Quotes of the day

... is the multiplier for the stimulus positive or negative?--Arnold Kling

The real downside of trashing private jets is job losses. The business-aviation industry employs more than a million workers.--Robert Frank

Call me bourgeois, but I think that when you sign your name to a document promising to repay money you've borrowed, you have an obligation to repay the money you've borrowed.--Megan McArdle

The U.S. housing bubble drew too many workers and too much capital into construction and related industries. So funding public works projects to keep those companies in business is the wrong solution.--Ben Powell

... having the highest level of income does more to increase economic thinking than does having the highest level of education.--Eric Crampton

... the fact that rent control protects her from "worrying about material things" means that the owner who takes the loss must do so.--David Henderson

This is the paradox of deleveraging: it’s good for borrowers to reduce their debt, and good for lenders to be more rigorous in their standards, but when everyone deleverages at once it does real damage. It’s like a drug addict whose dealer cuts him off: it’s good to stop using, but withdrawal is painful. The end of the credit-card boom isn’t going to wreak as much havoc as the end of the housing boom. But it is helping to put a brake on our spending. And, at this point, every little bit hurts.--James Surowiecki

A centrist administration would have thought about how to create a political constituency for cost control in health, and in public spending more generally. The [Obama] administration rightly emphasises that healthcare cost control is the single biggest challenge in fiscal policy. Without it, public debt will stay on its present unsustainable path until it hits the wall of a new financial crisis. The need to create a wider constituency for fiscal discipline is the best argument for associating healthcare reform with a new and broadly based tax. Instead, the budget makes this already small constituency even smaller, telling almost all taxpayers they can have everything for nothing.--Clive Crook

Watchmen may well be the most audacious literary challenge to utilitarianism ever written. If you think it's just adolescent violence, you're missing the point.--Bryan Caplan