We have one of the few societies, the only one I can think of right offhand, where your health care is so tied to your job, so that when an American company has to hire, they have to think about health care.

Meanwhile, hard-working Americans are increasingly faced with workplace conditions in which critically important safeguards are watered down, emerging problems are ignored, and enforcement is scaled back.

In my district, the budget scales back and eliminates several long-term shore protection projects important to the safety and economic security of Long Island.

For a variety of reasons, we are not producing at a given level of economic activity the jobs we used to have.

Perhaps one day earthquakes, hurricanes and financial crashes will all be predictable. But we don't have to wait until then for seismology, meteorology and economics to become sciences; they already are.

Money does not make you happy but it quiets the nerves.

For complicated historical and political reasons, we associate 'poor' in our public consciousness with 'black.' Terms such as 'welfare queen' and 'culture of poverty' became associated uniquely with the social maladies of African Americans in urban ghettos, despite the fact that poor whites outnumbered poor blacks.

We're kidding on that. One of the things I insisted upon when we went into this project was that we are full partners, going fifty-fifty, both on the money and on the say of what's going on with the books.