The Tea Party was born out of the disgust many Americans felt early in the financial crisis upon learning that the federal government was even contemplating reducing the principal on some troubled mortgages.

There is plenty of blame to go around for the U.S. housing bubble, but not much of it belongs to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The two giant housing-finance institutions made many mistakes over the decades, some of them real whoppers, but causing house prices to soar and then crater during the past decade weren't among them.

Lenders look at potential borrowers from many angles before extending credit: How much of its income will a household need to put into debt repayment? How large is the down payment? Does the borrower have a job with a stable income? What is the borrower's credit score?

Our biggest challenge is to eliminate the popular perception that economists don't have anything useful to say.

The more I see of democracy the more I dislike it. It just brings everything down to the mere vulgar level of wages and prices, electric light and water closets, and nothing else.

I have to have an emotional connection to what I am ultimately selling because it is emotion, whether you are selling religion, politics, even a breath mint.

At home, we must reject the mistaken notion - a notion that has dominated too much of the public dialogue for too long - that ever bigger Government is the answer to every problem.

The challenge is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible.