Jim Talent Quotes

We believe that - the President believes that the economy will continue to grow, that the economy will continue to create jobs, and that we need to do everything we can to enhance that growth and enhance that job creation.

In the past, proactive fiscal polices almost always meant just more investment and an increase in the fiscal deficit.

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's going to be difficult to stimulate the real economy in the U.S. at a faster rate than 2 percent and perhaps even less if we have that fiscal cliff in December or January 2013.

When you look what is happening in this country with the debt, the deficit, the CBO coming out and saying once again we're going to have a trillion dollar plus deficit in 2012, the fourth straight year, and unemployment may be going back up to 8.9 or maybe nine percent by the end of the year, these are serious situations that are going.

When the economy shows signs of faltering, prompt countermoves are required. Even mild measures on the part of government can be effective in the early stages of an economic decline. ... If action is withheld until a recession has gained momentum, strong and costly measures may prove insufficient.

If we think we're going to solve our economic problems by monetary policy alone, we are mistaken. History shows that we have to employ fiscal policy as well.

The cozy world we were told would go on forever, where full employment would be guaranteed by a stroke of the Chancellor’s pen, cutting taxes, deficit spending—that cozy world is gone.

Prices always soar when there is a Congress government.

We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists, and in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion since the war by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy, followed by a higher level of unemployment as the next step.

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.

The stagflation of the 1970s blessed us with damaging wage and price controls and the utterly counterintuitive supply-side notion - famously drawn on a napkin - that cutting taxes would lead to higher tax revenues.

The economy is terrible it's been terrible for years now, and the reason it's bad is not because of a debt-ceiling vote. The reason it's bad is because we have people who believe that by making government bigger by keeping people on unemployment checks and on welfare we're going to dig us out of this mess.

The entire economy, of course, is locked in a down cycle right now. Last time we weathered this was during another Bush presidency in '90. We were locked in it for a year and a half and everyone came out of it.

The Democrats want government to do the spending. Senator McCain wants families to do the spending.

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.

We have to change economic policy: create confidence, foster investment, cut the public deficit, restructure taxation and reform the labor laws.

Obama and the Democrats' preposterous argument is that we are just one more big tax increase away from solving our economic problems. The inescapable conclusion, however, is that the primary driver of the short-term deficit is not tax cuts but the lack of any meaningful economic growth over the last half decade.

I think it would take a real stretch to think that I caused the problems with the economy.

When the economy is growing, there's a lot that can be done to deal with the deficit.

The reality for us in America is that we will never get out of debt with more than 15 million people out of work.

You don't want to get so distracted, focusing on what the opposition is putting forth that you forget to remind America that the real issue is 8.3 percent unemployment, virtually no growth at all in an economy that has been in shambles for the last four years under Obama.

The economy is too weak right now. We need to jump-start it. The American Jobs Act will provide that jump-start, to help us into next year and the year after that.

A troubled economy is always the sitting president's fault. It was when Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter, when Bill Clinton defeated George H.W. Bush, and when Barack Obama defeated John McCain by running against George W. Bush.

Americans know that we cannot tax and spend our way out of a recession, yet Democrats can't grasp this simple fact.