"Keep your eye on one thing and one thing only: how much government is spending, because that is the true tax. Every budget is balanced. There is no such thing as an unbalanced federal budget. You're paying for it. If you're not paying for it in the form of explicit taxes, you're paying for it indirectly in the form of inflation or in the form of borrowing. The thing that you keep your eye on is what government spends. And the real problem is to hold down government spending as a fraction of our income. And if you do that, you can stop worrying about the deficit."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Academics from the United StatesJews from the United StatesPeople from New York CityAgnostics from the United StatesEconomists from the United States
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Milton Friedman Speaks: Money and Inflation (full speech) (1978)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Milton Friedman
1912 – 2006
US-amerikanischer Ökonom und Nobelpreisträger
216 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Milton Friedman →
Related Quotes
"Now, when anybody starts talking about this [an all-volunteer force] he immediately shifts language. My army is 'volu…"
"Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more r…"
"The construction of hypotheses is a creative act of inspiration, intuition, invention; its essence is the vision of s…"
"I have no right to coerce someone else, because I cannot be sure that I'm right and he is wrong."
"Over the period covered by these data, a drastic change has occurred in the responsibilities undertaken by the state …"
"I say thank God for government waste. If government is doing bad things, it's only the waste that prevents the harm f…"
"The price system works so well, so efficiently, that we are not aware of it most of the time. We never realize how we…"
"A largely parallel example involving human behavior has been used elsewhere by Savage and me. Consider the problem of…"
"If we are to use effectively these abstract models and this descriptive material, we must have a comparable explorati…"
"Make politics an avocation, not a vocation."