Al-Waleed bin Talal Quotes
It is very clear that the Republicans do not want to raise taxes.
Bin Talal, Al-Waleed. Interview by Fareed Zakaria. Fareed Zakaria GPS, CNN, 2012.
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.
Al Waleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud is a Saudi Arabian businessman, investor, philanthropist and a member of the Saudi royal family. He was listed on Time magazine's Time 100, an annual list of the hundred most influential people in the world, in 2008. Al-Waleed is a grandson of Ibn Saud, the first Saudi Arabian king, a nephew of all Saudi Arabian kings since, and a grandson of Riad Al Solh (Lebanon's first prime minister).
