Economists From The United States

"People don’t work to pay taxes, they work to consume."

"Nations with the greatest stimulus spending had the deepest recessions — while those with the least stimulus spending performed the best. The bigger the spending stimulus, the slower the recovery. I also showed historically that spending has never been associated with faster growth of the US economy."

"In the 1970s, the more Congress spent, the higher unemployment rose, and it was not until government spending and taxes were cut in the early 1980s that unemployment started its long-term decline."

"Don’t confuse fiscal discipline with party label. All those parties are all fiscally unsound. I mean, every Republican wants to spend more. Every Democrat wants to spend more. It is not their money… They’re spending your money and my money."

"It's not Republican, it's not Democrat. Honestly, it's not liberal, it's not conservative ... It's economics … If you tax people who work and you pay people who don't work, don't be surprised when you get a lot of people not working."

"California is the highest-tax state in the nation and has been for a long time. It has the highest paid teachers in the nation, by far — $400 a month more than New Jersey — and yet California is the third lowest state on test scores for fourth and eighth grade English and math in the nation, and has been at the low level for a long, long time."

"Have you ever heard of a poor person spending himself into prosperity?"

"Governments are raising taxes for austerity and that doesn’t work. Poor people cannot spend themselves into wealth and governments cannot tax their economies into prosperity. If you tax people who work, and pay people who don’t work, don’t be surprised if you find a lot of people not working…"

"Both sides have a bad incentive. The people you tax, who do work, they are going to stop working. The people who learn to live getting income without working, they are going to work less too."

"The states that have large in-migrations of Hispanics are Florida, Texas and California. And Florida and Texas are way above average in educational achievement, while California’s the lowest, just about."

"Government doesn’t create resources. Government redistributes resources. For everyone the government bails out, there is someone they put into trouble dollar for dollar. You can’t bail someone out of trouble without putting someone else into trouble."

"Stimulus packages don’t work. Every president that I have ever heard of has wanted a free lunch. They just don’t get it."

"I don’t think we have to do it by government spending. My view is I’ve never heard of a poor person spending himself into prosperity. The government doesn’t create resources. The government redistributes them, and it redistributes them from workers and producers to people they get the resources based on some characteristic of the work effort. So what you really need to do is I think you need to incentivize producers, and what you need to go along, and my way of going would be Simpson-Bowles. Something to lower the tax rates, broaden the base, get rid of the loopholes. I mean really get a production base that officially starts, and that’s the way you really get out of this depression. The way we did in the Eighties to be honest with you."

"You can never bail someone out of trouble without putting someone else into trouble."

"As my former colleague Milton Friedman often said, ‘Government spending is taxation.’ Beyond the essential services government provides — such as roads, courts, schools, police and fire services, and the military — government spending doesn’t actually create resources. It just redistributes resources. For every beneficiary of government largesse, there’s someone who pays for that largesse."

"And you can’t have a prosperous economy when the government is way overspending, raising tax rates, printing too much money, over regulating and restricting free trade. It just can’t be done."

"In the 1990's, we had the largest cut in government spending as a share of GDP in the history of the U.S. In the 1990's, we were doing free trade, we passed NAFTA, we went through there. We were for lowering interest rates and controlling money far better. And we weren't regulating nearly as much. We had welfare reform and all of those wonderful things. We had the biggest tax cut in our nation's history. Any comparison between today and the 1990's, it's totally inappropriate. Bill Clinton, as bad a person as he was, was a good president."

"As my former colleague Milton Friedman used to say, ‘Government spending is taxation, pure and simple.’ Governments, when they spend the money, not only add to demand, they also reduce demand by taking the resources from the rest of society."

"Which would you rather have, capital lined up on your borders, trying to get into your country or trying to get out of your country? We are the capital magnet of this planet and we are the savior for not only people, for not only freedom, but also for capital."

"The trade deficit is the capital surplus and don't ever think of having a capital surplus as being a bad thing for our country."

"Sound money is the sine qua non of a prosperous society."

"The minimum wage is the black teenage unemployment act. It is the guaranteed way of holding the poor, the minorities and the disenfranchised out of the mainstream is if you price their original services too high."

"You know, without China there is no Wal-Mart and without Wal-Mart there is no middle class and lower class prosperity in the United States."

"If you like the post office and the Department of Motor Vehicles and you think they're run well, just wait till you see Medicare, Medicaid and health care done by the government."

"Over the past 100 years, there have been three major periods of tax-rate cuts in the U.S.: the Harding-Coolidge cuts of the mid-1920s; the Kennedy cuts of the mid-1960s; and the Reagan cuts of the early 1980s. Each of these periods of tax cuts was remarkably successful as measured by virtually any public policy metric."

"In 1994, Estonia became the first European country to adopt a flat tax, and its 26 percent flat tax dramatically energized what had been a faltering economy. Before adopting the flat tax, the Estonian economy was literally shrinking. In the eight years after 1994, Estonia experienced real economic growth - averaging 5.2 percent per year."

"People do not work, consume, or invest to pay taxes. They work and invest to earn after-tax income, and they consume to get the best buys after tax. Therefore, people are not concerned per se with taxes, but with after-tax results. Taxes and after-tax results are very similar, but have crucial differences."

"The Laffer Curve, by the way, was not invented by me."

"Resources don’t miraculously materialize out of thin air,… there is no free lunch."

"The notion of a Keynesian spending multiplier is right out of an Aesop fable. And who ever heard of a poor person spending himself into prosperity? No one!"

"Countries with the highest tax rates probably also have the highest unemployment rates. High tax rates certainly do not guarantee fiscal solvency."

"Economic freedom is extraordinarily important. It’s the freedom to do with your resources what you believe you should do. My dream has always been to make poor people rich, not rich people poor."

"While discussing President Ford's ‘WIN’ (Whip Inflation Now) proposal for tax increases, I supposedly grabbed my napkin and a pen and sketched a curve on the napkin illustrating the trade-off between tax rates and tax revenues. Wanniski named the trade-off ‘The Laffer Curve.’"

"I used the so-called Laffer Curve all the time in my classes and with anyone else who would listen to me to illustrate the trade-off between tax rates and tax revenues."

"Any further spread of nuclear weapons multiplies the possibilities of nuclear confrontation and magnifies the danger of diversion. Thus, if proliferation of weapons of mass destruction continues into Iran and remains in North Korea in the face of all ongoing negotiations, the incentives for other countries to follow the same path will become overwhelming. Considerations as these have induced former Senator Sam Nunn, former Secretary of Defense William Perry, former Secretary of State George Shultz, and I -- two Democrats and two Republicans -- to publish recommendations for systematically reducing and eventually eliminating reliance on nuclear weapons. We have a record of strong commitment to national defense and security. We continue to affirm the importance of adequate deterrent forces, and we do not want our recommendations to diminish essentials for the defense of free peoples while a process of adaptation to new realities is going on. At the same time, we reaffirm the objective of a world without nuclear weapons that has been proclaimed by every American President since President Eisenhower."

"George left us at a moment when our national arguments are too often vindicated by passion rather than reason, by the debasement of the adversary rather than the uplifting of purposes. He also believed that if you were blessed with great gifts, you had a responsibility to apply yourself, and if you cared about your country, you had a duty to defend and improve it. He was skilled in presenting his convictions, but above all practiced the art of making controversy superfluous by encouraging mutual respect. Trust, George used to say, is the coin of the realm."

"Gorbachev's impressionability also showed up in economics. He had been aware, from his travels outside the Soviet Union before assuming the leadership, that "people there . . . were better off than in our country." It seemed that "our aged leaders were not especially worried about our undeniably lower living standards, our unsatisfactory way of life, and our falling behind in the field of advanced technologies." But he had no clear sense of what to do about this. So Secretary of State Shultz, a former economics professor at Stanford, took it upon himself to educate the new Soviet leader. Shultz began by lecturing Gorbachev, as early as 1985, on the impossibility of a closed society being a prosperous society: "People must be free to express themselves, move around, emigrate and travel if they want to. . . . Otherwise they can't take advantage of the opportunities available. The Soviet economy will have to be radically changed to adapt to the new era." "You should take over the planning office here in Moscow," Gorbachev joked, "because you have more ideas than they have." In a way, this is what Shultz did. Over the next several years, he used his trips to that city to run tutorials for Gorbachev and his advisers, even bringing pie charts to the Kremlin to illustrate his argument that as long as it retained a command economy, the Soviet Union would fall further and further behind the rest of the developed world. Gorbachev was surprisingly receptive. He echoed some of Shultz's thinking in his 1987 book, Perestroika: "How can the economy advance," he asked, "if it creates preferential conditions for backward enterprises and penalizes the foremost ones?""

"Many of today's trading relationships actually make America more globally competitive. . . . Raising tariffs among the United States, Canada and Mexico will only weaken a well-oiled manufacturing machine that is driven by the high level of integration the three economies have in their supply chains. This integration makes the region as a whole more competitive vis-à-vis the world."

"Few people did as much to shape the trajectory of American diplomacy and American influence in the 20th century as George Shultz. He was a gentleman of honor and ideas, dedicated to public service and respectful debate, even into his 100th year on Earth. That's why multiple Presidents, of both political parties, sought his counsel. I regret that, as President, I will not be able to benefit from his wisdom, as have so many of my predecessors."

"When current events set us thinking about which former Washington policymaker might have something interesting to say about this story or that story, the name of George Shultz inevitably comes to mind."

"[A] revenue-neutral carbon tax would benefit all Americans by eliminating the need for costly energy subsidies while promoting a level playing field for energy producers."

"We should say we think a big element in the process of seeking peace [in the Middle East] is the acceptance of Israel's existence and so we´re going to go around to all our friends in Europe and Asia and elsewhere and say let´s accept Israel´s right to exist - and a way of doing that is to move our embassy to west Jerusalem. As long as the embassy is in Tel Aviv, it sort of says we´re camping out."

"We may make progress only by freeing ourselves from the rut of the past, but without this rut an orderly society would hardly be possible in the first place."

"In an age which no longer waits patiently through this life for the rewards of the next, it is a crushing spiritual blow to lose one's sense of participation in mankind's journey, and to see only a huge milling-around, a collective living-out of lives with no larger purpose than the days which each accumulates. When we estrange ourselves from history we do not enlarge, we diminish ourselves, even as individuals. We subtract from our lives one meaning which they do in fact possess, whether we recognize it or not. We cannot help living in history. We can only fail to be aware of it. If we are to meet, endure, and transcend the trials and defeats of the future — for trials and defeats there are certain to be — it can only be from a point of view which, seeing the future as part of the sweep of history, enables us to establish our place in that immense procession in which is incorporated whatever hope humankind may have."

"The rise of the welfare state, on the one hand, and of the military bureaucracy, on the other, are instances of the manner in which technology is enforcing a socialization of life."

"In the end the question is: Who is to be master, man or his machines? As long as the control over technology rests primarily on economic calculation, the victor is not likely to be man."

"For it is certain that the future will bring realities for which our traditional optimism fails to prepare us and against which our economic momentum fails to arm us."

"The basic function of the military — to achieve victory over the enemy — has been rendered obsolete by the fact that "victory" and defeat are almost certain to be achieved simultaneously."

"The total amount of electric power generated by India would not suffice to light up New York City."

"Karl Marx did not call for an opposition to the forces of history. On the contrary he accepted all of them, the drive of technology, the revolutionizing effects of democratic striving, even the vagaries of capitalism, as being indeed the carriers of a brighter future."