This Week In Quotes: June 1 – June 7

My period comes like twice a month. My eggs are jumping ship. Seriously, they’re like, ‘the last one out’s a retard. I get worried about that, as an older woman, I don’t necessarily want to have a retard. — Margaret Cho

It is a major crusade of mine and that is to get rid of the Star-Spangled Banner. Now I know you’re going to say I am not a true American I’m not patriotic. I don’t think patriotism has anything to do with it. The National Anthem is just absolutely monumentally un-singable. I mean there’s so much wrong with it. I don’t know where to start. It’s an abomination. First it ranges two octaves most people can only do kind of one octave. I mean when you think about it, it’s bombs bursting in air rocket’s red glare it all kinds of, you know a lot of national anthems are that way, all kinds of military jargon and the land there’s only one phrase ‘the land of the free’ which is kind of nice and ‘the home of the brave?’ I don’t know,” he said. “Are we [Americans] the only ones who are brave on the planet? I mean all the brave people live here. I mean it’s just stupid I think. I’m embarrassed, I’m embarrassed every time I hear it. — Bill Press

[I]t seems very clear that there is no such thing as positive attention in the Twitter age; that anyone who sticks there head up is going to just have it picked apart by 100,000,000 gnats. The internet has largely become a roving lynch mob and you can’t stop a lynch mod with comedy GIF’s. — Richard Rushfield

State and local property tax collections (blue line in the graph below) have risen by 10%, from $400 billion to $440 billion, since 2008, even though the price of homes in most American markets (red line) has fallen by 30% since 2008. Your house is worth less and your property taxes have gone up. Most of the $440 billion in property taxes is paid by homeowners. That compares with the $380 billion a year or so that homeowners pay on the $10 trillion in outstanding home mortgage debt. Homeowners now pay roughly as much in property taxes as in mortgages interest. It used to be a quarter to a third as much. No wonder home prices remain depressed. — Spengler

That’s to say, the unsustainable “bubble” is not student debt or subprime mortgages or anything else. The bubble is us, and the assumptions of entitlement. Too many citizens of advanced Western democracies live a life they have not earned, and are not willing to earn. Indeed, much of our present fiscal woe derives from two phases of human existence that are entirely the invention of the modern world. Once upon a time, you were a kid till you were 13 or so; then you worked; then you died. That bit between childhood and death has been chewed away at both ends. We invented something called “adolescence” that now extends not merely through the teenage years but through a desultory half decade of Whatever Studies at Complacency U up till you’re 26 and no longer eligible for coverage on your parents’ health-insurance policy. At the other end of the spectrum, we introduced something called “retirement” that, in the space of two generations, has led to the presumption that able-bodied citizens are entitled to spend the last couple of decades, or one-third of their adult lives, as a long holiday weekend. The bit in between adolescence and retirement is your working life, and it’s been getting shorter and shorter. Which is unfortunate, as it has to pay for everything else. This structural deformity in the life cycle of Western man is at the root of most of our problems. — Mark Steyn

Look around you. The late-20th-century Western lifestyle isn’t going to be around much longer. In a few years’ time, our children will look at old TV commercials showing retirees dancing, golfing, cruising away their sixties and seventies, and wonder what alternative universe that came from. — Mark Steyn

On Friday the White House blamed the third slowdown of its four-year term on Republicans for blocking the President’s policies, but what policies are they talking about? In his first two years in office, Democrats gave Mr. Obama everything he wanted, save for cap and trade and union card-check, which would have done even more harm to job creation. They passed stimulus, ObamaCare, multiple housing bailouts, Dodd-Frank and more.

Even after Republicans took the House, they gave Mr. Obama the payroll tax holiday he demanded first for 2011 and again for 2012. Far from some new fiscal “austerity,” overall federal spending hasn’t declined. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve has delivered monetary stimulus after stimulus–QE I, QE II, Operation Twist, and 42 months of near-zero interest rates with the promise of 30 months more.

Mr. Obama has had the freest run of policy of any President since LBJ. So maybe the problem is the policies. — The Wall Street Journal

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