Jeffrey R. Immelt Quotes
I would love to see more certainty on tax policy and regulations, but in a sense that is a crutch….We need more certainty of demand.
Many corporate executives were claiming that they were not investing in growth and jobs because they were uncertain about the future tax rates or regulatory environment with which they would be coping. But with elections coming up, there has never been such certainty, and much of the best growth in American business was in the Clinton administration where these policies were under constant debate. Immelt identified the real problem: Demand for products and services was very weak.
Jeffrey R. Immelt, CEO General Electric, Chairman of President Obama’s Jobs Council, Interview, CNN The Global Public Square, September 19, 2011
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The traditional conservative tax principle has always been that low tax rates are needed to produce economic expansion and in general this had been so until Clinton and Rubin combined higher tax rates with great fiscal discipline of government spending and low interest rates, not only produced a great economic expansion but eliminated the Reagan deficit and left office with a huge projected surplus.
She was refuting the claim of many economic conservatives that cutting taxes will always produce economic growth. Actually, in many cases tax cuts do have that effect, but as the counter-example shows, not always and not under all conditions. The Kennedy tax cuts, for example, did produce economic growth.
This quotation was very important because the most important economic principle of Republican ideology since the 1960s has been that tax cuts will produce economic growth and the converse: that tax increases will stifle economic growth. For 50 years the Republican nostrum for all economic problems has been to increase growth by cutting taxes and opposing all tax increases. However Leonhardt studied the data and results since 1987 and found that the Republican doctrine had been wrong. Economic growth plummeted when we had the largest tax cuts in the George W. Bush years and the greatest growth spurts were following the 1990 George W. Bush tax increase and the 1993 Bill Clinton tax cuts. When the data became public some Republicans took the view that taxes were just one of the factors determining economic growth and have been overwhelmed by other factors. Some Democrats argue that if this were really believed by Republicans, they would have favored these other factors more so than tax cuts when in fact tax cuts are always their nostrum.
Jeffrey Robert Immelt is an American business executive currently working as a venture partner at New Enterprise Associates. He previously served as the CEO of General Electric from 2001 to 2017, and the CEO of GE's Medical Systems division from 1997 to 2000.
