Steven Rattner Quotes

I understand fully that jobs are created by the private sector, having been all my life in the private sector, but I don't buy the argument that the state has no role to play.

We need the private sector to create jobs. If the government could create jobs Communism would have worked, but it didn't.

The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy.

The FHA's success provides strong evidence that government can and should play a role in the nation's mortgage finance system. It also demonstrates that although government intervention in the economy during the Great Recession was messy, things would have been a lot messier without it.

The government’s role is to motivate the private sector, to assure that it performs in a way which serves the public interest.

Let’s have a moratorium on press conferences …. Get off your asses and let’s do something and fix the biggest doggone crisis in the history of this country.

Whatever the economy needs to maintain itself, the government will do it.

Government can't create wealth, but it can create the conditions for private enterprise to flourish.

Civil servants are fully aware of the challenges the British economy faces. They are, after all, working tirelessly and professionally to support the coalition government through the current challenges, every day, and in every part of Britain.

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.

The public is upset. If they haven't lost their job, they know somebody that has. If they haven't lost their house, they know somebody that has. What do you do? When something's wrong, it's government's job to fix it, it must be government that's responsible for causing it.

It's been said that government doesn't create jobs, business does. For the most part, this is true. But government creates the environment in which businesses can excel and expand.

History has shown that a government's redistribution of shrinking wealth, in preference to a private sector's creation of new sources of it, can prove more destructive than even the most deadly enemy.

The federal government needs to get off the backs of small businesses and let the private sector grow and create jobs instead of harnessing it with onerous regulations and a repressive tax code.

Government is not the generator of economic growth; working people are.

However, before we make the mistake of patting ourselves on the back, let's remember: government does not create jobs. It only helps create the conditions that make jobs more or less likely. The real credit for our economic renewal belongs to the people of Alabama .

I supported the stimulus package.

As President Bush has said on numerous occasions, it is the government's role to create the conditions, the friendly environment, that will attract capital.

If you look at the fact that the best chance we have for a good economy is the private sector. The government cannot create jobs. If the government could create jobs, then Communism would have worked. But didn't work. So what we have to do is allow the private sector and the entrepreneurial spirit to lead us back to a job-filled recovery.

I was criticized at some level within the Republican Party by those who say government should not be in the economic development business at all. My response is that the only country I know that doesn't have an economic development plan is Papa New Guinea.

The government can't create jobs; they'll destroy jobs trying to do it. The government doesn't have any money; all they have is a printing press. We need to free markets to create jobs; if the government wants to help, they should reduce their burden on the economy.

The fundamental problem is that President Obama has grown government. He has grown the private sector jobs.

If I could create one job in the private sector by helping to grow a business, that would be one more than Congress has created in the last six months.

Obama sees everything backward. Where Americans see individual achievement, he sees government's work. Where we see failing companies, he sees innovation worth subsidizing. Where we see the need for economic growth, he sees a need for higher taxes.

It has become fashionable to rail against government intervention in the economy, and the FHA is a favorite example by those trying to show the government's overreach. In reality, the FHA shows how government action during the Great Recession forestalled a much worse economic fate.