Words matter. These are the best Steven Rattner Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
To fix Social Security, we should first stop using the Consumer Price Index to adjust benefits for inflation. Using the C.P.I. overstates the impact of inflation and has also led to larger increases in benefits for Social Security recipients than the income gains of typical American workers.
Eye-popping tales of growing income inequality are hardly new. By now, nearly every American must be painfully aware of the widening pay gap between top executives and shop floor laborers; between ‘Master of the Universe’ financiers and pretty much everyone else.
During my 30 years on Wall Street, taxes on ‘unearned income’ have bounced up and down with regularity, and I’ve never detected any change in the appetite for hard work and accumulating wealth on the part of myself or any of my fellow capitalists.
Not surprisingly, troubled economic times often beget proselytizers of wacky, extreme ideas.
The weak economy, widening income inequality, gridlock in Congress and a presidential election: Those were perhaps the dominant economic and political themes of 2012.
It’s time for the sensible center to rise up and push for a rational approach to our fiscal challenges.
India’s rigid social structure limits intergenerational economic mobility and fosters acceptance of vast wealth disparities.
Picking winners among the many young companies seeking money is a tough business, even for the most sophisticated investors. Indeed, most professionally run venture funds lose money. For individuals, it’s pure folly. Buy a lottery ticket instead. Your chance of winning is likely to be higher.
Increased revenues, meaning higher taxes, will be a central element of any successful long-term budget plan, and President Obama is right to insist that the wealthy – the slice of America that has come through the recession in by far the best financial health – should provide those funds.
China has lunged into the 21st century, while India is still lurching toward it.
Conservatives brayed that government should stay out of the private sector; liberals bleated for nationalizing the banks.
The largest number of jobs likely to be created by the JOBS Act will be for lawyers needed to clean up the mess that it will create.
The highest-income Americans don’t need tax-free health insurance, mortgage interest deductions or deferred taxation on retirement funds.
Neither the George W. Bush nor the Obama administrations volunteered to bail out G.M., Chrysler and other parts of the auto sector. Both subscribed firmly to the longstanding American principle that government should resolutely avoid these kinds of interventions, particularly in the industrial sector.
Slapping a catchy acronym like the JOBS Act on a piece of legislation makes it more difficult for politicians to oppose it – and indeed that’s what happened with the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act.
Most troublesome is the legalization of ‘crowd funding,’ the ability of start-up companies to raise capital from small investors on the Internet.
Finally, let’s keep well in mind the most important lesson of the auto rescue: While government should stay away from the private sector as much as possible, markets do occasionally fail, and when they do government can play a constructive role, as it did in the case of the auto rescue.
