Christina Romer Quotes

If the fiscal cliff occurs, I don't think the Federal Reserve has the tools to offset that event.

The insane pursuit of the holy grail of a balanced budget in the end is going to drive the economy into a depression.

Deficits must be cut, yes, but the rush to austerity risks undermining the fragile global recovery.

You cannot spend your way out of recession or borrow your way out of debt.

If there's a severe recession, the automatic stabilizers will come into effect, and we will still try to reduce the structural deficit, but we will not try to keep cutting the budget so that we keep worsening a severe recession.

The economy is terrible it's been terrible for years now, and the reason it's bad is not because of a debt-ceiling vote. The reason it's bad is because we have people who believe that by making government bigger by keeping people on unemployment checks and on welfare we're going to dig us out of this mess.

Even people on the liberal side are starting to worry about going off a fiscal cliff.

In the middle of a recession, where we're just climbing out of it, where the economy -unemployment is still at 9.7 percent, the idea of raising taxes and reducing spending is a prescription for disaster.

In the past, proactive fiscal polices almost always meant just more investment and an increase in the fiscal deficit.

In point of fact, 'Simpson-Bowles' has become a symbol, or SimBowl, rather than an actual plan, political shorthand for the process of long-term deficit reduction.

We've unveiled the most comprehensive reform budget people have seen in a generation.

Clinton took very tough decisions on the economy.

The U.S. have printed money; they intend to tax the rich in order to avoid the fiscal cliff. These are things that sees anyone who dares to propose them in Greece and Europe labeled an extremist, when at the same time, it's what Obama does.

The caricature of what George Osborne is doing on the fiscal side is absurd. If you read some of the commentary, particularly from the left, you would think he was turning the clock back to the 1930s.

This economy is not getting better and the president's policies are the reason.

It's going to be difficult to stimulate the real economy in the U.S. at a faster rate than 2 percent and perhaps even less if we have that fiscal cliff in December or January 2013.

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

You just don't see people running through the streets to have the deficit cut.

As austerity measures were foisted upon Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and other highly indebted countries, growth was rendered even more elusive, aggravating unemployment

If, before 2020, there is a choice between further spending cuts, more borrowing and tax rises, the priority must be to avoid tax increases. They would disrupt consumption, employment and investment.

There is a broad consensus, not only in the United States but in most of the world, that if you are in an economic downturn, you need to stimulate. Germany seems to be an exception.

The polls are with us on this. They say the American people, more than anything, want to see spending cuts rather than tax increases.

Let's be clear: raising taxes during a very slow recovery is likely to lead to another recession, and it will do absolutely nothing to balance the budget.

Governments need to lay out a credible path to reducing their deficits in the medium term, but without excessively enfeebling an already weak recovery. That means raising retirement ages and overhauling pensions; putting in place the budget rules and institutions that will curb future profligacy; and favouring spending cuts over tax increases.

The sky isn't falling. We're not going to have more meteors hit because of sequestration.