Arthur Laffer Quotes

The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

Basic Economics 101. It's the most complicated simple subject there is.

Economics is not brain surgery.

I understand fully that jobs are created by the private sector, having been all my life in the private sector, but I don't buy the argument that the state has no role to play.

Our tax policies, the tax relief and reform we passed in 2003 and 2005, helped get government out of the way of America's entrepreneurs, and our unemployment rate is now lower than it was in the 1970s, the 1980s, and the 1990s.

I am a believer in Adam Smith, who says that if you look at something that really contributes value to society, and you can deliver it at a reasonable price, then society will recognise that at some point because rational behaviour will come into play.

Macroeconomic policy can never be devoid of politics: it involves fundamental trade-offs and affects different groups differently.

Economics pretends to be a science. Its practitioners fill blackboards with equations and clog computers with data. But it is really a faith, or more accurately a set of overlapping and squabbling faiths, each with its own doctrines.

Our economy is robust and will remain strong as more Americans who want a job find one. Republican economic policies based on tax relief are working for the American people.

We propose in the following Treatise to give an outline of the Science which treats of the Nature, the Production, and the Distribution of Wealth. To that Science we give the name of Political Economy.

The confounding Political Economy with the Sciences and Arts to which it is subservient, has been one of the principal obstacles to its improvement.

I'm a free-market economist from years and years back, and I've never veered from that.

Economics is a subject profoundly conducive to cliche, resonant with boredom. On few topics is an American audience so practiced in turning off its ears and minds. And none can say that the response is ill advised.

Economics is a strange science. Our subject deals with some of the most important as well as mundane issues that impinge on the human condition.

Economics has never been a science - and it is even less now than a few years ago.

President Reagan, Jack Kemp and other advocates of supply-side economics understood that pro-growth tax, spending and economic policies were essential to America's long-term economic and fiscal health.

There is a big divergence between views on a variety of policy issues from fiscal stimulus to financial regulation. It's my hope and my ambition for the economics profession that as we advance our knowledge, that those discussions will narrow in their focus, and that it will help to have more prudent policy-making down the road.

But while I loved all of these courses, there was an irresistible attraction of economics.

People confuse economists and economic policy.

I wonder if economics has less basic core material than is necessary for fields such as mathematics, physics, or chemistry, say.

Life is full of joys and sorrows, much of it our own making. Sadly, the West has voted time and time again for bigger government, more inflation, higher taxes and excessive regulation - all policies that have kept us from Adam Smith's vision of an opulent society.

Remember, Republican economic policies quadrupled the debt before I took office and doubled it after I left. We simply can't afford to double-down on trickle-down.

We have learned that the various schools of [economic] thought all have important elements of truth in them. But none of them is by itself a sufficient explanation of what goes on in the economy.

What we may call, by way of eminence, the dismal science.

I learned more about economics from one South Dakota dust storm than I did in all my years in college.