Barack Obama Quotes

Discussions of the economy, especially during times of crisis, are often framed in terms of lessons we supposedly learned during the Depression of the 1930s. If we are not to endure terrible times like those again, we are told, we must support whatever form of state intervention is currently being peddled.

In difficult economic times, I'm firmly opposed to austerity.

The insane pursuit of the holy grail of a balanced budget in the end is going to drive the economy into a depression.

What got us out of the depression was capitalism, and we would have gotten out a lot quicker had the government not intervened.

In the middle of a recession no tax increase is justified because it kills jobs, and any tax increase is a job-killing measure and should be defeated.

In all modesty, we must admit that governments are not always the best doctors when it comes to diagnosing economic ailments and prescribing the right treatment.

The last thing you want to do is raise taxes in the middle of the recession because that would just suck up and take more demand out of the economy and put businesses in a further hole.

Keynesian economics has always been needed.

If there's a severe recession, the automatic stabilizers will come into effect, and we will still try to reduce the structural deficit, but we will not try to keep cutting the budget so that we keep worsening a severe recession.

Nationalization, unmentionable only yesterday, has entered common usage not least because an even scarier word - depression - is next on America's list to avoid.

Raising taxes in an economic downturn is not a good idea.

If the program goes off track again due to recession, this should not become a pretext for the imposition of more austerity measures.

Believing that a crisis is a useful thing to create, the Obama administration - which understands that, for liberalism, worse is better - has deliberately aggravated the fiscal shambles that the Great Recession accelerated.

It is no longer a matter of serious controversy whether the government should play a positive role in helping to maintain a high level of economic activity. What we debate nowadays is not the need for controlling business cycles, but rather the nature of governmental action, its timing and its extent.

As austerity measures were foisted upon Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and other highly indebted countries, growth was rendered even more elusive, aggravating unemployment

When the economy gets wobbly, people pay attention to the leadership failures.

Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea.

I have a lot of sympathy for every ailing economy …. The question is not whether you have sympathy. The question is what would be the right measure to help alleviate the situation.

A national government has to be able to spend money in a recession to make up for the private money that is not being spent.

During an economic crisis, what matters is that the government keeps its foot on the accelerator.

This is the paradox of thrift: belt-tightening causes people to lose their jobs, because other people are not buying what they produce, so their debt burden rises rather than falls.

There is a broad consensus, not only in the United States but in most of the world, that if you are in an economic downturn, you need to stimulate. Germany seems to be an exception.

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

For better or worse, US Keynesianism was so far ahead of where it started. I am a cafeteria Keynesian. You know what a cafeteria catholic is?

When you're facing the threat of recession, you need to have an expansionary monetary and fiscal policy. Pre-Keynesian, Hooverite views are dead everywhere except on 19th Street in Washington.