These unfunded liabilities are not a big problem. We have 40 or 50 years to recoup the money through investments. A person who owes $400,000 on a mortgage wouldn't say, 'Oh, my God, we're doomed,' because they know they have 30 years to pay it off.

To politicians who say we're in such a bind now, you have to look at what the politicians did. The reason they can't afford these plans is that in many cases they enjoyed pension holidays, and now they have to catch up.

Money doesn't make Dr. Rudolph tick. What makes Dr. Rudolph tick, what drives him, is unfairness in the health care system.

It will be very negative. Given the easy money out there, if these kind of prime assets can't get taken, it will rattle a lot of investors and depress sentiment.

It is a curious thought that the earliest description of the steam-engine in antiquity describes its use for the magic opening of the temple doors, when the priests lit the fires on the altars, to deceive the populace into ascribing to a deity what was the work of the engineer. In much the same way today, the almost boundless fecundity of the creative scientific discoveries and inventions of the age are being appropriated for the purpose of the mysterious opening of doors into the holy of holies of the temples of mammon by a hierarchy of imposters and humbugs, whom it is the first task of a sane civilization to expose and clear out.

The ruling passion of the age is to convert wealth into debt in order to
derive a permanent future income from it - to convert wealth that perishes
into debt that endures, debt that does not rot, costs nothing to maintain,
and brings in perennial interest.