The people that make this country work the people who pay on their mortgages the people getting up and going to work striving in this recession to not participate in it they're not the enemy. They're the people that hire you. They're the people that are going to give you a job.

Quite frankly Barack Obama knows what it's like to pay a mortgage and student loans. He knows what it's like to watch a beloved family member in a medical crisis and worry that treatment is out of reach. Barack Obama knows our struggles. And my friends he shares our values.

The Tea Party was born out of the disgust many Americans felt early in the financial crisis upon learning that the federal government was even contemplating reducing the principal on some troubled mortgages.

However my parents - both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing quirk that would never pay a mortgage or secure a pension.

The one thing that offends me the most is when I walk by a bank and see ads trying to convince people to take out second mortgages on their home so they can go on vacation. That's approaching evil.

The highest-income Americans don't need tax-free health insurance mortgage interest deductions or deferred taxation on retirement funds.

Because when we think about the real facts: 44 million Americans without health insurance millions without jobs a 50-year high on mortgage foreclosures an historic high the third year in a row on personal bankruptcies.

Left to ourselves we might pick the wrong health insurance the wrong mortgage the wrong school for our kids why unless they stop us we might pick the wrong light bulb.

The future that I will not live to see is the one my children will live in. That's my immortality. And I shouldn't try to mortgage theirs for my benefit.

When I was a little kid I wrote this play about all these characters living in a haunted house. There was a witch who lived there and a mummy. When they were all hassling him this guy who bought the house - I can't believe I remember this - he said to them 'Who's paying the mortgage on this haunted house?' I thought that was really funny.