Peter Thiel Quotes
The debt austerity would not be problems if we had technological progress. If you doubled the debt in the U.S., and the size of the economy doubled because of technological progress and growth, the two would roughly cancel out and it would all be a totally manageable situation.
Thiel, Peter. "Peter Thiel on Stagnation, Innovation, and What Not to Do." Conversations with Tyler, Mercatus Center, 11 Mar. 2015.
She was refuting the claim of many economic conservatives that cutting taxes will always produce economic growth. Actually, in many cases tax cuts do have that effect, but as the counter-example shows, not always and not under all conditions. The Kennedy tax cuts, for example, did produce economic growth.
The most successful way of poor nations developing rapidly is to trade with rich nations.
Almost every major corporation that is growing must borrow money to finance the growth. There is a great temptation to do this continuously, as if all works out the borrowed money is paid back and the nation has grown. However, not every investment succeeds, and when they do, few nations will take the growth and save it for a future date when a national investment does not work out as well as hoped. Gradually national debt as a proportion of the economy gets larger and larger and it makes mew investments more and more difficult to succeed because of the higher rates of interest that must be paid. Every modern country must find a balance. Those that do not can have a financial disaster such as Greece in the early part of the 21st century.
This quotation is important as it provides a major counter-example to the ideological political belief that tax cuts and deregulation produce economic growth. Sometimes they do, but other times they do not. Ironically the greatest periods of growth in the last half of the 20th century included some of the highest rates of taxes. At other times high taxes curtailed growth. As with many political ideologies, they are really not principles or laws of nature or economics, but political preferences.
Peter Andreas Thiel is a German-American billionaire entrepreneur and venture capitalist. A co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, he was the first outside investor in Facebook. He was ranked No. 4 on the Forbes Midas List of 2014, with a net worth of $2.2 billion, and No. 391 on the Forbes 400 in 2020, with a net worth of $2.1 billion. In 2016, Thiel confirmed that he had funded Hulk Hogan in the Bollea v. Gawker lawsuit because Gawker had previously outed him as gay. The lawsuit eventually bankrupted Gawker.
