Walter E. Williams Quotes

The national debt is totally unlike a family budget for about a gazillion reasons, not the least of which being that families cannot raise money by fiat or deflate the size of their debt unilaterally and that family members die instead of existing infinitely.

When the federal government spends more each year than it collects in tax revenues, it has three choices: It can raise taxes, print money, or borrow money. While these actions may benefit politicians, all three options are bad for average Americans.

In a great financial emergency nearly every country has, at one time or another, been tempted to confuse the monetary with the fiscal functions of the Treasury. To borrow by the issue of money seems to have a seductive charm hard to resist.

What the federal government does basically is borrow money from people and mail it to people.

Strictly speaking, it probably is not “necessary” for the federal government to tax anyone directly; it could simply print the money it needs. However, that would be too bold a stroke, for it would then be obvious to all what kind of counterfeiting operation the government is running. The present system combining taxation and inflation is akin to watering the milk; too much water and the people catch on.

Federal spending is atrocious.

Slow growth and inflation have a tendency to accompany large deficits and increasing debt as a percentage of GDP.

The economy grows when families can spend money on personal priorities rather than priorities imposed by the federal government.

People confuse economists and economic policy.

He smote the rock of the national resources, and abundant streams of revenue gushed forth. He touched the dead corpse of Public Credit, and it sprung upon its feet.

Government can’t deliver a free lunch to the country as a whole. It can, however, determine who pays for lunch.

Monetary policy and fiscal policy are inseparable.

A public debt is a public curse and in a representative government greater than any other.

government may secretly and unobserved, confiscate the wealth of the people, and not one man in a million will detect the theft.

Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth

By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.

Government should adjust its rates of expenditure and taxation such that total spending is neither more or less than that which is sufficient to purchase the full employment level of output at current prices. If this means there is deficit, greater borrowing, "printing money," etc., then these things in themselves are neither good or bad, they are simply the means to the desired ends of full employment and price stability.

Government spending cannot create additional jobs. If the government provides the funds required by taxing the citizens or by borrowing from the public, it abolishes on the one hand as many jobs as it creates on the other

Microeconomics is about money you don't have, and macroeconomics is about money the government is out of.

If the US government spends 40 percent of the nation's income, as it does through either borrowing or taxes, that income is not available for people to spend. The deficit is an indirect method of taxation. Of course, politicians prefer to borrow instead of tax because then someone down the road has to deal with the consequences.

The government has nothing to give to anybody that it doesn't first take from someone else.

A national debt if it is not excessive will be to us a national blessing; it will be powerfull cement of our union. It will also create a necessity for keeping up taxation to a degree which without being oppressive, will be a spur to industry.

Printing money is merely taxation in another form. Rather than robbing citizens of their money, government robs their money of its purchasing power.

The State cannot get a cent for any man without taking it from some other man, and this latter must be a man who has produced and saved it. This latter is the Forgotten Man

Moreover, because we chose to finance the way by borrowing, our deficits and debt has soared, and this means we have less room for maneuver, less money available to stimulate the eocnomy in the way needed.