Quotes from Timothy Noah

Federal law prohibits anyone convicted of a felony from owning a gun. Seems like kind of a good idea, no?

If the 1992 and 2000 elections were any guide, third-party candidates are death on the mainstream parties with which they're most naturally aligned.

In Washington, the accepted method for passing along information about how the government fails to meet real-world needs is to leak it.

Voters care only that student loans remain freely available and that they cost taxpayers as little as possible.

There is no better example of social and economic policy discussion as an idle pastime for the rich than the World Economic Forum at Davos. These guys make the millionaire schmoozers at the Aspen Ideas Festival look like short-order cooks.

Under Obama, income growth has been confined almost entirely to those at the top of the income distribution, continuing a pattern that began under President George W. Bush.

In removing the friction involved in paying bills, electronic billing has substantially increased the friction involved in not paying them.

Within the narrow confines of Permanent Washington - the journalists, lobbyists, and congressional lifers who are the city's avatars of centrism and continuity - Ford is considered the beau ideal of American leadership.

Why does Medicare have such difficulty accommodating a cut - no, wait, a trim to its annual spending increase - of two measly percentage points? Two words: baby boom.

Wal-Mart uses technology to increase sales volume, but the more it does so, the more it drives down profit margins - its own and everybody else's. The same logic does not appear to hold for Goldman Sachs.

What people want is big government that they don't have to pay for.

The Sudan bombing is a blot on the Clinton presidency, and a blot it ought to remain.

What I've learned, and will try to remember from now on, is that defending your country's credibility is never sufficient reason to fight a war.

On Wall Street, financial crisis destroys jobs. Here in Washington, it creates them. The rest is just details.

The war to rein in Wall Street excess is never over.

When the only people in mainstream discourse who care about the working class are Wall Street investors, it really is time to ask where our politics went wrong.

When businesses affirmatively like regulations, that's when to reach for your wallet.

The problem with wanting the tax code to be 'simpler, fairer,' and 'pro-growth' is that it's impossible to achieve all three at the same time.

The financial services industry is a ward of the state.

You know what isn't class warfare? Progressive taxation, as in, say, expecting billionaires to pay at least as much in taxes as their secretaries. Ideally, in fact, they should pay more.

Romney has become reluctant to say that human activity causes global warming, and even in his greener days he was always somewhat cagey about which remedies he'd support.

The Supreme Court needs jurists, not politicians.

It's no surprise that Mitt Romney bent himself into a pretzel to disavow the portions of Obamacare that derive from his own reform in Massachusetts.

Health care probably contributes a lot more to the common wealth than finance.