Arthur Laffer Quotes

The income effects in an economy always sum to zero.

I mean, everyone agrees with stress tests for banks. I mean that’s clear. But banks should do that on their own. And they should worry about their own capital functioning. That’s what they should do. It shouldn’t be a government function.

And let the Fed sell bonds to bring bank reserves back down to required reserve levels, so we have restraint on bank lending and bank issuances of liability.

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.

I feel very uncomfortable with respect to looking at inflation.

The story of how the Laffer Curve got its name begins with a 1978 article by Jude Wanniski in ‘The Public Interest‘ entitled, ‘Taxes, Revenues, and the Laffer Curve.’

The linkage between tax rates and public services is, if not non-existent, negative.

My godfather was a man named Justin Dart. Some of you may remember Justin Dart. My younger son‘s name is Justin, named after Justin Dart. I was executor of his estate, and he was my godfather. I first really got time to spend with Ronald Reagan with Justin Dart personally, one-on-one.

Sometimes, tax rate increases create the very problems that the spending is intended to cure. In other words, the tax rate increases reduce economic growth; they shrink the pie; they cause more poverty, more despair, more unemployment, which are all things government is trying to alleviate with spending.

Let me just try to give you sort of the intuitive one here on the stimulus funds. If you have a two-person economy – let’s imagine we have two farms, and that’s the whole world, just two farms. If one of those farmers gets unemployment benefits, who do you think pays for him? Am I going way over your heads today?

Ask me whether inflation represents longer-term problem. I think there’s a potential there for excess reserves to create problems.

People can change the volume, the location and the composition of their income, and they can do so in response to changes in government policies.

In 2010 the U.S. will have a payroll tax rate increase, an estate tax increase, and income tax increases. There’s also a tax increase coming in 2010 on carried interest. This rate will rise from its current level of 15 percent to 35 percent, and then it will rise again in 2011.

It has always amazed me how tax cuts don’t work until they take effect. Mr. Obama‘s experience with deferred tax rate increases will be the reverse. The economy will collapse in 2011.

When you look at the government, when the government collects a buck, it’s not free. They have to spend resources, the IRS, audits, all this sort of crap, to collect the dollar. I’m not assuming any Laffer curve effect here at all. There are just transactions costs of collecting that money.

The United States is a nation located in the global economy, and we get enormous, enormous benefits from dealing with foreigners.

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.

And just remember, every dollar we spend on outsourcing is spent on U.S. goods or invested back in the U.S. market. That’s accounting.

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.

I’ve been truly blessed. I’ve been a fly on the wall of history. I’ve been just so many lucky places just by chance and serendipity, and obviously a huge portion of that serendipity had to do with my relationship with the real president, Ronald Reagan.

The Laffer Curve illustrates the basic idea that changes in tax rates have two effects on tax revenues: the arithmetic effect and the economic effect.

Raising taxes is not a frivolous venture that you do on the editorial page of ‘The New Republic,’ for god sakes. It’s something that you really have to think about and go through carefully.

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.

Because tax cuts create an incentive to increase output, employment, and production, they also help balance the budget by reducing means-tested government expenditures. A faster-growing economy means lower unemployment and higher incomes, resulting in reduced unemployment benefits and other social welfare programs.

Obama is a fine, very impressive person. He really is. Unfortunately, everything that he is doing in economics is exactly wrong. He is a crappy president.

What you do by having an income tax rate reduction across the board, you really provide great incentives for people to work, produce, and increase output. So I would support a carbon tax in replacement for a progressive income tax.

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

People can also change the timing of when they earn and receive their income in response to government policies.

I’m worried about economic growth in the United States. And the creation of jobs, output, and employment. And if you tax people who work, you’re going to get less people working. And what the carbon tax would do is remove the tax from people who work and put it on a product in the ground.

When you look at the world, everyone in the world who cares about his or her family wants to have a major portion of their assets in the United States because we are the growth country and the freedom loving country.