Jack Monroe Quotes

Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea.

For a quarter-century, and changing only very recently, the main IMF prescription has been budgetary belt-tightening for patients much too poor to own belts. IMF led austerity has frequently resulted in riots, coups, and the collapse of public services.

Democracies can't handle austerity measures very well.

Government can’t deliver a free lunch to the country as a whole. It can, however, determine who pays for lunch.

Trickle down economics says that the best way to feed the birds is to give oats to the horse.

Austerity is a disaster for everyone but the rich…. It’s crap, but it’s dangerous crap..

Tax cuts for the rich defund the critical public programs on which American families depend.

When I see the sort of mindless tax cuts for the wealthy, cuts to education, I just think we've got it exactly backward in this country.

The growing inequality of wealth and income distribution is both a moral and economic problem. If the wealthy are unwilling to pay more taxes, then this is going to lead to spending cuts. And if you put off the table things like national defense, then you're going to end up cutting more and more out of programs that aid the poor. So, I think there are consequences to this idea that tolerance for inequality requires us to - to just do nothing to make the wealthy contribute a higher share of resources to fund the government.

Trickle-down did not work. It got us into the mess we were in, in 2008 and 2009. Slashing taxes on the wealthy hasn’t worked. And a lot of really smart, wealthy people know that. And they are saying, hey, we need to do more to make the contributions we should be making to rebuild the middle class.

The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.

The Republican agenda is a radical vision in which Medicaid is slashed to the bone - in which we start to balance the budget on the backs of, literally, our most vulnerable citizens.

He'll call that trickle-down. I call it Niagara Falls.

I hate big government, but I really hate a government that doesn't work. So when 'they say we either have to raise taxes or cut core services,' it's actually a 'false choice.'

You know and I know and economists know that trickle-down economics doesn't work.

But if they want to really think about the fiscal future of this country, then think about how we have moved from hundreds of billions of surpluses to hundreds of billions of deficits.

In the 1970s, New York City defaulted on its debt, and yes, the consequences were painful. Enrollment plummeted at City University campuses, which until then had offered free education. Seven thousand police officers were laid off. Crime skyrocketed. Services for the poor disappeared.

We're going to need to absorb some pain. The Republicans want to pile all the pain on people who can least afford it and the middle class and Democrats under his leadership want to make sure that we can address deficit reduction and continue to make investments and shared sacrifice is going to be imperative in order to be able to do that.

But such IMF pressure is very much helpful for me to push such a, you know, reform. So in this sense I think IMF is very much helpful for alien society.

Government has really been growing, a lot of largesse, but the people in the real world aren't. And that's what has to change. Government has no conformity at all with the real world.

You cannot carry on forever squeezing the productive bit of the economy in order to fund an unprecedented engorgement of the unproductive bit.

If the program goes off track again due to recession, this should not become a pretext for the imposition of more austerity measures.

The Republican Party is terrific at determining how a program will impact the federal budget, but we're not nearly as good as the Democrats in explaining to people how our agenda will directly benefit them and their families.

The flaw in, say, austerity, is that its success is predicated on the relative exactitude of math rather than the shifting, liquid imperfection of people's lives.

When you say fiscal responsibility, it seems to me that you really mean rich people keeping their money.