“We ought to be opening up our borders to skilled labour from all parts of the world because [the state of the world is as follows: ].”

Without the triggers, that tax cut is irreponsible fiscal policy. Eventually, I think that will be the consensus view.

I’ve always argued that this country has benefited immensely from the fact that we draw people from all over the world.

By far the most significant event in finance during the past decade has been the extraordinary development and expansion of financial derivatives.

I didn’t believe in absolutes, moral or otherwise. If I couldn’t prove a proposition with facts and figures, it was without merit.

It is decidedly not true that “nice guys finish last,” as that highly original American baseball philosopher, Leo Durocher, was alleged to have said.

Excessive optimism shows the seeds of its own reversal in the form of imbalances that tend to grow over time.

Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights.

The worst have failed; investors no longer fund them and are not likely to in the future.

History demonstrates that participants in financial markets are susceptible to waves of optimism.

But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?

I think that real pressure is going to occur not by the initiation by the Federal Reserve, but by the markets themselves.

The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default.

We need, in effect, to make the phantom ‘lock-boxes’ around the trust fund real.

The process of innovation is, of course, never ending.

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value.

Anything that we can do to raise personal savings is very much in the interest of this country.

With a background in science I am extremely interested in the meeting ground of science, theology, and philosophy, especially the ethical questions at the border of science and theology.

My opponents are the people who gave up our borders.

Today, the number of migrants crossing is at a 30-year low. That’s because of years of bipartisan work on this issue.

Waiting is a huge part of being a refugee. You’re waiting at borders to get across. You’re waiting for transportation.

I think there’s no question that the barriers, the fences and in certain urban areas, the walls, have had an important effect in terms of increasing the manageability and the security of the border.

Cross-border trade is part of a single production process, and while apparently the Trump administration will seek to re-examine elements of that production platform, it is what it is and won’t be easily dismantled.

Six million jobs in the US depend on trade with Mexico. Ten border states – six in Mexico and four in the United States – combined have the third or fourth largest economy in the world.

The work the Mexicans are doing in terms of migration control on Mexico’s southern border is crucial to our own border security.