117 Fiscal Policy Quotes
Following is our list of fiscal policy quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about deficit spending.
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Famous Fiscal Policy Quotes
More generally, I strongly believe in the importance of fiscal responsibility. — Rishi Sunak
When you say fiscal responsibility, it seems to me that you really mean rich people keeping their money. — Alice Adams
Additional fiscal support could be costly, but worth it if it helps avoid long-term economic damage and leaves us with a stronger recovery. — Jerome Powell
Macroeconomic policy can never be devoid of politics: it involves fundamental trade-offs and affects different groups differently. — Joseph Stiglitz
For policy makers interested in using tax policy to stimulate investments or especially to smooth business cycle fluctuations, the results are not promising. — Austan Goolsbee
There will be a fiscal adjustment of 5 points of GDP that will fall on the public sector. — Javier Milei
Monetary policy is about the redistribution of wealth and income from the masses to the classes. — Russell Napier
Budget consolidation and economic growth are two sides of the same coin. — Angela Merkel
Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it. — Ronald Reagan
Governments harangue about deficits to get more revenue so they can spend more. — Allan H. Meltzer
Restoring responsibility and accountability is essential to the economic and fiscal health of our nation. — Carl Levin
Too often in recent history liberal governments have been wrecked on rocks of loose fiscal policy. — Franklin D. Roosevelt
The budget should be balanced not by more taxes, but by reduction of follies. — Herbert Hoover
Outrageous fiscal mendacity is neither historically normal nor bipartisan. It’s a modern Republican thing. — Paul Krugman
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. — Arthur Laffer
Short Fiscal Policy Quotes
- Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation. — Milton Friedman
- The problem is not that people are taxed too little, the problem is that government spends too much. — Ronald Reagan
- Monetary policy itself cannot sensibly be directed at reducing imbalances. — Timothy Geithner
- Having a lower tax, simpler, fairer, flatter tax system is something that can drive growth. — Rishi Sunak
- The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury. — John Maynard Keynes
- A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. — Karl Marx
- A tax cut means higher family income and higher business profits and a balanced federal budget. — John F. Kennedy
Fiscal Policy Image Quotes
Fiscal Quotes
Democracy is a form of government that cannot long survive, for as soon as the people learn that they have a voice in the fiscal policies of the government, they will move to vote for themselves all the money in the treasury, and bankrupt the nation. — Unknown Author
If a country lacks a reputation, businessmen will not invest until they see the fiscal adjustment. — Javier Milei
Although virtually all Republicans campaign on fiscal restraint, how many actually care about it deeply? — Tucker Carlson
Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor. Seizing the results of someone's labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities. — Robert Nozick
I am and will remain a tax resident in France and in this regard, I will fulfill my fiscal obligations. — Bernard Arnault
Even in a time of fiscal austerity, education is more than just an expense. — Arne Duncan
The fact that we are here today to debate raising America's debt limit is a sign of leadership failure... It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government's reckless fiscal policies. — Barack Obama
The administration's reckless plan doesn't do one thing to ensure the long term security of social security, rather it undermines our economy. We need a budget and a fiscal policy that reflects the values and interests of America and restores fiscal discipline. — Debbie Stabenow
As we get closer to the end of this Congress, we should be addressing the urgent needs of the American people - the war in Iraq, affordable health care, a sensible energy policy, quality education for our children, retirement security, and a sound and fair fiscal policy. — Chris Van Hollen
Europe unified its monetary policy through the euro before it unified politically, therefore sustaining member countries' abilities to pursue the kind of independent fiscal policies that can strain a joint currency. — Amity Shlaes
Deficit Spending Quotes
We think we can't survive without deficit spending - but we soon won't be able to survive with deficit spending, either. — Tony Blankley
I'm finding myself really angry over spending and the deficit. I'm finding myself really angry over what's happening in the Middle East, the decision to stay in Afghanistan indefinitely. I'm angry about cap and trade. And I've been on record for a long time on the failed war on drugs. — Gary Johnson
Deficits mean future tax increases, pure and simple. Deficit spending should be viewed as a tax on future generations, and politicians who create deficits should be exposed as tax hikers. — Ron Paul
Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the 'hidden' confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. — Alan Greenspan
We don't have a trillion-dollar debt because we haven't taxed enough; we have a trillion-dollar debt because we spend too much. — Ronald Reagan
We don't need more politicians insisting we have deficits because you're not taxed enough. Those deficits ballooned from an economy that didn't grow enough and from 50 years of government spending too much. — Ronald Reagan
Governments don't reduce deficits by raising taxes on the people; governments reduce deficits by controlling spending and stimulating new wealth. — Ronald Reagan
To reduce deficit spending and our enormous debt, you reign in spending. You cut the budget. You don't take more from the private sector and grow government with it. And that's exactly what Obama has in mind with this expiration of Bush tax cuts proposal of his. — Sarah Palin
The government deficit is the difference between the amount of money the government spends and the amount it has the nerve to collect. — Sam Ewing
The goal is to reduce the size and scope of government spending, not to focus on the deficit. The deficit is the symptom of the disease. — Grover Norquist
Fiscal Responsibility Quotes
As the President reviewed the state of the union and unveiled his second-term agenda, he fell short of adequately explaining how he intends to set America back on the course of fiscal responsibility and secure the fiscal health of the nation. — Ron Kind
Republicans should simply focus on first principles and give the American people what they want - an honest party dedicated to common sense, fiscal responsibility and limited government. If we govern to save the country, we'll do well as a party. — Tom Coburn
Being lectured by the president on fiscal responsibility is a little bit like Tony Soprano talking to me about law and order in this country. — John F. Kerry
Spending and tax cut decisions must be both fiscally responsible and fair to our working families. I believe that fiscal responsibility is the way to create prosperity for America and secure the retirement of America's seniors. — Blanche Lincoln
The American people expect more from Congress. They expect fiscal responsibility and common sense. They expect us to return to the pay-as-you-go budget rules that we had enacted in the past that helped us establish a surplus, however briefly. — Melissa Bean
I will work to restore fiscal responsibility to our country's budget and to provide for a more robust economy. — Ed Pastor
But in Congress, accountability is just a catch phrase, usually directed elsewhere. Demands to personal responsibility or corporate accountability abound, but rarely congressional accountability or fiscal responsibility. — Melissa Bean
Rather than waiting to restore fiscal responsibility after we pass legislation, we must work to ensure we remain committed to it as we draft legislation. — Gary Miller
I'm not really conservative. I'm conservative on certain things. I believe in less government. I believe in fiscal responsibility and all those things that maybe Republicans used to believe in but don't any more. — Clint Eastwood
Fiscal responsibility and government reform are going to be good themes for governing, well at any time, but particularly coming out of a recovery. — Bob McDonnell
Monetary Policy Quotes
While monetary policy can contribute to growth by supporting a durable expansion in a context of price stability, it cannot reliably affect the long-run sustainable level of the economy's growth. — Jerome Powell
The success of monetary policy should be judged by the economy's performance against our statutory mandates of price stability and maximum employment. — Jerome Powell
By tying minimum wage to money supply, the poor's income would rise and fall with the rise and fall in money supply. — Max Keiser
One factor that favors easier adjustment in EMEs is that U.S. monetary policy normalization has been and should continue to be gradual, as long as the U.S. economy evolves roughly as expected. — Jerome Powell
Minimum wage law is the 'People's Fed.' Tie minimum wage to money supply. If there is pushback against this idea, then shut down the Fed and its ability to distort the economy, penalizing labor, or make the Fed's distortions available to all businesses and all workers. — Max Keiser
The financial crisis and the Great Recession posed the most significant macroeconomic challenges for the United States in a half-century, leaving behind high unemployment and below-target inflation and calling for highly accommodative monetary policies. — Jerome Powell
Long experience, in the United States and in other advanced economies, has demonstrated that monetary policy is most successful when decisions are rendered independent of influence by elected officials. — Jerome Powell
The Fed's organization reflects a long-standing desire in American history to ensure that power over our nation's monetary policy and financial system is not concentrated in a few hands, whether in Washington or in high finance or in any single group or constituency. — Jerome Powell
No government can successfully achieve all three goals of having a fixed foreign exchange rate, free capital flows, and an independent monetary policy. — Saifedean Ammous
Economic Policy Quotes
The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside. — Kwame Nkrumah
[E]conomic history is a long record of government policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disregard for the laws of economics — Ludwig von Mises
We will become a global advocate for rainforest preservation and marine restoration. We will rethink development policies that promised economic growth while ignoring ecological sustainability, and ended up delivering neither. — Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Food price inflation is running at 13% in Ireland. The people creating policy are laughably unserious. The government is borrowing money to give to farmers to destroy the food supply. This is Robert Mugabe economic policy. — Philip Pilkington
I believe that we can create a poverty-free world because poverty is not created by poor people. It has been created and sustained by the economic and social systems that we have designed for ourselves; the institutions and concepts that make up that system; the policies that we pursue. — Muhammad Yunus
Policies that promote better wages and better jobs would be super-helpful, and I'm a big fan of programs that encourage people to go where jobs are. — James David Vance
Mr. David Stockman has said that supply-side economics was merely a cover for the trickle-down approach to economic policy — what an older and less elegant generation called the horse-and-sparrow theory: If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows. — John Kenneth Galbraith
One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results. — Milton Friedman
Trickle down economics is a fraud. Giving tax breaks to the rich and large corporations does not create jobs. It simply makes the rich richer, enlarges the deficit and increases income and wealth inequality. We need economic policies which benefit working families, not the billionaire class. — Bernie Sanders
Unless we understand what it is that leads to economic and financial instability, we cannot prescribe -- make policy -- to modify or eliminate it. Identifying a phenomenon is not enough; we need a theory that makes instability a normal result in our economy and gives us handles to control it. — Hyman Minsky
People Writing About Fiscal Policy
More Fiscal Policy Quotes
The potential gains from improved stabilization policies are on the order of hundredths of a percent of consumption, perhaps two orders of magnitude smaller than the potential benefits of available supply-side fiscal reforms. — Robert Lucas, Jr.
Inflation is not caused by the actions of private citizens, but by the government: by an artificial expansion of the money supply required to support deficit spending. No private embezzlers or bank robbers in history have ever plundered people's savings on a scale comparable to the plunder perpetrated by the fiscal policies of statist governments. — Ayn Rand
President Reagan, Jack Kemp and other advocates of supply-side economics understood that pro-growth tax, spending and economic policies were essential to America's long-term economic and fiscal health. — Bob Beauprez
Many emerging countries are facing the same issue of overheating and inflation because they have been vigorously expanding fiscal and monetary policy to counter the 2008 shock. — Sri Mulyani Indrawati
I've always believed in expansionary monetary policy and if necessary fiscal policy when the economy is depressed. — Paul Krugman
Fiscal policy, monetary policy, they need to work together to try and raise the level of growth. — Joe Hockey
Developing protectionism regarding trade and our reluctance to place fiscal policy on a more sustainable path are threatening what may well be our most valued policy asset: the increased flexibility of our economy, which has fostered our extraordinary resilience to shocks. — Alan Greenspan
Our future begins on January 1 1999. The euro is Europe's key to the 21st century. The era of solo national fiscal and economic policy is over. — Gerhard Schroder
I believe, unlike people that are totally free-market, laissez-faire fundamentalists, that there is an important role that the government can play - one, in providing public goods, whether it's education, health care, or other things, and two, supervising countercyclical policy - stimulus, whether it's monetary, fiscal, or otherwise. — Nouriel Roubini
The United States has experienced high rates of inflation in the past and appears to be running the same type of fiscal policies that engendered hyperinflations in 20 countries over the past century. — Laurence Kotlikoff
The spirit of a people, its cultural level, its social structure, the deeds its policy may prepare—all this and more is written in its fiscal history, stripped of all phrases. He who knows how to listen to its message here discerns the thunder of world history more clearly than anywhere else. — Joseph A. Schumpeter
We've got to be explicit that the road to greater economic success does not lie in this cosy assumption that you can move from a single market through a single currency to harmonising all your taxes and then having a federal fiscal policy and then effectively having a federal state. — Gordon Brown
Inflation is the fiscal complement of statism and arbitrary government. It is a cog in the complex of policies and institutions which gradually lead toward totalitarianism . — Ludwig von Mises
Today's tax cuts provide yet another illustration of the Republicans' fiscally irresponsible economic policies that ignore the needs of America's middle class, students, and working families. — Ellen Tauscher
A lot of joblessness in the black community doesn't seem to be reachable through fiscal and monetary policies. People have not been drawn into the labor market even during periods of economic recovery. — William Julius Wilson
Governments cannot assume or expect that the ECB will always facilitate their funding independently of the achievement of their fiscal and other policy objectives. — Lucas Papademos
That means following a very restrictive fiscal and monetary policy which will squeeze the monopolies and cut their subsidies. On the micro level we will allow other economic agents, both domestic and foreign, to compete with them. — Vaclav Klaus
A lot of joblessness in the black community doesn't seem to be reachable through fiscal and monetary policies. People have not been drawn into the labor market even during periods of economic recovery. Employers would rather not hire a lot of workers from the inner city. They feel people from the inner city are not job-ready, that the kids have been poorly educated, that they can't read, they can't write, they can't speak. — William Julius Wilson
When you're facing the threat of recession, you need to have an expansionary monetary and fiscal policy. Pre-Keynesian, Hooverite views are dead everywhere except on 19th Street in Washington. — Joseph Stiglitz
Abenomics, quantitative easing, fiscal policy - we know all the issues. — Jamie Dimon
Without the triggers, that tax cut is irreponsible fiscal policy. Eventually, I think that will be the consensus view. — Alan Greenspan
... it's important to have the right monetary policy. It's important for, to have the right fiscal policy. But it's nowhere near as important as just the normal regenerative capacity of American capitalism. — Warren Buffett
The way I've always governed my life as far as fiscal policy goes is I'm smart enough to know that I'm dumb about it, so I surround myself with smart people in much the same way a hole surrounds itself with a doughnut. I just pay things off. That's all I do. — Dennis Miller
If we have a common currency, the main regulator for policy in the country is the fiscal policy. — Iveta Radicova
I'm not trying to be diplomatic. I'm trying to be more nuanced and realistic. I think there has to be a serious examination of the shortcomings of the Euro structure. Euro central institutions, whether it be fiscal policy, monetary policy, financial regulation, are simply not as robust as they are in a currency that has a national government behind it. — Stephen Harper
It's the [George Bush] president's fiscal policies that have driven up the biggest deficits in American history. He's added more debt to the debt of the United States in four years than all the way from George Washington to Ronald Reagan put together. — John F. Kerry
The United States needs serious change in its fiscal, entitlement, infrastructure, immigration, and education policies, among others. And yet a polarized and often paralyzed Washington has pushed dealing with these problems off into the future, which will only make them more difficult and expensive to solve. — Fareed Zakaria
I don't think that our problem, our jobs problem, is fundamentally a problem of trade. I think it has much more to do with the fact that we have not sufficiently educated our population. We have not got out of this great recession with adequate stimulus and adequate fiscal and monetary policies over all. — Robert Reich
In order to consolidate the euro we need to harmonise our economic, fiscal and social policies, hence we are going toward greater integration. — Francois Fillon
Our first benchmark is to cut the deficit more quickly to safeguard Britain’s credit rating. I know that we are taking a political gamble to set this up as a measure of success. Protecting the credit rating will not be easy The pace of fiscal consolidation will be co-ordinated with monetary policy. And we will protect Britain's credit rating and international reputation. — George Osborne
In short, Mr. Ryan’s plan is devoid of credible math or hard policy choices. And it couldn’t pass even if Republicans were to take the presidency and both houses of Congress. Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan have no plan to take on Wall Street, the Fed, the military-industrial complex, social insurance or the nation’s fiscal calamity and no plan to revive capitalist prosperity - just empty sermons. — David Stockman
The great thing about fiscal policy is that it has a direct impact and doesn't require you to bind the hands of future policymakers. — Paul Krugman
I can't remember the exact quote but when I used to trade and Mr. Volcker was Fed chairman, he said something like 'gold is my enemy, I'm always watching what gold is doing', we need to think why he made a statement like that. If you're a central banker or one of the congressmen or senators, watch what gold is doing because this is a no-confidence vote in fiscal and dollar policy. — Rick Santelli
This nation is on a course where if we don't do something about it, get federal situation, the fiscal policy [under control], we're Greece. We're a banana republic. Our status as a nation is threatened by what we’ve got coming at us in the area of deficit and debt. And it’s only a few more years, at the most, that we have to work with here before the market says, ‘Sorry, your currency is something we can not continue to defend.’ — Judd Gregg
The greatest threat facing America today is the disastrous fiscal policies of our own government, marked by shameless deficit spending and Federal Reserve currency devaluation. It is this one-two punch - Congress spending more than it can tax or borrow, and the Fed printing money to make up the difference - that threatens to impoverish us by further destroying the value of our dollars. — Ron Paul
The prudential regulation that I have put in place has been absolutely critical. The fiscal policy which we have put in place has been absolutely critical and if people looked at Australia now turn its back on economic reform, which of course industrial relations rollback or throwback would be, let me tell you, that would really start affecting confidence. — Peter Costello
Democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largesse out of the public treasure. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefit from the public treasury, with the result that democracy always collapses over a loose fiscal policy, always to be followed by a dictatorship, and then a monarchy. — Alexander Fraser Tytler
The basic prescription for preventing deflation is therefore straightforward, at least in principle: Use monetary and fiscal policy as needed to support aggregate spending, in a manner as nearly consistent as possible with full utilization of economic resources and low and stable inflation. In other words, the best way to get out of trouble is not to get into it in the first place. — Ben Bernanke
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