Garet Garrett Quotes

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

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.

The left-wing agenda wants us to think that the reason there was a depression was because the government didn't do anything. That's not true.

But despite historic levels of obstruction, President Obama was able to bring the economy back from the verge of a second Great Depression.

The president's grand experiment in trickle-down government has held back rather than sped economic recovery. He seems to sincerely believe we can build a middle class out of government jobs paid for with borrowed dollars.

Understanding the true causes of the Depression, as well as the real economic record of the United States in the 1930s, is an essential ingredient in anyone's economic and historical education.

In the 1860s we used the national debt to save the Union. In the 1930s we used it to save the American economy. In the 1940s we used it to save the world.

Since Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt established the New Deal in the 1930s, radical conservatives have railed against the idea that the government should intervene in the economy.

The anti-New Deal line is wrong as a matter of economics. F.D.R.'s spending programs did help the economy and created millions of new jobs.

What the president announced yesterday, is that somehow magically, if we just continue to prime the pump of taxpayer dollars, we're going to see magically an economic recovery.

Recovery measures work better when they raise confidence - as Franklin D. Roosevelt understood. His fireside chats, and his inaugural address proclaiming he would fight the Great Depression with the same resolve he would muster against a foreign foe, were aimed at reassuring Americans.

The BBC is locked to the reading of the economy that is run out of Ed Miliband and Ed Balls' office. They think if only you spend and borrow more money you can create growth everywhere.

It would probably strike the average politician as absurd to argue that the best way to fix the economy is to stop trying to 'fix it.'

Popular as Keynesian fiscal policy may be, many economists are skeptical that it works. They argue that fine-tuning the economy is a virtually impossible task, and that fiscal-stimulus programs are usually too small, and arrive too late, to make a difference.

I don't think Obama understands basic economics. Not economics that work. He may understand some theory that someone in Princeton sat and dreamed up, but it's not working.

By 1939, the Depression was back. Unemployment was huge. Roosevelt didn't have any quick fix. Remember, the New Deal, Works Progress Administration, and Civilian Conservation Corps - all that happened years before. Roosevelt was riding a storm.

I don't accept as an article of faith that lots of short-term stimulus boosts the economy and gets us back on the long-term trajectory.

Recent research suggests that New Deal programs may actually have had their primary impact on the economy by influencing consumer and business expectations of future growth and inflation.

It's become glib political conventional wisdom in Washington that a massive spending plan will provide a parachute rescue for a cliff-diving economy - landing it safely and with strong enough legs to move toward a healthy future.

What do you think a stimulus is? It's spending - that's the whole point! Seriously.

I don't think that much change comes from economists. I think it comes more from political realities. Probably the two giants of the 20th century, who actually did shift government policy in the U.S. and around the world, were John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman. I don't see anybody in our system who is at that level of influence.

Why don't we stop the stimulus spending? There's still about $400 billion or $500 billion of the stimulus plan that has not been spent. Why don't we stop it? It's not working.

It has become fashionable to rail against government intervention in the economy, and the FHA is a favorite example by those trying to show the government's overreach. In reality, the FHA shows how government action during the Great Recession forestalled a much worse economic fate.

And taking more money out of the private economy and having the government perform as it has poorly done with the stimulus I don't think is the right way to go.

I don't want to go negative on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but he didn't pass an economic deal in the first 100 days. We have passed the largest Recovery Act in the history of the country.