Arthur Laffer Quotes

• 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.

  Arthur Laffer

• With the shrinking of the US economy, and it’s shrinking very rapidly, you not only have more money, but you also have fewer goods. That’s a classic double-whammy on inflation.

  Arthur Laffer

• 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.

  Arthur Laffer

• 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.

  Arthur Laffer

• What we’re talking about is the price of goods, all goods, in terms of money. That has nothing to do with unemployment, except for the fact that you get fewer goods. And when you have more money and fewer goods, the amount of dollars per good goes up. It goes up because there are fewer goods and it goes up because there is more money.

  Arthur Laffer

• What I’m not saying is that all government spending is bad. It’s not – far, far from it, but there is no free lunch, as a former colleague of mine used to say. There is no public tooth fairy. Father Christmas does not work on the Treasury staff this year. You can never bail someone out of trouble without putting someone else into trouble.

  Arthur Laffer

• We are having the single worst recovery the U.S. has had since the Great Depression. I don’t care how you measure it. The East Coast knows it. The West Coast knows it. North, South, old, young, everyone knows it’s the worst recovery since the Great Depression.

  Arthur Laffer

• The truth of the matter of is that stimulus money not only doesn’t stimulate; it actually reduces output.

  Arthur Laffer

• 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.

  Arthur Laffer

• 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.

  Arthur Laffer

• The income effects in an economy always sum to zero.

  Arthur Laffer

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

  Arthur Laffer

• 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.

  Arthur Laffer

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

  Arthur Laffer

• 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?

  Arthur Laffer

• 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.

   

  Arthur Laffer

• I think the inflation prospects for the U.S. over the next five or six, seven years, are quite serious. You cannot have a bumper crop in apples without the value or the price of each apple falling. The Fed has had the largest increase in the monetary base in the history of the U.S., from colonial times to the present, times ten.

  Arthur Laffer

• 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.

  Arthur Laffer

• Government spending is taxation. When you look at this, I’ve never heard of a poor person spending himself into prosperity; let alone I’ve never heard of a poor person taxing himself into prosperity.

  Arthur Laffer

• 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.

  Arthur Laffer

Arthur Laffer (22)

Birth:	14th August, 1940
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Economist, Professor

About

Arthur Betz Laffer was born in Youngstown, Ohio. He is an American economist who first gained prominence during the Reagan administration as a member of Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board. Laffer is best known for the Laffer curve, an illustration of the theory that there exists some tax rate between 0% and 100% that will result in maximum tax revenue for governments. He is the author and co-author of many books and newspaper articles, including Supply Side Economics: Financial Decision-Making for the 80s. Laffer is Policy Co-Chairman of the Free Enterprise Fund. Laffer earned a B.A. in Economics from Yale University and an M.B.A. and a Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University. He has stated publicly that he voted for President Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996. Laffer references President Clinton's conservative fiscal policies as cornerstones of his support. Laffer also regularly writes opinion articles in The Wall Street Journal.

Related Authors

• Paul Samuelson
• Douglass North
• Nikolai Bukharin
• Arthur Laffer
• Clark Kerr
• Carlos Salinas de Gortari
• Toba Beta
• Henry Calvert Simons
• John Harsanyi
• Mark Zandi

Advertisement

Today's Anniversary - 23rd January

Births

• 1950 - Richard Dean Anderson
• 1947 - Megawati Sukarnoputri
• 1947 - Thomas Carper
• 1953 - Antonio Villaraigosa
• 1897 - William Stephenson

Deaths

• 1947 - Pierre Bonnard
• 1996 - Norman MacCaig
• 1989 - Salvador Dalí
• 1993 - Thomas A. Dorsey
• 1981 - Samuel Barber