Theodore Roosevelt Quotes

Big government doesn't help the middle class, it buries it.

We've created rules and taxes on top of every aspiration of people, and the net result is we're not growing fast, income is not growing.

There's no conflict between the social-welfare state and open markets.

The reformocons court right-wing censure simply by acknowledging that the middle class is under pressure and that government has a role to play beyond cutting taxes.

The very nature of the government, and the direction it's been heading in for the past 40 years, is one of contrived government solutions to all the problems in the United States.

The too-big-to-fail reform project is massive in scope. In my view, it holds real promise. But the project will take years to complete. Success is not assured.

Bad facts make bad law, and people who write bad laws are in my opinion more dangerous than songwriters who celebrate sexuality.

The real question is whether the federal government should be in the business of redistributing wealth to equalize the economic status of every state, including states where not many people, for whatever reason, have chosen to live. That type of redistribution is a distortion of our economy.

Laws matter. With effective implementation and enforcement, good laws can nudge forward positive changes in social and cultural mores.

I think it's important that we eliminate regulations that are not serving a useful purpose.

Republicans are listening and offering better solutions that get Washington out of your way, out of your pocket, and back on your side.

The whole New Deal was in a sense just a series of public options, some more optional than others, that offered government as an alternative to the often-flawed private market.

Fed role - legal system, currency & defense, within its means.

[Obama White House] rescued the economy from the worst recession.

America needs a president who can fix the economy because he understands the economy, and I do and I will.

I would say that in this world, the greatest source of inequality has been special privileges granted by government.

The growing inequality of wealth and income distribution is both a moral and economic problem. If the wealthy are unwilling to pay more taxes, then this is going to lead to spending cuts. And if you put off the table things like national defense, then you're going to end up cutting more and more out of programs that aid the poor. So, I think there are consequences to this idea that tolerance for inequality requires us to - to just do nothing to make the wealthy contribute a higher share of resources to fund the government.

I argue that in the long run, the US would be on a far more financially secure footing if we recalibrate how we spend about two-to-three percent of the country's GNP, using state and federal taxes to create pools of money for spending on America's poor - which would, as numerous economists have argued in recent years, create virtuous spending circles, since those on lower incomes spend more of each extra dollar in their possession than do those on higher incomes.

If you stimulate the economy by means of a tax cut, the people that you tend to be benefiting are the better off.

The government isn't going to say, "We're going to regulate banks, but we'll leave these other companies alone." I think the regulators want to make sure that they have some form of regulation on anything systemic. We like our hand. But, you know, honestly, who owns the future?

Inflation is the fiscal complement of statism and arbitrary government. It is a cog in the complex of policies and institutions which gradually lead toward totalitarianism .

Reduced employment opportunities is one effect of minimum wage legislation. The minimum wage law has imposed incalculable harm on the disadvantaged members of our society. The only moral thing to do is to repeal it.

The US and Europe are committing suicide in different ways. In Europe it's austerity in the midst of recession and that's guaranteed to be a disaster. There's some resistance to that now. In the US, it's essentially off-shoring production and financialization and getting rid of superfluous population through incarceration.

In Europe and the United States the two decades following the Second World War will for long be remembered as a very good time, the time when capitalism really worked. Everywhere in the industrialized countries production increased. Unemployment was everywhere low. Prices were nearly stable. When production lagged and unemployment rose, governments intervened to take up the slack, as Keynes had urged.

If a government resorts to inflation, that is, creates money in order to cover its budget deficits or expands credit in order to stimulate business, then no power on earth, no gimmick, device, trick or even indexation can prevent its economic consequences.