If you are wealthy and can hire enough accountants and attorneys, you can find ways around the code. It's fundamentally not fair. It wastes a lot of time and energy and effort to comply with it. It doesn't encourage savings and investment. And we need to simply it and make it more fair.

Ronald Reagan wasn't in the establishment of the Republican Party either, nor was Richard Nixon.

I`m not planning to endorse anybody. I have a long friendship with the family and a long friendship with Jeb [Bush], but I`m, like a lot of people, sitting on the sidelines watching and waiting.

In chaos, there is opportunity.

If we're going to have a strong and dynamic economy in the years ahead, we need to tackle some of the structural challenges that our economy faces and the tax code is one of the biggest.

Our [Republicans'] object is to avoid having stupid candidates who can't win general elections, who are undisciplined, can't raise money, aren't putting together the support necessary to win a general election campaign, because this money is too difficult to raise to be spending it on behalf of candidates who have little chance of winning in a general election.

But perhaps the most important difference between conservatives and liberals can be found in the area of national security. Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers. In the wake of 9/11, conservatives believed it was time to unleash the might and power of the United States military against the Taliban.