Arthur Laffer Quotes

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…

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Sound money is the sine qua non of a prosperous 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.

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.