A Quote by Robert H. Frank
Only the federal government has the power to spend beyond its current revenue. It shouldn't do that when the economy is at full employment. But it's an essential step for an economy mired in recession.
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We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists, and in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion since the war by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy, followed by a higher level of unemployment as the next step.
If we don't get this economy going, the numbers that represent this stimulus package are going to be small compared to the loss of revenue to the federal government for our economy.
Broadly speaking, Keynesianism means that the government has a specific responsibility for the behavior of the economy, that it doesn't work on its own autonomous course, but the government, when there's a recession, compensates by employment, by expansion of purchasing power, and in boom times corrects by being a restraining force. But it controls the great flow of demand into the economy, what since Keynesian times has been the flow of aggregate demand. That was the basic idea of Keynes so far as one can put it in a couple of sentences.
We are shrinking the size of the federal government as a percent of our economy from over 21 percent of the economy to 19 percent of the economy. At the same time, we're growing the private economy.
I would cap the amount of federal government can spend at 20 percent of the economy. Bring it back to 20 percent or lower. And say, we are not going to spend above that level. Democrats, they want to raise your taxes and spend more and more and turn us into an economy which is no longer driven by the private sector.
America is now a socialist economy. The definition of a socialist economy is when 50% or more of your economy is dependent on the federal government.
Government is taking 40 percent of the GDP. And that's at the state, local and federal level. President Obama has taken government spending at the federal level from 20 percent to 25 percent. Look, at some point, you cease being a free economy, and you become a government economy. And we've got to stop that.
In the immediate postwar years, the whole of Europe was in a recession. So first of all, it helped us step out of a recession; it gave a certain amount of speed to the economy. But that was the first step.
Democratic socialism means that our government does everything it can to create a full employment economy.
But again, you know, the views that we've expressed are transferring power back from the federal government to the states, giving Alaska an incredible opportunity to expand its economy, especially at a time when our federal government is coming close to bankruptcy. So that is a broad-based appeal. It's not an extreme view.
As long as we're focused on spending, there are only two ways to do that: One is spend less, and Democrats have no solutions for that. Or we have pro-growth policies that make the economy grow so the dead-weight cost of government becomes a smaller percentage of the economy and therefore less expensive.
The counting-room maxims liberally expounded are laws of the Universe. The merchant's economy is a coarse symbol of the soul's economy. It is, to spend for power, and not for pleasure.
The Federal Reserve's monetary policy objective is to foster maximum employment and price stability. In this regard, a key challenge is to assess just how far the economy now stands from the attainment of its maximum employment goal.
The economy grows when families can spend money on personal priorities rather than priorities imposed by the federal government.
After 2003, we lowered taxes across the board. And by 2004, revenue to the federal government grew. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan cut taxes dramatically. And by the end of the decade, revenue coming in the federal government had doubled.
An overheating economy, characterized by accelerating inflation and rising interest rates, is another precondition for recession. This doesn't describe today's economy.
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