Austan Goolsbee Quotes

The Obama administration's large and sustained increases in debt raise the specter of another financial crisis and large future tax increases, further chilling business investment and job creation.

Look, I don't dispute that the deficit has increased.

Well, I think what we need to remember is that budget deficits can impede economic activity.

Government is just spending too much money.

If we don't get a grip on government spending, there will be no growth.

Comparing your family budget to the sovereign debt of the United States is a little like comparing two kindergartners tossing a paper airplane to the Apollo 11 mission.

Why don't we stop the stimulus spending? There's still about $400 billion or $500 billion of the stimulus plan that has not been spent. Why don't we stop it? It's not working.

If we don't get this economy going, the numbers that represent this stimulus package are going to be small compared to the loss of revenue to the federal government for our economy.

Governments harangue about deficits to get more revenue so they can spend more.

Fiscal discipline can turn the economy around.

I've been able to bring billions of dollars back to our state that has so desperately needed it - billions of dollars in relief to homeowners and our communities and our pension systems that desperately need it.

Federal spending is like a massive ship that takes a very long time to turn.

Democrats get credit for money coming into the state, but I do a lot of heavy lifting.

A government can't cut its way out of a recession any more than you can dig yourself out of a hole.

The government must do all it can to help reduce interest rates for business.

Gradual fiscal consolidation may also be stimulative in the short run.

I am not worried about the deficit. It is big enough to take care of itself.

The outlook for the Federal budget is bleak.

I think it's important that people know what raising the debt ceiling is. It's Congress giving permission to the federal government to borrow more money that we don't have, and we borrow it for the purpose of spending it.

The national debt is totally unlike a family budget for about a gazillion reasons, not the least of which being that families cannot raise money by fiat or deflate the size of their debt unilaterally and that family members die instead of existing infinitely.

Defense spending as a share of the economy dropped significantly during the early 1990s, and that was one of the things, along with other policy changes, that put us back on the path to a balanced budget.

Fiscal policy is not just, or even not even principally, the purview of the president.

What's hurting the U.S. economy is total government spending. The deficit is an indicator that the government is spending so much money that it can't even get around to stealing all of the money that it wants to spend. But the tip of the iceberg is not what hit the Titanic - it was the 90 percent of the iceberg under water.

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

Have you noticed the debt is exploding? And it's not all because of Medicare.