Financial Incentives Quotes

No salaries should be allowed the public Officers, but that their necessary expenses should be defrayed. This would make Men, he said, more desirous of obtaining the Esteem of their Country-men, than avaricious or eager in the pursuit of wealth.

One of the biggest reasons for higher medical costs is that somebody else is paying those costs, whether an insurance company or the government. What is the politicians' answer? To have more costs paid by insurance companies and the government. ... [H]aving someone else pay for medical care virtually guarantees that a lot more of it will be used. Nothing would lower costs more than having each patient pay those costs. And nothing is less likely to happen.

American and world history show that if you want minimal government, you can have it—but only if you want almost everyone in your society also to be a dirt-poor, subsistence farmer. If you want a prosperous, growing modern economy, you need high specialization and a huge, complex, interdependent network of individuals, businesses, research centers and education. And only government has the authority or money to regulate that network and to regularly pump in the targeted funds needed to sustain and grow it.

I think I understand the relationships between different people within the company: people who are straightforward employees, people who can impact the bottom line, and people who share in the bottom line. I don't think you can understand inequality in America unless you understand what's driving profitability.

The American economy must be altered to put business back in the driver's seat. The correct role for finance is to support job creation.

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have deep ties to corporate money. They both have a detailed and complexed view of how some on Wall Street manipulate the game. They know where the excesses are and who is to blame. If willing to take on their friends, they both could reform Wall Street from the inside.

I'll work overtime to open the doors of opportunity to industry and commerce.

To focus capital and entrepreneurship into empowering innovation, we should change is the capital gains tax rate. We would be better served by a regressive tax rate, that would become progressively smaller the longer the investment is held.

We made a mistake. We paid the farmers not to grow poppies. So all the other farmers started planting poppies. If we didn’t pay them, they had the poppies [to sell.]

The benefits cap is right in principle because people don't pay their taxes so that families who could work don't work. People pay their taxes so we support people who really need to be supported.

There are some people who get money just because they've got large families. So if it pays to make large families and earn more money than you would earn out at work, why not have more families, larger families? That's wrong.

It's bad for baseball to have owners who can benefit another business by losing money in baseball.

I know why elected officials want to spend money. It’s great. I can get a vote from you if I give you some money. OK but that doesn’t help your children. It just helps you.

Money is the measure of morality, and the success or failure of slavery as a money-making system, determines with many whether...it should be maintained or abolished.

Our tax code encourages people to raise thoroughbred horses, not children.

The relationship between executive CEO pay, stock performance is tenuous and not easily unscrambled, just one of myriad factors that affect the price of a stock.

The future of innovation has to include not only the technology, but economic viability.

Considering how advantageous it would be to this realm to reestablish its foreign and domestic commerce, ... we have resolved to establish a council particularly devoted to commerce, to be held every fortnight in our presence, in which all the interests of merchants and the means conducive to the revival of commerce shall be considered and determined upon, as well as all that which concerns manufactures. …. We also inform you that we are setting apart, in the expenses of our state, a million livres each year for the encouragement of manufactures and the increase of navigation, to say nothing of the considerable sums which we cause to be raised to supply the companies of the East and West Indies;

Sometimes you look at a movie and you can see that the actor or actress said, 'I'm taking this onboard because I'm making a ton of money, and not because it's going to be something special.'

Experts are human, and humans respond to incentives. How any given expert treats you, therefore, will depend on how that expert's incentives are set up.

An overview of all wars since the establishment of the Bank of England in 1694 suggests that most of them would have been greatly reduced in severity, or perhaps not even fought at all, without fiat money.

If the world's using bitcoin, governments won't be able to fund wars through inflation like they do today.

Like everyone else, rich people respond to incentives.

People talk about Wall Street greed, but one of the things many people don't understand is that there are a lot of organizations that have been the recipient of largess from the same Wall Street.

Everybody in the Olympics is paid. Lindsay Vonn is going to make a million dollars whether she skis or not.