This Week In Quotes: Double Edition (Dec 21 – Jan 3)

Confiscation could be an option. Mandatory sale to the state could be an option. Permitting could be an option – keep your gun but permit it. — Andrew Cuomo

Savers are getting ripped off. Interest rates are near zero, yet the inflation rate as of October 2012 was 2.2 percent, which means real interest rates are negative 2 percent, so savings are being diluted by 2 percent a year. — Andy Kessler

I don’t know what the number is but say the number is 40 out of 240 — that’s not a repudiation of his leadership. That’s the same 40, 50 chuckleheads that all year … have screwed this place up. And he has done everything in his power to make nice to them, to bring them along, to make them feel included, but it hasn’t mattered. — Rep. Steven LaTourette

In 2009, the most recent year for which data are available, the richest 1 percent of Americans paid 28.9 percent of their income in federal taxes, according to the Congressional Budget Office. (That includes income taxes, both individual and corporate, and payroll taxes.) Members of the middle class, defined as the middle fifth of households, paid 11.1 percent of their income in taxes.

Some of this difference in tax rates is attributable to temporary tax changes passed in response to the recent recession. But not all. In 2006, before the financial crisis, the top 1 percent paid 30 percent of their income in taxes, compared with 13.9 percent for the middle class. — Gregory Mankiw

Stop saying, ‘I support the troops.’ I don’t. I used to. — Michael Moore

In essence, if you are Catholic in this country, you no longer can own a company. — Frank O’Brien

Senate rules limit the number of amendments that legislators can offer. Because the majority leader is recognized on the floor before anyone else, Senator Reid has abused that rule on numerous occasions by immediately proposing the maximum number of nonsubstantive amendments, leaving no room for amendments from the opposition. He then files a cloture motion to end debate before debate has started – even when no member of the minority party intends to filibuster the legislation. He uses these cloture motions to create the imaginary storyline (often repeated uncritically by many in the media) that Republicans are “filibustering” all of his legislation.

Prior majority leaders, Republican and Democratic alike, ”filled the tree” very sparingly. Senator Reid has used this amendment-blocking maneuver more times than the previous seven majority leaders combined. The filibuster is one of the few ways for minority members to protest this unscrupulous behavior. The only way to end debate in the Senate, according to Rule 22, is by way of a three-fifths vote. — Hans A. von Spakovsky

It would not be imprudent to expect that an ever broker America, with more divorce, fewer fathers, the abolition of almost all social restraints, and a revoltingly desensitized culture, will produce more young men who fall through the cracks. But, in the face of murder as extraordinarily wicked as that of Newtown, we should know enough to pause before reaching for our usual tired tropes. So I will save my own personal theories, no doubt as ignorant and irrelevant as everybody else’s, until after Christmas – except to note that the media’s stampede for meaning in massacre this last week overlooks the obvious: that the central meaning of these acts is that they are without meaning. — Mark Steyn

Will the GOP have the courage to insist on making the deep and painful cuts that will be required to restore us to fiscal sanity?

Forgive me for being skeptical, but not only did the last debt-ceiling agreement fail to actually cut spending (federal spending rose by $61.5 billion in the twelve months following that deal), the fiscal-cliff agreement undid two months’ worth, or $24 billion, of the sequestration cuts resulting from the debt-ceiling compromise. Indeed, congressional negotiators will spend the next two months looking for ways to undo the rest of the sequester. — Michael Tanner

Progressives do not study Marx, Bismarck, Croly, or their other intellectual founding fathers, because they do not believe them to be their founding fathers – and also because many of them are kind of embarrassing. — Kevin Williamson