Yanis Varoufakis Quotes
Berlin has traditionally backed a rules-based eurozone in which every member state is responsible for its own finances, including bank bailouts, with political union limited to a fiscal overlord's possessing veto power over national budgets that violate the rules.
Varoufakis, Yanis. "Germany's European Conundrum." Project Syndicate, 15 Feb. 2016.
Although the Professor was often right about this technique, at the time he made this statement, the Clinton administration was actually cutting spending and using much of the revenue to pay for the deficit—just the opposite of what the Professor was worried about. It was successful and the deficit was eliminated and surpluses were projected. However the succeeding administration more closely followed the professor’s pattern and increased spending enormously for serious needs, but also cut taxes, so that we went during the Bush administration from the largest projected surplus in American history to the greatest deficit in American history.
After many years of deficit financing, Clinton finally produced a balanced budget and together with his Secretary, of the Treasury, Robert Rubin, actually developed an economy which was producing a huge annual surplus that would soon eliminate the national debt. However, when George W. Bush replaced Clinton after two terms, Bush was unable to manage the budget any better than the other aspects of the Presidency. He cut taxes dramatically and even after it was clear that the Clinton surplus was squandered, he continued tax reductions and even increased them while increasing government spending creating the biggest government in history and went from our largest surplus to our largest deficit in his 8 years.
This is a particularly interesting historical quotation. It shows that when FDR was first elected, he had a classic view of deficit spending. However, above all, Roosevelt was a pragmatist and not an ideologue. Faced with the Great Depression that was not getting much better, Roosevelt turned around, changed his mind and policy about deficits and embarked on the “pump priming” approach of injecting substantial Federal spending into the economy and accepting the deficits in order to improve the situation which had been stagnant. FDR’s new policy staved off total disaster, but few remember that his great success was a total reversal of his earlier views.
Ioannis "Yanis" Varoufakis is a Greek-Australian economist and politician. A former academic, he has been Secretary-General of MeRA25, a left-wing political party, since he founded it in 2018. A former member of Syriza, he served as Minister of Finance from January to July 2015 under Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. Varoufakis was a member of the Hellenic Parliament for Athens B from January to September 2015; he regained a parliamentary seat in July 2019.
