Top 33 Arthur Laffer Quotes

My godfather was a man named Justin Dart. Some of you may remember Justin Dart. My younger son’s name is Justin, named after Justin Dart. I was executor of his estate, and he was my godfather. I first really got time to spend with Ronald Reagan with Justin Dart personally, one-on-one.

I feel very uncomfortable with respect to looking at inflation.

Over the past 100 years, there have been three major periods of tax-rate cuts in the U.S.: the Harding-Coolidge cuts of the mid-1920s; the Kennedy cuts of the mid-1960s; and the Reagan cuts of the early 1980s. Each of these periods of tax cuts was remarkably successful as measured by virtually any public policy metric.

Sound money is the sine qua non of a prosperous society.

People can change the volume, the location and the composition of their income, and they can do so in response to changes in government policies.

Sometimes, tax rate increases create the very problems that the spending is intended to cure. In other words, the tax rate increases reduce economic growth; they shrink the pie; they cause more poverty, more despair, more unemployment, which are all things government is trying to alleviate with spending.

The Laffer Curve illustrates the basic idea that changes in tax rates have two effects on tax revenues: the arithmetic effect and the economic effect.

I’ve been truly blessed. I’ve been a fly on the wall of history. I’ve been just so many lucky places just by chance and serendipity, and obviously a huge portion of that serendipity had to do with my relationship with the real president, Ronald Reagan.

Let me just try to give you sort of the intuitive one here on the stimulus funds. If you have a two-person economy – let’s imagine we have two farms, and that’s the whole world, just two farms. If one of those farmers gets unemployment benefits, who do you think pays for him? Am I going way over your heads today?

When you look at the world, everyone in the world who cares about his or her family wants to have a major portion of their assets in the United States because we are the growth country and the freedom loving country.

The minimum wage is the black teenage unemployment act. It is the guaranteed way of holding the poor, the minorities and the disenfranchised out of the mainstream is if you price their original services too high.

I used the so-called Laffer Curve all the time in my classes and with anyone else who would listen to me to illustrate the trade-off between tax rates and tax revenues.

I’m worried about economic growth in the United States. And the creation of jobs, output, and employment. And if you tax people who work, you’re going to get less people working. And what the carbon tax would do is remove the tax from people who work and put it on a product in the ground.

And let the Fed sell bonds to bring bank reserves back down to required reserve levels, so we have restraint on bank lending and bank issuances of liability.

The states that have large in-migrations of Hispanics are Florida, Texas and California. And Florida and Texas are way above average in educational achievement, while California’s the lowest, just about.

The Laffer Curve, by the way, was not invented by me.

Obama is a fine, very impressive person. He really is. Unfortunately, everything that he is doing in economics is exactly wrong. He is a crappy president.

Ask me whether inflation represents longer-term problem. I think there’s a potential there for excess reserves to create problems.

You know, without China there is no Wal-Mart and without Wal-Mart there is no middle class and lower class prosperity in the United States.

The linkage between tax rates and public services is, if not non-existent, negative.

And you can’t have a prosperous economy when the government is way overspending, raising tax rates, printing too much money, over regulating and restricting free trade. It just can’t be done.

Because tax cuts create an incentive to increase output, employment, and production, they also help balance the budget by reducing means-tested government expenditures. A faster-growing economy means lower unemployment and higher incomes, resulting in reduced unemployment benefits and other social welfare programs.

Taxes are not trivial – they’re a huge portion of this overall economy. And that’s why I focused on them.

With the shrinking of the US economy, and it’s shrinking very rapidly, you not only have more money, but you also have fewer goods. That’s a classic double-whammy on inflation.

We are having the single worst recovery the U.S. has had since the Great Depression. I don’t care how you measure it. The East Coast knows it. The West Coast knows it. North, South, old, young, everyone knows it’s the worst recovery since the Great Depression.

The United States is a nation located in the global economy, and we get enormous, enormous benefits from dealing with foreigners.

The income effects in an economy always sum to zero.

The truth of the matter of is that stimulus money not only doesn’t stimulate; it actually reduces output.

The trade deficit is the capital surplus and don’t ever think of having a capital surplus as being a bad thing for our country.

Government spending is taxation. When you look at this, I’ve never heard of a poor person spending himself into prosperity; let alone I’ve never heard of a poor person taxing himself into prosperity.

When you look at the government, when the government collects a buck, it’s not free. They have to spend resources, the IRS, audits, all this sort of crap, to collect the dollar. I’m not assuming any Laffer curve effect here at all. There are just transactions costs of collecting that money.

What you do by having an income tax rate reduction across the board, you really provide great incentives for people to work, produce, and increase output. So I would support a carbon tax in replacement for a progressive income tax.

And just remember, every dollar we spend on outsourcing is spent on U.S. goods or invested back in the U.S. market. That’s accounting.