Chuck Grassley Quotes

Where we're coming down is we currently have $787 billion of stimulus that's been passed. We're certainly focusing on spending that money as quickly and as efficiently and as transparently as we can. We think that's absolutely the right strategy.

Larger deficits are necessary and proper means to mitigate unemployment as the far greater evil in terms of human welfare.

President Obama is traveling around the country, proposing a stimulus bill that has already failed once. Instead of having an honest discussion about whether or not a plan that already failed once will fail again, the establishment would rather distract the American people with gossip.

I was in the room with, you know, more than a dozen Republicans trying to negotiate the stimulus. Most of them decided the politics of the situation meant they should walk away, even if it wasn't responsible in terms of what our country needed right then.

I supported the stimulus package.

What do you think a stimulus is? It's spending - that's the whole point! Seriously.

The economy is too weak right now. We need to jump-start it. The American Jobs Act will provide that jump-start, to help us into next year and the year after that.

As a former member of President Obama's economic team, I have a soft spot for the fiscal stimulus legislation he signed just a month after his inauguration.

And taking more money out of the private economy and having the government perform as it has poorly done with the stimulus I don't think is the right way to go.

If we don't get this economy going, the numbers that represent this stimulus package are going to be small compared to the loss of revenue to the federal government for our economy.

Within the U.S., the Obama presidency will be mainly measured by the success or failure of his economic policies. And here, I fear, the monstrous stimulus package with which this administration stumbled out of the gate will prove to be Obama's Waterloo.

We have to change course. And we have to do so now. That is why I worked with my colleagues in Washington to pass the Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

The vaunted Democratic stimulus bill has failed to stimulate anything other than a few federal bureaucrats.

Very clearly, government investment can and should be used to support economic growth.

The present Stimulus Bill sets up the equivalent commission in the United States similar to that which is in England.

The bill that was about jobs, jobs, jobs has turned into a bill that's about spending, spending, spending.

What the president announced yesterday, is that somehow magically, if we just continue to prime the pump of taxpayer dollars, we're going to see magically an economic recovery.

The American people know the economy is too weak. Too many of them are suffering. So the question for Washington is, are we going to continue to play political games and - and - or are we going to say, we can do something right now to create jobs, to put money in the pockets of the middle-class, hire construction workers, teachers, veterans?

Surely, the best and most effective measure is to get the economy moving and shorten the period of recession or slowdown. That's the rationale for Gordon Brown's 'fiscal stimulus' and it sounds like a good one to me.

Infrastructure investment can boost economic growth and employment, and, in fact, it is fiscally neutral.

Yes. We do think that the stimulus package is raising GDP and raising employment relative to what would have happened otherwise.

And so we have to be careful with looking at additional stimulus that we don't provoke an increase in the bond rate and then offset a lot of the stimulus we've already got.

Actually, I have been very supportive of a very robust stimulus package from day one. I think this economy has to have a major stimulus initiative because the only group with liquidity is the federal government.

Even if the government spends itself into bankruptcy and the economy still does not recover, Keynesians can always say that it would have worked if only the government had spent more.

If you increase taxes now on - at any level, it's going to make it harder to create jobs And we've lost 2 1/2 million jobs since the stimulus package passed. We're at 9.6 unemployment. So I don't think we tax too little, I think we spend too much.