Robert Kuttner Quotes

By default, we have created a "system" of nursing-home care for the aged in which middle-class people pay exorbitant rates to for-profit nursing-home entrepreneurs - and then when private resources are consumed and the patient qualifies as a pauper, the nursing home begins billing Medicaid. This is precisely the antithesis of social citizenship; instead of the poor being accorded the dignity associated with the middle class, equality of treatment is achieved by making the middle class undergo pauperization.

The economic illusion is the belief that social justice is bad for economic growth.

It is more than a little ironic that "capital accumulation" once a rather tendentious Marxian view of a supposed capitalist obsession, should have become - of all things - Wall Street's own slogan.

Henry Ford, in a sense, was the first Keynesian. He paid his assembly workers high wages so they could afford to buy his cars.

Not surprisingly, extensive effort in Britain and America goes into finding tax shelter. the system is "efficient" for the shelter industry, not for the economy.

Technological change is beneficial only when other jobs replace the ones lost.

But of course you can have your cake and eat it, too - if you decide to to bake a second cake. And you may well find that baking two cakes does not take twice the work of baking one.

If social security depresses savings rates, it is only because it is unfunded.

Political conservatives have focused on tax reduction as an economic growth strategy for three reasons. First it is self-serving; it saves rich people lots of money. Second, it comports with their ideological allegiance to laissez-faire economics. And third, tax incentives are less intrusive to business-as-usual than any other form of government planning.

We are already well down the road toward a managed-trade regime. It would be far better to acknowledge that reality, and seek a set of reasonable rules, than to pretend that Ricardian trade is the norm and allow mercantilist states to overwhelm U.S. industry and ratchet down wages, in the name of free trade.

In America, we build public housing by creating lucrative inducements to private developers, and then wax indignant at the public waste.

If got a big head start on the 707 from multibillion-dollar military contracts to develop an air force transport, is that a sin against free trade?

In practice, a good deal of the outcomes produced by the market reflect nothing more than luck - good or bad.

Keynes, like Freud and Marx, deserves to be read in the original, not through the glosses of his lesser disciples.

Technological advance often thrives in sheltered and subsidized markets, which defy free trade.