Top 15 Arthur Laffer Quotes

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

Rise the minimum wage is the best way of hurting the poor.

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.

You can't grow an economy, frankly, by over-taxing it.

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

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.