Words matter. These are the best Austan Goolsbee Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
If we hit the debt ceiling, that’s… essentially defaulting on our obligations, which is totally unprecedented in American history. The impact on the economy would be catastrophic.
If you had asked people in 1929, ‘Here is what is about to happen. How much would you pay to avoid the Great Depression from occurring?’ The answer is they would have paid a lot. They would have borrowed money if it could be used to prevent the Great Depression.
I was always a data guy, not a theorist. Theorists can maintain total purity. The data are always messy.
Let’s pass the small business credit enhancement bill so small business can get back on its feet.
In several quarters in the 2000s, if you added up all the private savings of everyone in the United States, it was less than nothing. You can’t sustain that as a driver of growth.
The only question where there is disagreement is should the highest income rates above a quarter million dollars a year go back to where they were under Bill Clinton. That is the dispute about the taxes.
In this country, we have partnerships, we have S corps, we have LLCs, we have a series of entities that do not pay corporate income tax.
I was named DC’s funniest celebrity.
For policy makers interested in using tax policy to stimulate investments or especially to smooth business cycle fluctuations, the results are not promising.
If a lobbyist sets up shop, or a lawyer, in which they’re receiving income through what is something like a tax loophole so that it’s not counting as corporate income, that is what this is counting as a small business.
I don’t believe, the president doesn’t believe, that the high income tax cuts work, period. I don’t think the evidence supports that.
I’m pretty happy not to be an insider anymore. There’s just no common ground. I don’t know if it’s distrust or that the politics is substantially more partisan than the public. But there’s no pressure to make a grand bargain on fiscal matters, on growth, on anything.
If we get to the point where we damage the full faith and credit of the United States, that would be the first default in history caused purely by insanity.
The U.S. is still in a pretty good spot, especially relative to other advanced countries. The aging of our population is not as pronounced as almost anyone else’s.
If Democrats don’t go on Fox News, it doesn’t mean that people stop watching.
A lot more people are willing to invest in bonds denominated in euros. And there was the fiscal discipline argument, which is that this tied the hands of countries the market hasn’t always trusted, which also helped them borrow at low rates.
In Michigan, in the mid-’80s, the unemployment rate goes way up because a lot of factories shut down. And then, the mid-2000s, to pick a date, the unemployment rate in Michigan isn’t that much higher than in the rest of the country. But the main way that happened is people moved.
When I was at MIT, they had a beta test of Mosaic, the first popular browser. I remember looking at it, and there was a weather map or something. Now, in fairness to me, there weren’t any websites then. But I remember saying, ‘This is stupid – what’s the point?’ Now, of course, it’s obvious.
It’s clear that the medium and long-run fiscal challenges facing the country have to do with the rise of entitlement spending, they have to do with the longer run imbalances that we’ve created in the structure of the system.
Cutting taxes for very high income people an average of more than $100,000 a year for people that make more than a million dollars a year is not an effective way to get the economy going.
What happened is we went into a recession beginning in December of 2007 that was the worst since 1929. And it is a very deep hole that we have been struggling to get out of.
That is what happened in 2010. The administration and the leadership of the Republicans thought, ‘Well, we’re making a deal together; we’re showing the world things can be done in a bi-partisan way. We’re extending all our tax cuts for two years.’
The data does not support that high-income tax cuts are the main drivers of growth, so I don’t think that uncertainty over what the tax rate will be for someone that makes a million dollars a year has that big an impact on the economic growth rate in the country.
I get massive invective, massive abuse, via email, phone messages, and Twitter. From people way, way to the right of center – scary, abusive kind of stuff. Really freaks out my assistant and my wife. Hate-filled.
The president is 100 percent for extending the tax cuts for 98.7 percent of small businesses.
So more than 8 million people lost their jobs. It’s going to take a significant push on our part and time before that comes down. I don’t anticipate it coming down rapidly.
All I’ll say is if you look at countries where it is – where they are rapidly growing, they’re investing in their infrastructure. They’re investing in their educations. They are trying to streamline regulations, but they’re not neglecting key investments.
If you look at the Greek economic record, it’s been very similar to the U.S. experience in the first four years of the Great Depression. And after having a Depression-sized event, they’ve cut the unit-labor cost in Greece – they’ve closed something like half the gap with Germany.
If you’re going to be an academic who’s involved in the world of policy, you have to be involved in the world that exists.
One of the most interesting things that I’m seeing of the Trump picks is such a heavy business and financial focus. I can’t help but feel like this is going to throw a lot of policy weight and details back to Congress, because these are not people who have a lot of experience drafting legislation.
I can’t remember exactly, but the White House is not keen on people going on Fox News. It’s my view that while people in the administration feel that Fox News doesn’t give them a fair shake, the fact of the matter is there are a lot of people who watch Fox News.
At the time of the formation of the euro, I would say most American economists said that’s not a good idea; that’s not a currency area that makes sense. And the answer from Europe was, ‘How is Missouri and Mississippi a currency area?’ But the flaw in that was not recognizing the importance of mobility.
We have to do everything we can to try to create jobs and get people back to work.
We know there are a lot of people in the unemployment pool that do not match up in their skill set for what jobs are going to be created, and that’s an area we’ve got to keep pressing on.
We’ve gone through rounds of tax cutting and rounds of tax increases in modern U.S. history. We haven’t really had a big igniting of a trade war belligerence since the Depression era, and that’s not an era that we want to repeat.
I always felt my role was like the pit crew in a NASCAR race, and President Obama was Dale Jr.- he’s driving, and my job is to change the tires and get him back on the road.
This recession is the deepest in our lifetimes, the deepest since 1929. If you take the people thrown out of work in the 1982 recession, the 1991 recession, the 2001 recession, not only is this bigger, this is bigger than all of those combined.
My impression is the Trump administration is in imminent danger of violating the gunfighter’s credo, which is ‘Do not pick seven fights if you are carrying a six shooter.’
Whenever I interview someone for a job, I always ask them whether they want to sit in Bernanke’s chair. The only wrong answer is, ‘Who’s Bernanke?’.
For every criticism of the U.S. economy, whenever people go into a panic, they look around and say, ‘That’s the cleanest shirt I have. So I’m putting it on.’
