Jews From The United States

"It's like kissing Hitler."

"Janet Leigh was years ago! Nowadays I wouldn't be caught dead married to a woman old enough to be my wife!"

"You can argue all you want and discuss it, but when the boss says this is what we’re going to do, do you have a problem doing what the boss says they’re going to do? You always have two choices. You can quit or you can execute the plan."

"Our great allies have taken advantage of our good nature, and they like steel in Japan and appliances in Korea. They've just taking advantage of us it's time for them to partner with us and bring that production back home. So I think we're going to work closely with our allies to increase their manufacturing productivity at home and I think your way of thinking about it, saying let's work together to do that and bring it home, I think is really important for us and really important for our workforce."

"I imagine that’s how Howard Lutnick woke up on the morning of 9/11: unaware of the tragedy unfolding before him, unaware that his world—and ours—was about to change forever. But leadership is about rising to the occasion. That’s what we saw from Secretary Duffy last week. And it’s what we can expect to see—what his colleagues did see—from Howard Lutnick, who suffered the loss of his own brother and 657 other Cantor Fitzgerald employees on 9/11. Mr. Lutnick knows the kind of pain victims’ families are facing. His life story shows he is prepared to meet the gravest of challenges. And we need him to be. In a time of great power competition, we must, as Mr. Lutnick told us, ‘stay in the lead.’ America must ‘show the world what leadership is like, what a great economy is like."

"I think America is in a place to teach the world and to show the world what leadership is like, what a great economy is like, what taking care of its Americans is like. And to be part of that administration, to be part of this historic Trump administration is one of the great honors of my life. So I'm just looking forward to being a part of this administration, to play my part in helping drive our economy's growth and driving the support and dedication to our American people."

"Before 9/11, we wanted to do things on our own. And then after 9/11, I just wanted to be partners with everybody. I feel like working with other firms, working with other companies, working with other people just builds a stronger foundation beneath you. And I needed the breadth and scale of that foundation beneath me. So I'm much more attuned to working together with others, to being partners with others, to creating broad coalitions and that's what Cantor Fitzgerald has set out to do. It works really, really well with all sorts of other companies. And that's the key part of what's made us successful."

"So my plan is to only serve the American people. So I will divest, and I will sell all of my interests, all of my business interests, all of my assets, everything. I've worked together with the Office of Government Ethics, and we've reached agreement on how to do that. And I will be divesting within 90 days upon my confirmation. So I should have no business interest, therefore, no conflicts of interest. I've made the decision that I've made enough money in my life. I can take care of myself, I can take care of my family. It is now my chance to serve the American people."

"Howard has been a dynamic force on Wall Street for more than 30 years. He joined Cantor Fitzgerald in 1983, and rapidly rose through the ranks to become President and CEO at the age of 29. Tragedy struck on September 11, 2001, when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center, and Cantor Fitzgerald lost 658 of its 960 New York-based employees, including Howard's brother and his best friend. He emerged from these events with an indomitable sense of purpose to rebuild the firm to honor those lost, support their families, and become a beacon of hope for those who remained. He was an inspiration to the World - The embodiment of resilience in the face of unspeakable tragedy."

"I take a very jaundiced view of China. I think they only about themselves and seek to harm us, and so we need to protect ourselves. We need to drive our innovation, and we need to stop helping them."

"So the night of September 11, I didn't really know who was alive and who wasn't alive. So we had a conference call. It was about 10 o'clock at night. And my employees called in. And I said, look, we have two choices. We can shut the firm down and go to our friends' funerals. Remember, that would be 20 funerals a day every day for 35 straight days. And I've got to tell you, I'm not really interested in going to work. All I want to do is climb under the covers and hug my family. But if we are going to go to work, we're going to do it to take care of our friends' families. So what do you want to do? You guys want to shut it down? Or do you want to work harder than you've ever worked before in your life? And that was the moment where the company survived."

"Well, decisions I made were they needed to have a boss for the business. If I didn't have a leader, I shut it. And I had a division of 86 people where four people survived. And you can't really build a business back with four people. Basically, we went from being a great company that was making a million dollars a day to a company that was losing a million dollars a day. But they all have mortgages to pay, and they need to put food on their table. So one of the things I did is I would call the leaders of other companies and say, here, this guy's John. He sells this many products. He's incredibly successful. You would've never been able to hire him. He was never going to come work for you."

"Who's Apple? It's America. We want to bring that innovation back and make sure our great companies, and let's be clear, we have them all. There's no other country as the incredible technology companies, pharma companies that we have. Let's bring those companies manufacturing and innovation and have them do that, manufacturing America with American workers. Let's try that."

"We would never, ever be associated with a company that has anything to do with jihad. And it disgusts me. Tether will seize any amount of coin in illicit activity."

"I've worked at Cantor my entire career, 41 years. And rebuilding the company over the past 24 years is my greatest business achievement. After 9/11, we were down to about 1000 employees. Today, the company employs more than 14,000."

"Well, I don't know if they were surprised or not, but if you just think for a second of what the people of Cantor Fitzgerald went through, to lose all their friends, their co-workers, all the people they worked together closely with and cared about. I mean, the emotions were very, very high. I don't think there's a single person at Cantor Fitzgerald who could say that they weren't, you know, just completely torn apart by what happened. It was the most difficult of circumstances."

"My father was diagnosed with lung cancer. He kept his diagnosis secret from me because he wanted to make sure I left to start college in the fall. He dropped me off at school, and a week later, he went for his first chemotherapy treatment at a local hospital. The nurse accidentally gave him the wrong dose, and he died right then and there. It was September 12, 1979, and I was 18 years old. So we all know losing one parent is heartbreaking, but losing both is something entirely different. It's life shattering."

"I remember right after the attacks on 9/11, the initial reports were on, that was an attack on capitalism. They make it theoretical. And what I really understood that it's personal. These are human beings lives being torn up."

"Well, it used to be that I felt that I had two lives before 9/11 and after, and it would feel sometimes that it was still so raw it felt like yesterday. And this year as I reflect on 20 years, it just doesn't feel like yesterday anymore. I employ the children of people who were killed that day. 20 years is as much time since 9/11 as I was at Cantor Fitzgerald before 9/11. So I think it feels much more separated from my life before."

"No one really knows how much the U.S. government can borrow before global investors get uneasy and begin to demand higher interest rates. The national debt exceeded 100 percent of GDP during World War II and then came down as the economy sprinted. But history suggests debt of that level is in the danger zone. Think Argentina, circa 2001. Think Greece, circa 2012."

"In the high-volume debate over taxes, facts about basic issues—who pays? how much? who doesn’t?—often get lost, twisted, or distorted. Perhaps the most salient and overlooked fact is this one: for most Americans, federal taxes have not risen over the past couple of decades."

"In classical tragedy, this is known as the denouement. In Washington, it could be just farce."

"“Everyone thinks there’s a lot, but there’s nothing that a majority wants to cut. The average person doesn’t want less government. They just want the government to cost less.”"

"The public remains strikingly misinformed about the budget. The typical respondent to a CNN poll said food stamps accounted for 10 percent of federal spending; it’s closer to 2 percent. Maybe being off by a factor of five is understandable given the enormity and complexity of the budget. But it’s harder to make sense of a 2008 Cornell University poll in which 44 percent of those who receive Social Security checks and 40 percent of those covered by Medicare say they “have not used a government social program.”"

"Until the Civil War, the U.S. government relied almost exclusively on tariffs on imported goods, a practice that provoked conflict between Northern manufacturers who favored tariffs to keep imports out and Southern farmers who did not. An income tax was imposed during the Civil War, but proved so unpopular that it died in 1872. In its place, the government imposed taxes on alcohol and tobacco that accounted for 43 percent of all federal revenue by 1900. Repeated attempts to revive the income tax were thwarted when the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in 1895. But the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution changed that. Less than eight months after it was ratified in February 1913, Congress enacted an income tax."

"“Tax reform”—the always popular, always politically treacherous goal of making the tax code simpler and smarter—“is really difficult when you can’t throw money at it. Losers always squeak louder than winners cheer.”"

"The overarching lesson: Bringing the deficit down to sustainable levels takes big changes. Little ones won’t do it."

"The 1980s broke a pattern in which the federal government ran big deficits only in wartime. The deficit topped $200 billion a year from 1983 through 1992. They would have been even bigger if Reagan hadn’t flinched on taxes, accepting significant tax increases in 1982 and 1984."

"The Reagan presidency was styled as a turning point in American politics: the end of the New Deal and the beginning of an era in which the government would retreat from the economy. Ronald Reagan made three significant fiscal promises during his campaign for president: cut taxes, rebuild the nation’s defenses, and balance the budget. He delivered on the first two, but not on the third."

"In response to years of calls to control “spending” and “smaller government,” Congress and presidents have discovered something simple: giving people a tax break—a credit, a loophole, a deduction—makes them happy without increasing government “spending” and can accomplish the same objective. Practically and economically, there’s no difference between getting $1,000 in cash from the government and getting a $1,000 voucher that you can use to reduce your taxes. Either results in a federal budget deficit that’s $1,000 bigger than it would have been had a tax break not been created. But the first is called “spending” (boos, hisses) and the second is called “a tax cut” (applause, cheers). The first is formally recorded on the budget books as an outflow of money. The second doesn’t show up in the outflow and inflow accounting. It is revenue that wasn’t collected."

"Back in 1955, when the federal debt was much smaller, less than 5 percent was held by foreigners. Foreign holdings began to climb in 1970 and surged in the 2000s. Today, foreign governments and private investors hold nearly half of all the U.S. government debt outstanding."

"Ultimately, what matters is where Congress and the president end up, not where they start. But defining the starting point and crafting the baseline are important to the politics and public perceptions of the budget—they are used by one side to magnify the size of the spending cuts or tax changes proposed by the other side—and politics and perceptions have a lot to do with what actually happens."

"Reagan enjoyed many victories as president. But starving the beast was not one of them. When he left office, federal spending was 20 percent higher, adjusted for inflation, than it had been when he arrived, and he never found a way to pay for it. In the twenty years before Reagan became president—under Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Carter—the budget deficit averaged well under 1 percent of GDP. In Reagan’s eight years, it averaged 4.25 percent of GDP."

"Adjusted for inflation, the federal government spent more on Medicare and Medicaid in 2011 than it spent on everything in 1960."

"“From the mid-1930s to the 1970s, the government made a set of commitments that led to expectations on the part of the American people about what their government owes them,” says Robert Reischauer, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office. “And they are totally unprepared to go back to a different world.”"

"In a city riddled with dysfunctional institutions, the CBO has become one of the few organs of Congress that actually work. It is the arbiter of facts, a call-it-as-we-see-it outfit that is viewed as largely immune to political pressure."

"Panetta summed up Reaganomics in a single sentence: “A significant tax cut was enacted at the same time that defense spending went up and…entitlement programs were also expanding.”"

"Except for four unusual years at the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s, the federal government has spent more than it took in every year for the past four decades. It borrows the difference, essentially promising that taxpayers in the future will pick up the tab for government spending today."

"The share of income most American families pay in federal taxes has been falling for more than thirty years. Today, Americans pay less of their income in taxes than citizens of nearly every other developed country."

"“The fiscal path we are on today is simply not sustainable. These deficits that we are incurring on an annual basis are like a cancer, and they are truly going to destroy this country from within unless we have the common sense to do something about it. “We face the most predictable economic crisis in history.”"

"Eliminating the federal workforce entirely would have pared the federal budget deficit in 2011 by only one-third."

"For every dollar the United States spends on the military, it spends another nickel on foreign aid, international development aid, and humanitarian assistance. Yet in a CNN poll in March 2011, the typical respondent estimated about 10 percent of the entire federal budget goes for “aid to foreign countries for international development and humanitarian assistance.” The reality: about 1 percent. That’s another problem with budgeting: the public makes woefully wrong assumptions about virtually every aspect of it."

"Nearly all the growth in the federal budget over the next ten years [2013-2022] is going to come from spending on healthcare and interest payments unless something changes. “You can’t fix this without doing health care,” says Paul Ryan. “I mean, health care is the driver of our debt.” And, as he and others routinely observe, even though the United States spends far more per person on health care than any other country, it isn’t close to having the world’s healthiest population."

"The federal government was smaller—4.3 percent of GDP in 1931—and narrower. About 70 percent of the spending went for three things: Defense, veterans’ benefits, and interest payments on the national debt. “The federal budget was not then, as it later became, a machine constantly generating new programs and expansions of old ones,” Herbert Stein wrote."

"Bush was elected in 1988 with one memorable promise: “Read my lips, no new taxes.” Republican poster Richard Wirthlin once called them “the six most destructive words in the history of presidential politics.”"

"Today, the idea that a president could appeal to a mixed-party center to win approval of any measure seems as quaint is a typewriter."

"In all, $1 of every $5 the federal government spent in 2011 went to defense, and about 20 cents of that $1 was spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan."

"Extreme music, more specifically the death metal sub-genre, would cease to exist without the musical brilliance of Chuck Schuldiner. [...] Within metal, there are few musicians who’ve shown such a profound prowess for technical and melodic guitar playing, all while playing music as extreme as death metal. Chuck Schuldiner was the epitome of this."

"It's difficult trying to articulate what it is about this instrumental Death song off Human — essentially arranged and written in the studio — that speaks to me. It doesn't have Chuck's voice in the literal sense, but it contains all the vital harmonic, melodic and rhythmic components that branded Death's sound. But it also has something else. It's reaching for truth, and it holds a majestic beauty that gave Death's songs their greatest potency. What I'm remembering is the beginner mind approach in which this song took shape in the studio. It was driven by instinct and spontaneous creative freedom. Our collective energies united and we swam into the 'Cosmic Sea,' trusting we wouldn't need a life raft. Chuck's story was liberated without words. 'Cosmic Sea' is a journey straight into the heart of Death and, for me, an auditory memory of what an old friend felt like at his best."

"Schuldiner broadened death metal’s horizons, dragging it out of the fetid gore and unworked thrash into something more sophisticated, programming intelligence into its necro physiology, and in the process recruiting some of the most technically gifted musicians the scene has had."