Joseph Stiglitz Quotes

My friend Paul Ryan talks about fiscal responsibility, but voted to put two wars on a credit card.

When is the last time we had a tax cut before going to war?

I love listening to these guys give us lectures about debt and deficits. I inherited a trillion-dollar deficit. ... This notion that somehow we caused the deficits is just wrong. It's just not true. ... If they start trying to give you a bunch of facts and figures suggesting that it's true, what they're not telling you is they baked all this stuff into the cake with those tax cuts and a prescription drug plan that they didn't pay for and the wars.

The fact is that a lot of the spending increases came during the Bush administration. Two unpaid for wars we got ourselves engaged in. A prescription drug plan that added enormous amounts to our spending, and the tax cuts at the high end that did not create jobs and create revenue coming.

The debt they ran up in the first year of the Obama administration is bigger than the last four years of the Bush combined.

When George W. Bush entered office, the national debt was $5 trillion. When he left, it was $10 trillion. I think the administration spent too much money.

I don't want to remember 2005 as a year that the government heaped unnecessary burdens upon American families. Stealing from the poor and middle class and giving to the rich, while increasing the deficit, is hardly responsible.

The Republicans in the House and the Bush administration are bankrupting this country.

Where is the politician who has not promised to fight to the death for lower taxes- and who has not proceeded to vote for the very spending projects that make tax cuts impossible?

This program that the Republican majority has taken us toward as a country is leading us to fiscal bankruptcy.

The first year of the Bush administration we used up all of the surplus and ended up just with the Social Security and Medicare surplus, and each year worse than the year before.

For the last 4 years, our Federal Government has produced the four biggest deficits in history, and the estimated 2006 deficit of $423 billion is projected to be the largest of all.

We had massive tax cuts in the early phases of the [George W.] Bush years… The decade following was the worst growth rate in over 60 years.

The laws of normal economics dictate that lower taxes combined with increased spending will lead to bigger deficits.

With a congressional mandate to run the deficit up as high as need be, there is no reason to raise taxes now and risk aggravating the depression. Instead, Obama will follow the opposite of the Reagan strategy. Reagan cut taxes and increased the deficit so that liberals could not increase spending. Obama will raise spending and increase the deficit so that conservatives cannot cut taxes. And, when the economy is restored, he will raise taxes with impunity, since the only people who will have to pay them would be rich Republicans.

We ought to pay down the national debt, ... The American people are tired of people who make promises about cutting taxes that they cannot keep.

Regarding the Economy & Taxation: America's most successful achievers do pay a higher share of the total tax burden. The top one percent income earners paid 18 percent of the total tax burden in 1981, and paid 25 percent in 1991. The bottom 50 percent of income earners paid only 8 percent of the total tax burden, and paid only 5 percent in 1991. History shows that tax cuts have always resulted in improved economic growth producing more tax revenue in the treasury.

It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now Cutting taxes now is not to incur a budget deficit, but to achieve the more prosperous, expanding economy which can bring a budget surplus.

To the extent that we've got a fiscal crisis right now, part of it is prompted by a bullheaded insistence on the part of the president, for example, that we should extend all of his tax cuts, make all of them permanent.

I do think that Republicans are flirting with their tax cut, which has always been the narcotic of Republicans, that they in fact have to at some point, with any remote pretense of candor, abandon any pretense of a balanced budget.I mean, they talk about - because they are going to finance the tax cut by tax cuts. That's how they're going to do it. And I do think that the will is there right now in the Congress to act. I think they will be as close to unity as you will see on Capitol Hill this year.

Ronald Reagan cut taxes to raise the deficit to stop liberals in future years from increasing spending. Obama will raise spending to raise the deficit to stop conservatives in future years from cutting taxes. As he funds every liberal dream - from alternative energy production to infrastructure renovation to more federal revenue sharing - he will force a massive expansion in the size of government for a decade to come.

What Donald Trump is proposing with these massive tax cuts will result in a $20 trillion additional national debt. That will have dire consequences for Social Security and Medicare.

I got tired of my taxes paying for exciting little wars around the world. Then I discovered that when I died, my wife would probably have to sell our house to pay for the taxes in America.

Every tax cut I call for is targeted, it's responsible and it is paid for within my balanced budget plan. My tax cuts will not undermine our economy. They will speed economic growth.

Tax increases appear to have a very large sustained and highly significant negative impact on output. Since most of our exogenous tax changes are in fact reductions, the more intuitive way to express this result is that tax cuts have very large and persistent positive output effects