Old Fogey's Quotes for Thursday

We are having a winter storm in Raleigh that cancelled all my plans for today, giving me a chance to blog. Tomorrow John and I leave for one of our warm and sunny retreats to the Caribbean, so I will not have an opportunity until this time next week. Then I hope to adjust my schedule in order to blog more often.

"The fact is that income inequality is real -- it's been rising for more than 25 years. The reason is clear: We have an economy that increasingly rewards education and skills because of that education."
King George the Fact Twister
Bush Addresses Income Inequality
[If education is the cause of income inequality, why do professional athletes and CEOs both earn more than college professors? CEOs usually have no more than masters degrees and get rewarded at preposterous levels for failing. I don't know of any college professor who gets a golden parachute for being ineffective.]

". . . we know that, in any given year, consumer spending is far more equally distributed than income."
Richard Vedder, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute
Democrats Want to Rise With Middle Class
[Wow! I thought I had heard every lame-brain economic theory of the right. Veddar's says that income is the wrong measure of economic disparities and instead should be spending. The poor must be ecstatic, since their spending often exceeds their income.]

"In 1965, the concern that greenhouse gases would lead to global warming was a prediction. Today, it is an established scientific fact."
Naomi Oreskes, professor of science history at the University of California at San Diego
Climate Change Consensus
[The threat of global warming is not new--just our awareness. When the solution to a problem involves large individual sacrifices, the problem has a way of going unnoticed even in the face of a huge body of facts. Government's role should be to make such blindness impossible. Instead King George the Sacrifice Slayer insists our heads belong in the sand.]

"The 1994 Republicans came to 'revolutionize' Washington. Washington won."
Republican pollster Frank Luntz
The GOP in Denial
[This failure has been far too frequent in our history. The Democrats have the opportunity to break the cycle of power and corruption. The question is whether they have the will and integrity to do so. Public cynicism, however warranted, has a corroding effective on democracy. The 2006 elections demonstrate that Americans still have some degree of hope in the political system, and another disappointment could be devastating.]

"Four months into fiscal 2007, we are cleaning up the Republican Party's budget mess."
House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.)
House Passes $463 Billion Spending Bill After Deleting Earmarks
[I hope the Democrats recognize that effective solutions to the budget deficits will require sacrifice by many Americans. Democratic leadership must be willing and able to make those sacrifices fair and reasonable, and then sell those sacrifices as true patriotism.]