I often traveled to Nicaragua to speak against repressive policies by the Sandinista government.
Life is amazingly unpredictable; any 22-year-old who thinks they know where they will be in 10 years, much less in 30, is simply lacking imagination.
Nobody likes to fail but failure is an essential part of life and of learning. If your uniform isn't dirty, you haven't been in the game.
The impact on the broader economy and financial markets of the problems in the subprime markets seems likely to be contained.
The U. S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U. S. dollars as it wishes at no cost.
Inflation is certainly low and stable and, measured in unemployment and labour-market slack, the economy has made a lot of progress. The pace of growth is disappointingly slow, mostly because productivity growth has been very slow, which is not really something amenable to monetary policy. It comes from changes in technology, changes in worker skills and a variety of other things, but not monetary policy, in particular.
With respect to their safety, derivatives, for the most part, are traded among very sophisticated financial institutions and individuals who have considerable incentive to understand them and to use them properly.
The biggest downside to being a novelist is writing the novel.
You do scenes with certain people, all the time, and you know them so well. It's not that it can become predictable, but it's the same thing. So, when you have new people in the mix, it's so refreshing.
One might ask the question: Is the mortgage interest deduction doing a better job, a worse job, if it's supposed to promote homeownership and savings? Because home ownership is the biggest form of savings in this country. Different people will look at that data and draw different conclusions, but that's just an example of the kind of thing you can pull out of USAFacts and develop a point of view about.
Or - perhaps - I should just worry about my own behavior and let others be who they are.