simply can't refute my argument - and so it's easier for them to ignore it as well, so that they're not forced to confront the logical contradiction in their own position.

There's bound to be a recovery in [capital spending] sometime soon. We have had basically no capital investment for about year. At some point, machinery wears out, and you've got to replace it.

The break for me was the Medicare drug benefit in 2003. It's just grossly expensive, bad policy. After that, I no longer gave them the benefit of the doubt and started seeing the glass as half-empty.