Arthur Laffer Quotes

I have never heard of an economy being taxed into prosperity.

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.

Whoever heard of a poor man spending himself into wealth? It’s dumb. But we try stimulus spending all of the time.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.’

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.