I think my wife would take objection to any characterization of me as perfect.

A government decision that slashes spending at the wrong time and sends a weak economy into a tailspin can be just as undisciplined as one that unleashes a wasteful spending spree in an overheated environment.

I think that whether you're on the right or on the left as an economist or as a policy maker, every serious analyst I know agrees that at some point you have to deal with entitlements.

In Jamaica, you're never very far away from people who don't have very much, and in Wilmette, pretty much everybody had a lot.

I think my wife would take objection to any characterization of me as perfect.

Disciplined governments do not engage in the economic equivalent of binge eating followed by crash dieting.

Good economic policy requires not so much the bravado to implement drastic change as the strength and wisdom to make reasonable trade-offs over the many years it takes to transform a country's standard of living.