Anybody who has watched government from the inside recognizes that governments need institutions, need ways to respond to crises.

The life prospects of an American are more dependent on the income and education of his parents than in any of the other advanced industrial countries.

There is a growing consensus that the European systems have worked better than the American: They have been able to deliver better health care to more people at lower cost.

I trace the inequality to a particular set of decisions that we took when we lowered the tax rate from 91% down to very low levels at the top, where we stripped away regulations. So the result of that was not a more dynamic economy, but a more unequal society. We tried the experiment of trickle-down. A third of a century later, we can say fairly definitively that it was a failure.

The striking thing about America is - it's historically, extraordinary unusual, I don't of any other instance - is that productivity of workers and wages have not moved in tandem.

The Bush administration has been doing everything it can to hide the huge number of returning veterans who are severely wounded - 17,000 so far including roughly 20 percent with serious brain and head injuries. Even the estimate of $500 billion ignores the lifetime disability and healthcare costs that taxpayers will have to spend for years to come.

Macroeconomic policy can never be devoid of politics: it involves fundamental trade-offs and affects different groups differently.