Top 979 Rates Quotes & Sayings - Page 16

You know what higher interest rates mean. To you it means a higher mortgage payment, a higher car payment, a higher credit card payment. To our economy, it means business people will not borrow as much money, invest as much money, create as many new jobs, create as much wealth, raise as many raises.

According to the Bank of England the economy is growing too fast so interest rates must rise to counter the supposed inflationary threat. In lay terms, I interpret this to mean that people are working much harder, causing economic growth, and they're in danger of spending their money, which is what the recession-hit shops want them to do. But the Bank and the City seem to think this is wrong, and that if people work harder they should be punished by having their mortgages increased.

The Afghan government is much better informed, much more intrusive and ambitious than I had guessed. There are amazing craftsmen in Kabul but few designers and wage rates are astonishingly high - which is a problem when trying to support and promote Afghan craft exports. The community in Murad Khani in the old city - who we are helping to restore their area - have been the best part so far - eccentric, led by a champion wrestler, determined, proud and courageous.

Let's take the nine states that have no income tax and compare them with the nine states with the highest income tax rates in the nation. If you look at the economic metrics over the last decade for both groups, the zero-income-tax-rate states outperform the highest-income-tax-rate states by a fairly sizable amount.

If you have credit card debt and credit card companies continue to close down the cards, what are you going to do? What are you going to do if they raise your interest rates to 32 percent? That's five times higher than what your kid is going to pay in interest on a student loan. Get rid of your credit card debt.

[Australian Reserve Bank] Governor MacFarlane said recently when Paul Volcker broke the back of American inflation it's regarded as the policy triumph of the Western world. When I broke the back of Australian inflation they say, "Oh, you're the fellow that put the interest rates up." Am I not the same fellow that gave them the 15 years of good growth and high wealth that came from it?

The [liberals] consider profits as objectionable. The very existence of profits is in their eyes a proof that wage rates could be raised without harm to anybody. They speak of profit without dealing with loss. Profit and loss are the instruments by means of which the consumers keep a tight rein on all business activities. A profitable enterprise tends to expand; an unprofitable one tends to shrink. The elimination of profit renders production rigid and abolishes the consumer's control.

Well, I'm telling them two things. One is that, look, this is going to be something when the American people realize - once it's passed - that, A, it does take care of preexisting conditions; B, you're insurance rates aren't going to skyrocket; C, the insurance companies aren't going to be running the show like they were before; D, you're going to be in a position where you can keep your insurance that you have. That once the American public realizes that, you're going to get a reward for this. They're going to be rewarded.

There are times when a market such as housing, transportation or the stock or mortgage market keep rising and people with capital want to join in this growth. Soon the markets become overheated, partly because of the abundance of investment money and speculation. This is when the government should raise interest rates and increase the cost of borrowed money. Governments are shy about doing this because it could cause the very recession. Yet this is the best time to do this so that the inevitable recession never reaches the magnitude of the recent Great Recession.

By default, we have created a "system" of nursing-home care for the aged in which middle-class people pay exorbitant rates to for-profit nursing-home entrepreneurs - and then when private resources are consumed and the patient qualifies as a pauper, the nursing home begins billing Medicaid. This is precisely the antithesis of social citizenship; instead of the poor being accorded the dignity associated with the middle class, equality of treatment is achieved by making the middle class undergo pauperization.

Today the strategies of many companies in the real estate industry are premised on low interest rates, an assumption that has resulted in the rapid expansion of the real estate securitization business. This trend could be regarded as a risk factor, as it exposes the real estate sector to at least three potential problems: first, interest rate hikes; second, revisions to securitization business accounting standards; and third, overheating in the real estate market.

The people trying to change others can conveniently be termed the angry, while the people trying to change themselves might be called the guilty, although it would be just as descriptive to speak of the controlling and the dependent, or the paranoid and the repressive, or, inelegantly, the screamers and the criers. In some circles, attaching labels to people rates only a little higher than chicken stealing, because ... a label immediately ends attempts to understand the individual.

Life holds one great but quite commonplace mystery. Though shared by each of us and known to all, seldom rates a second thought. That mystery, which most of us take for granted and never think twice about, is time. Calendars and clocks exist to measure time, but that signifies little because we all know that an hour can seem as eternity or pass in a flash, according to how we spend it. Time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart.

So I'm not proposing anything radical. I just believe that anybody making over $250,000 a year should go back to the income tax rates we were paying under Bill Clinton. Back when our economy created nearly 23 million new jobs, the biggest budget surplus in history, and plenty of millionaires to boot. ... At the same time, most people agree that we should not raise taxes on middle-class families or small businesses -- not when so many folks are just trying to get by.

See the investment world as an ocean and buy where you get the most value for your money. Right now the value is in non-callable bonds. Most bonds are callable so when they start going up in price, the debtor calls them away from you. But the non-callable bonds, especially those non-callable for 25-30 years, can go way up in price if interest rates go way down.

When you own gold you're fighting every central bank in the world. That's because gold is a currency that competes with government currencies and has a powerful influence on interest rates and the price of government bonds. And that's why central banks long have tried to suppress the price of gold. Gold is the ticket out of the central banking system, the escape from coercive central bank and government power.

Weirdly enough, the best thing that ever happened to black people in the last twenty or thirty years was the O.J. Simpson verdict because it shut down the white guilt bank. And white guilt has never led to anything good. It's brought us spiraling crime rates, mostly with black victims, and a permanent underclass living in public housing projects. For years, liberals cried that "law and order" and "welfare reform" were racist code words.

In 88 poor countries for which we have data, in each and every one of the 88, the PPP for food shows that poor people can buy less food than you would expect from the PPP that the World Bank is using. The reason for this is obvious on reflection. It has to do with the fact that most foodstuffs are tradable commodities: basic foodstuffs, such as rice, flour and beans, can easily be conveyed across national borders and their prices will therefore roughly mirror the exchange rates among currencies.

It has taken biologists some 230 years to identify and describe three quarters of a million insects; if there are indeed at least thirty million, as Erwin (Terry Erwin, the Smithsonian Institute) estimates, then, working as they have in the past, insect taxonomists have ten thousand years of employment ahead of them. Ghilean Prance, director of the Botanical Gardens in Kew, estimates that a complete list of plants in the Americas would occupy taxonomists for four centuries, again working at historical rates.

The effort to eliminate synthetic pesticides because of unsubstantiated fears about residues in food will make fruits and vegetables more expensive, decrease consumption, and thus increase cancer rates. The levels of synthetic pesticide residues are trivial in comparison to natural chemicals, and thus their potential for cancer causation is extremely low. [Ames believes that "to eat your veggies" is the best way to prevent cancer.]

There is no evolutionary pressure to create minds capable of forming sciences; it just happened. Evolutionary pressure has not led to higher rates of reproduction for people capable of solving scientific problems or creating new scientific ideas. So if, in fact, the science-forming capacities evolved for other reasons, it would not be too surprising if those particular structures that have developed proved to be rather special in their nature, reflecting the contingencies of their evolution or the working of physical law.

I think people have to remember where we were in 2009. We were losing 800,000 jobs a month. We had an unemployment rate in double digits. We had poverty rates soaring. We had kids who were food insecure. Today in 2016, we have a lot less unemployment, a lot less poverty, and a lot fewer kids who are food insecure.

Now, the president would like to do tax reform, which would obviously lower rates for most people in America and make the tax code fair and get rid of loopholes and special treatment. But absent tax reform, the president believes the right way to get our fiscal house in order is ask the wealthy to pay their fair share.

Democracy suits Europeans today partly because it is associated with the triumph of capitalism and partly because it involves less commitment or intrusion into their lives than any of the alternatives. Europeans accept democracy because they no longer believe in politics. It is for this reason that we find both high levels of support for democracy in cross-national opinion polls and high rates of political apathy.

We don't have a whole lot of people living hand-to-mouth in the Writers Guild, we get paid really well, and a lot of the things we fought for, in my case, I can negotiate. I can negotiate higher DVD rates or anything I want, it's not going to be a minimum basic agreement. But I do think it was important to stand up to them. I do think that we got things in the deal that we wouldn't have gotten had we not stood up to them.

With the rather stable ratio of labor force to total population, a high rate of increase in per capita product means a high rate of increase in product per worker; and, with average hours of work declining, it means still higher growth rates in product per man-hour.

Our true choice is not between tax reduction on the one hand and the avoidance of large federal deficits on the other. It is increasingly clear that no matter what party is in power, so long as our national security needs keep rising, an economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenues to balance our budget, just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits.

Once you have an equalization instrument in place, as you have in Canada, there arise tremendous bureaucratic values - bureaucratic rent so to speak - in maintaining the system that you have. To shift to a system that paid the transfers directly to individuals, by having differential rates of federal income tax levied to adjust to provincial fiscal capacities, which would be my preference, you would have huge bureaucratic opposition. People would try to protect the rents they have in the current system of institutions.

I'm not a doctor, nor am I a member of the military. What I am is an appreciative, concerned American citizen, who was horrified when I heard about the horrendous rates of suicide (22 per day) and PTSD/TBI within our military. As such, I felt compelled to reach out to anyone who cared to listen, to try to help with this terrible situation. This is not just life and death - it is life and death for those who defend our freedom.

Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science, in all of biology. The key to our being here now is time, 4.54 billion (Earth) years of time. Nuclear fission wasn't discovered until long after Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace published their original books and papers, for example. Our ability to measure atomic masses wasn't developed until long after their deaths. These features of nature enabled us to reckon the age of the Earth and compare it with speciation rates here.

We're trying our best to develop sort of strategies. We have already turned into law a labor reform law that will allow for more opportunities to ensue. We have also established a permits law that will facilitate permits in Puerto Rico. We are about to roll out a comprehensive tax reform that will enhance the base and will reduce the rates in Puerto Rico.

It was an easy thing to tax for a young country. And then gradually we moved to property taxes, manufacturing taxes, and the income tax was the answer to a populist demand: Let's go after the rich guys. We got into World War I, and they raised the rates and started taxing the rich. Then we got into World War II, and that's when they taxed everybody, because they just needed more revenue.

Contrary to the rhetoric emanating from the American left, the 'rich' are currently paying a lot more than 'their fair share.' It is only a handful of mega-rich, those whose entire incomes are derived from dividends and capital gains, rather than salaries or business profits, who have the ability to pay lower tax rates than some members of the middle class. The left knows this but continues to build their 'freeloading millionaire' straw man because it makes good politics.

The reason this system can’t be overthrown in this country,” Walter said, “is all about freedom. The reason the free market in Europe is tempered by socialism is that they’re not so hung up on personal liberties there. They also have lower population growth rates, despite comparable income levels. The Europans are all-around more rational, basically. And the conversation about rights in this country isn’t rational. It’s taking place on the level of emotion, and class resentments, which is why the right is so good at exploiting it.

Communication media enabled collective action on new scales, at new rates, among new groups of people, multiplied the power available to civilizations and enabled new forms of social interaction. The alphabet enabled empire and monotheism, the printing press enabled science and revolution, the telephone enabled bureaucracy and globalization, the internet enabled virtual communities and electronic markets, the mobile telephone enabled smart mobs and tribes of info-nomads.

While spay neuter is important, our goal has never been no more births, even though reducing birth rates might help. Our goal has been and is, and has always been no more killing. And when you focus on the no more killing part, spay neuter actually takes a backseat to all those other programs like foster care, and adoptions, and helping people overcome the challenges they face that cause them to surrender their animals.

I do know that all of the Michigan delegation worked very hard as related to the revival of the auto industry. There was really a choice between bankruptcy and liquidation. There was no one that was willing to come up not only with the cash to keep them afloat but also to serve the warranties of everyone, you and I that drive all these cars. There was no one that could have picked up those pieces other than the federal government. [The auto bailout was] bipartisan from the get-go. [Without it,] Michigan would have hit 40 percent unemployment rates.

The Fed has one power that is unique to it alone: it enables the creation of money out of thin air. Sometimes it makes vast new amounts. Sometimes it makes lesser amounts. The money takes a variety of forms and enters the system in various ways. And the Fed does this through techniques such as open-market operations, changing reserve ratios, and manipulating interest rates, operations that all result in money creation.

Industrialized countries have disproportionately more cancers than countries with little or no industry (after adjusting for age and population size). One half of all the world's cancers occur in people living in industrialized countries, even though we are only one-fifth of the world's population. Closely tracking industrialization are breast cancer rates, which are highest in North America and northern Europe, intermediate in southern Europe and Latin America, and lowest in Asia and Africa.

Only after realising that routine immunisations were dangerous did I achieve a substantial drop in infant death rates. The worst vaccine of all is the whooping cough vaccine... it is responsible for a lot of deaths and for a lot of infants suffering irreversible brain damage. In susceptible infants, it knocks their immune systems about, leading to irreparable brain damage, or severe attacks or even deaths from diseases like pneumonia or gastro-enteritis and so on.

Studies indicate that vegetarians often have lower morbidity and mortality rates. . . . Not only is mortality from coronary artery disease lower in vegetarians than in non-vegetarians, but vegetarian diets have also been successful in arresting coronary artery disease. Scientific data suggest positive relationships between a vegetarian diet and reduced risk for obesity, coronary artery disease, hypertension, diabetes mellitus, and some types of cancer.

A range of studies shows there is no evidence immigrants commit more crime than native-born Americans. In fact, first generation immigrants are predisposed to lower crime rates than native-born Americans. The two cities in this country most impacted by undocumented immigrants, you would think of the New York City with over 500,000 and Los Angeles, with a similar amount. Both those cities are among the safest in the free world.

The history of taxation shows that taxes which are inherently excessive are not paid. The high rates inevitably put pressure upon the taxpayer to withdraw his capital from productive business and invest it in tax-exempt securities or to find other lawful methods of avoiding the realization of taxable income. The result is that the sources of taxation are drying up; wealth is failing to carry its share of the tax burden; and capital is being diverted into channels which yield neither revenue to the Government nor profit to the people.

Church attendance rates among white Americans without a college education have dropped pretty significantly. People with college degrees are more likely to go to church than people without college degrees among the white working class.

The daily grinding of evolution, as accelerated by technology, churns out more and more complex organisms, with higher rates of energy use, and with increasing specialization. Minds are the ideal way to express complexity, energy density, increasing specialization, expanding diversity -- all in one system. Mindedness is what evolution produces. Mindedness is what technology wants, too.

The problem is that you're creating a system of bubble finance where interest rates are so low that people can speculate. An asset value goes up. You put it up as collateral. You borrow against it. You buy more of the asset. You then take the rising asset. You borrow against it again. This is the nature of what's going on in the world. This isn't an excess of real savings. This is an excess of artificial credit that's being fueled by all the central banks.

Here's why I think the public service jobs are almost unavoidable: When we have downturns in the economy - and we will, for we haven't repealed the business cycle - unemployment will build, yet we no longer have any safety net. What are we going to do? Unless we decide to pull out all the stops and lower interest rates immediately and risk turning a recession into wild inflation, we're going to have to figure out some way of providing some more, not job security, but employment security.

The government has brought on the housing problem, partly by these very low interest rates, which encouraged many people to go way out on a limb. They've brought it on by highly restrictive building policies, which have caused housing prices to skyrocket artificially. And they've brought it on by the Community Reinvestment Act, which presumes that politicians are better able to tell investors where to put their money than the investors themselves are. When you put all that together, you get something like what you have.

Near the top of the market, investors are extraordinarily optimistic because they've seen mostly higher prices for a year or two. The sell-offs witnessed during that span were usually brief. Even when they were severe, the market bounced back quickly and always rose to loftier levels. At the top, optimism is king, speculation is running wild, stocks carry high price/earnings ratios, and liquidity has evaporated. A small rise in interest rates can easily be the catalyst for triggering a bear market at that point.

In these days before antiseptics, doctors themselves also suffered high mortality rates. Florence Nightingale, a nurse during the Crimean War (1853-1856), watched one particularly inept surgeon cut both himself and, somehow, a bystander while blundering about during an amputation. Both men contracted an infection and died, as did the patient. Nightingale commented that it was the only surgery she'd ever seen with 300 percent mortality.

A tax cut means higher family income and higher business profits and a balanced federal budget....As the national income grows, the federal government will ultimately end up with more revenues. Prosperity is the real way to balance our budget. By lowering tax rates, by increasing jobs and income, we can expand tax revenues and finally bring our budget into balance.

President Trump repeatedly says that "America is the highest-taxed country in the world." This is an alternative fact. We pay less in taxes, and our government spends less, as a share of our total wealth, than our counterparts in Western Europe and East Asia. But Trump is right when it comes to corporate tax rates; the U.S. corporate income tax right is among the highest in the world.

Mortgage is one of the most popular deductions. It costs the Treasury about $103 billion a year. Now that's money we could use to treat wounded veterans or reduce the deficit or fill the border. Instead, we give it a subsidy to homeowners, and it goes mainly to the richest homeowners in America, because only one third of Americans itemize their deductions. It doesn't work. Many countries have gotten rid of the mortgage interest deduction. Almost all of them have higher homeownership rates than we do.

What you don't see on television is people dying today because they can't get to a doctor and they can't afford prescription drugs. That's why they are also dying. They are dying in Iraq because they are poor and they have gone into the military because they can't afford to go to college. They're dying because they're living in communities where asthma rates are extremely high because the air is filthy. The suffering of the poor and working class people is a virtual nonissue for the media. But that is the reality.

Most important, [research on affirmative action] has completely failed to show that affirmative action ever closes the academic gap between minorities and whites. And failing in this, affirmative action also fails to help blacks achieve true equality with whites - the ultimate measure of which is parity in skills and individual competence. Without this underlying parity there can never be true equality in employment, income levels, rates of home ownership, educational achievement and the rest.

There are going to be a lot of questions, not just in my country, but across the Middle East. Is Israel going to continue to be "Fortress Israel"? Or, as we all hope, become accepted into the neighborhood, which I believe is the only way we can move forward in harmony. And no matter what's happening in the Middle East - the Arab Spring, et cetera, the economic challenges, high rates of unemployment - the emotional, critical issue is always the Israeli-Palestinian one.

Even in areas like the most depressed region of India in terms of female education, namely Rajasthan, which has [one of] the lowest female literacy [rates] in India. Even there, 80 to 90 percent of the parents would like their girls to go to school. And indeed, about 80 percent would like them to be made compulsory.

The young love and cherish people and places from which they receive the skills and the emotional support which enable them to make it in the world or to meet their basic human needs. The same people and places are often the first recipients of the frustration and anger--violence, vandalism, disrespect--of young people who are not making it well in the world. I suspect that this is the reason that personal and school property violence is increasing more rapidly than school burglary and dropout rates.

Reinvigorating the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, making sure that in our Department of Education, where we see evidence of black boys being suspended at substantially higher rates than white boys for the same behavior, in the absence of that kind of rigorous enforcement of the nondiscrimination principle, then the long-standing biases that I believe have weakened, but are still clearly present in our society, assert themselves in ways that usually disadvantage African Americans.

Target prices? How that works? I know quite a bit about farm policy. I come from Indiana, which is a farm state. Deficiency payments - which are the key - that is what gets money into the farmer's hands. We got loan, uh, rates, we got target, uh, prices, uh, I have worked very closely with my senior colleague, (Indiana Sen.) Richard Lugar, making sure that the farmers of Indiana are taken care of.