Words matter. These are the best Christina Romer Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
Fewer people working means permanently lower tax revenues.
Where we’re coming down is we currently have $787 billion of stimulus that’s been passed. We’re certainly focusing on spending that money as quickly and as efficiently and as transparently as we can. We think that’s absolutely the right strategy.
Thanks to former President George W. Bush – remember the compassionate conservative? – I have a good name for the fundamental principle that should guide the Democratic alternative: compassionate deficit reduction.
The most effective way to shake an economy out of a terrible downturn when we’re at the zero lower bound is an aggressive change in policy that makes people wake up, say ‘this is a new day’ and change their expectations.
Tax increases appear to have a very large sustained and highly significant negative impact on output.
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.
Raising the minimum wage, as President Obama proposed in his State of the Union address, tends to be more popular with the general public than with economists.
Our estimates suggest that a tax increase of 1 percent of GDP reduces output over the next three years by nearly 3 percent. The effect is highly significant.
The basic idea that if you increase government spending or you cut people’s taxes that stimulates the economy and lowers the unemployment rate, is a very widely accepted idea. It’s in every economics textbook, that’s what we teach our undergraduates, and I certainly try to teach them the truth.
The stock market crash in October 1929 didn’t destroy a particularly large amount of wealth or make people highly pessimistic. Rather, it made companies and consumers very unsure about future income, and so led them to stop spending as they waited for more information.
If you look at the studies coming out of the Congressional Budget Office, the number one thing that’s going to blow a hole in the deficit as we go forward 20, 30 years is government spending on healthcare.
A natural way that an economist approaches a problem is to say, here’s where I think the economy is going; this is what we need to deal with the problem.
If every other store in town is paying workers $9 an hour, one offering $8 will find it hard to hire anyone – perhaps not when unemployment is high, but certainly in normal times. Robust competition is a powerful force helping to ensure that workers are paid what they contribute to their employers’ bottom lines.
The central question is whether Medicare and Medicaid should remain entitlement programs guaranteeing a certain amount of care, as Democrats believe, or become defined contribution programs in which federal spending is capped, as Republicans suggest.
Making labor less expensive helps firms hire people.
The goal of long-run economic growth without asset price bubbles is not only achievable, but is something we should expect if we put a sound regulatory framework in place and if policymakers remain vigilant.
President Obama has repeatedly urged Congress to let the Bush tax cuts expire for those earning more than $250,000 a year. Increasing rates on top earners is an obvious way to raise revenue from those who can afford it most.
The right way to deal with a budget problem that was years in the making is by formulating a credible plan to reduce the deficit over time and as the economy is able to withstand the necessary fiscal belt-tightening. That is what President Obama is doing.
If increasing income equality is the goal, it might be wiser to put money into infrastructure than to subsidize manufacturing. Construction also pays good wages, but with lower educational requirements. And America’s infrastructure needs are enormous.
There’s a joke in economics about the drunk who loses his keys in the street but only looks for them under the lightposts. When asked why, he says, ‘because that’s where the light is.’ That’s the problem with the deficit.
If you think about it, candidate Obama, Sen. Obama, was running on sort of long-run economic issues, like restoring prosperity to the middle class, dealing with the perennial problem of health care in the United States. He talked a lot about the budget deficit, about the need to transition to clean energy.
A successful argument for a government manufacturing policy has to go beyond the feeling that it’s better to produce ‘real things’ than services. American consumers value health care and haircuts as much as washing machines and hair dryers.
I think something that forces financial institutions to write down underwater mortgages, I think, would be a sensible thing to do.
Honest talk about the deficit is risky. Voters are more enthusiastic about the abstract notion of deficit reduction than about the painful details of accomplishing it.
As a former member of President Obama’s economic team, I have a soft spot for the fiscal stimulus legislation he signed just a month after his inauguration.
The stimulus legislation, technically known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, was a mixture of tax cuts for families and businesses; increased transfer payments, like unemployment insurance; and increased direct government spending, like infrastructure investment.
We’re committed to working with Congress to doing what the president said he was always going to do, which is cut the deficit in half over the – over his first term.
You care about the deficit because it allows you to do things you need to do to help people who are suffering.
Most arguments for instituting or raising a minimum wage are based on fairness and redistribution. Even if workers are getting a competitive wage, many of us are deeply disturbed that some hard-working families still have very little.
