K&C Quotables

Some notable quotes from Friday night's Kudlow & Company:

The Smart Investor This is one of those times when you have to be very discriminating when you talk about the “economy.” Because the “economy” includes things that are in outright depression like housing, and it includes things that are in an outright boom like technology. For instance, high-tech industrial production is at all-time highs, and going at roaring growth rates, even as overall industrial production has flattened out a little bit in the slowdown. So, just as people say, ‘It’s not a stock market, it’s a market of stocks,’ it’s not an “economy.” It’s a portfolio of micro-economies. And the smart investor looks at these sectors, one at a time, and figures out the winners and the losers. [The smart investor] steps aside from some of this falsely macro analysis where you try to make one size fits all. We are in a diversified situation.

-Don Luskin, chief investment officer at Trend Macro

Washington’s Attack on Coal I think cap-and-trade is just crazy. Because most of the coal use increase in the world, about 97 percent, is outside the United States. So if we’re really concerned about climate change, it won’t matter what we do. And all these new rules effectively just increase carbon emissions around the world, they don’t do anything to truly decrease carbon emissions…We’re fortunate at Massey to benefit from the coal use around the world because we export a lot of coal. But as far as getting free of imported energy in this country, the policies are exactly the reverse of what they ought to be…It just doesn’t make any sense at all because the world is going to use coal. And if the U.S. doesn’t use it, we’re going to be disadvantaged.

-Don Blankenship, chairman/CEO of Massey Energy

Global Warming Hoax Manmade global warming is increasingly found to be a hoax, that it is not true. And our responses to this [hoax] through cap-and-trade is going to raise the price of energy. It’s going to make Americans less competitive. And then guess what’s going to happen? Congress is going to come in and try to correct a problem that it created. And the so-called solutions to the problems that they create will create other problems…Americans need to be aware that this whole global warming argument is a way for the government to come in and control our lives. That’s the whole agenda behind these environmentalists. They want government to have greater power to control our lives.

-Walt Williams, professor of economics at George Mason University

More on Mac Let’s remember that [John McCain is] the only candidate running for president who stood up and said the Farm Bill – which just passed – is an abomination. It’s an abomination because it subsidizes American agriculture at a time when, as you point out, food prices are at record highs. And it is also a bill laden with pork—absolutely laden with pork.

-Carly Fiorina, RNC Victory Chair, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard