Jacob Hacker Quotes

Health care is in as bad a shape as it has ever been after eight years of Barack Obama and the Democrat Party running it and running the US economy. It's an absolute disaster. Other areas of the economy are a disaster. Economic growth? There isn't any. It's 1% per quarter, a 4% growth rate per year if we're lucky. There is no expansion. There is no productivity increase.

We know that, when it comes to technology and the economy, if you're not constantly moving forward, then - without a doubt - you're moving backwards.

If you look at the US economy over the last 15-20 years wages have been stagnating or even declining.

There's no question that California, in the last three or four years, has been privileged to add disproportionately to the economic growth of America, and to contribute to its technological productivity.

Many people think that the U.S. is ahead in the frontier technology sectors as a result of private sector entrepreneurship. It's not. The U.S. federal government created all these sectors.

Government isn't that good at rapid advancement of technology. It tends to be better at funding basic research. To have things take off, you've got to have commercial companies do it.

Look at electricity in human history - it took a few decades for electricity to really revolutionize the American economy. And the Internet will be the same. At some point in the future, we will arrive at a new era of low-hanging fruit.

This country has been economically successful because of cheap energy and cheap labor and we are never going to have these again.

The War of 1812 has given new direction to wealth and industry in the United States, and manufacturers grew up as if by magic.

Inadequate infrastructure has social as well as economic consequences. Lack of full access to vital networks—whether roads or broadband or running water—serves to reinforce existing patterns of economic growth and stagnation. It threatens to create new classes of haves and have-nots.

Government has always driven growth.

The army did more to shape the pattern and direction of economic development than did any other federal agency, any state government, or any private agency.

We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they will crush us.

American and world history show that if you want minimal government, you can have it—but only if you want almost everyone in your society also to be a dirt-poor, subsistence farmer. If you want a prosperous, growing modern economy, you need high specialization and a huge, complex, interdependent network of individuals, businesses, research centers and education. And only government has the authority or money to regulate that network and to regularly pump in the targeted funds needed to sustain and grow it.

Properly targeted public investment can do much to boost economic performance, generating aggregate demand quickly, fueling productivity growth by improving human capital, encouraging technological innovation, and spurring private-sector investment by increasing returns.

The U.S. is becoming an industrial heartland again.

Many of our advances in science and technology were seeded through government.

Israel stands proudly at the forefront of international achievement. The world's leading corporations - Google, Intel and Motorola, to name but a few - maintain research and development facilities here, and our technology start-ups continue to be acquired by the likes of AOL, eBay and IBM.

A budget is a reflection of our values, and as a member of the House Budget Committee, I work each year to ensure that our federal budget invests in programs that support working families, enhance our research and development capabilities, and ensure the safety and security of the American people.

R&D has been an obsession in Europe for many, many years. There is this magical number which many governments aspire to do, and that is to invest at least three percent of GDP in research and development. When you look at the number, it's a composite of private and public investment in R&D.

Infrastructure investment in science is an investment in jobs, in health, in economic growth and environmental solutions.

One of the great drivers of the alienation that has made Donald Trump possible is that the growth in the American economy has been weak. In the decade from 2005 to 2015, there was not one year when the US hit three per cent growth. And to the extent there's been growth, virtually all of it has been collected by the top 10 per cent of the population. Obviously, if we knew how to make growth faster, we would. We don't. And it's very difficult to make growth more broadly shared. Because it's not just the US that has this problem.

I wish we had the $4 trillion or $5 trillion. I wish it were spent right here in the United States, on our schools, hospitals, roads, airports, and everything else that are all falling apart.

The stimulus is our bridge over troubled waters. And if it's invested well, it'll generate a lot of economic growth, and we'll get quite a bit of the revenues back.

The clustering of technological innovation in time and space helps explain both the uneven growth among nations and the rise and decline of hegemonic powers.