At every stage since World War II, people have assumed that what's happening today will happen forever. Universally, that's been wrong. I can't say in which direction but I do think that what we expect today won't be what we'll get in 15 years.

One intriguing subplot of the economic crisis is the failure of most economists to predict it. Here we have the most spectacular economic and financial crisis in decades - possibly since the Great Depression - and the one group that spends most of its waking hours analyzing the economy basically missed it.

If President Clinton has his way, we will have a false debate in the 1996 election campaign. It will not engage real political choices - choices framed by our appetite for government services and our distaste for taxes - but rather artificial choices crafted by Clinton to advance his reelection. Clinton has clearly been using the budget as an election platform...I dislike using the word 'lies,' but Clinton exploits such forbearance (widespread in the press) to spread untruths.

We have arrived at socialized medicine in America. I do not report this as either a good or bad event but simply as something that has happened with hardly anyone realizing it. This is the first result - and probably the most important - of the national health care debate launched last week by President Clinton. Our politics and economy will never again be the same.

In politics, there's a fine line between too much conviction and too little.

We should balance the budget. If government programs are important enough, we need to pay for them with taxes or make cuts in lesser programs. We've lost that discipline entirely. It seems prudent to avoid the possibility that the people who own our debt will start to worry the U.S. won't pay. That would raise how much it would cost the U.S. to borrow, which in a national emergency, like a war or pandemic, could be critical.

Probably the only people left who think that economics deserves a Nobel Prize are economists. It confirms their conceit that they're doing 'science' rather than the less tidy task of observing the world and trying to make sense of it. This, after all, is done by mere historians, political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, and (heaven forbid) even journalists. Economists are loath to admit that they belong in such raffish company.