A Quote by Walter Karp

The military budget is simply an enormous pork barrel of special privilege, the privileges taking the form of windfall profits, of no-risk profits and, most importantly, of enormous outlays of capital supplied by the Pentagon to arms contractors.

Walter Karp

Quote Topics

Arms Barrel Budget Capital Contractors Enormous Form Importantly Military Military Budget Most Pentagon Pork Pork Barrel Privilege Privileges Profits Risk Simply Special Taking

Quote Author

Walter Karp
American - Journalist
May 14, 1934 - July 19, 1989

Profits are the driving force of the market economy. The greater the profits, the better the needs of the consumers are supplied... He who serves the public best, makes the highest profits.

Ludwig von Mises

What chiefly governs the [U.S.] military budget is the need to spend enormous sums of money in a useless way. The allegedly powerful Pentagon is simply a receptacle for wasteful expenditure, just as a city dump is the receptacle for the refuse of a city.

Walter Karp

Defense contractors are able to reap tremendous profits while rarely confronting the risks for which those profits are supposed to be the reward.

James Surowiecki

One common adage...that is completely wrongheaded is: You can't go broke taking profits. That's precisely how many traders do go broke. While amateurs go broke by taking large losses, professionals go broke by taking small profits.

William Eckhardt

Democratically elected governments meekly requesting giant corporations to pay pitifully low levels of tax on their enormous profits is not a good look.

David Olusoga

I admit that one should never underestimate the capacity of banks to destroy enormous amounts of accumulated capital and reduce, temporarily, the supply. After all, capital is the accumulated savings of mankind. And banks are great masters in destroying enormous amounts of capital with great regularity.

Arie de Geus

A huge part of Apple profits generated in Europe, in African countries, Middle East, and India were all booked in Ireland. And I think it is a very basic principle in taxation that your profits are taxed where the profits are generated.

Margrethe Vestager

The danger of tautological propositions is considerable in discussions of the concept of normal profits. Because supernormal profits seem to invite newcomers to an industry and sub-normal profits seem to drive away those who are in an industry, some writers are inclined to define normal profits as the earnings of the fixed resources in an industry which neither grows nor declines in size or number of firms. It should be clear that such a definition is useless: it muddles together attractiveness and actual afflux, desirbility of entry and ease of entry, zero profits and monopoly rents.

Fritz Machlup

The first pork-barrel bill that crosses my desk, I'm going to veto it and make the authors of those pork-barrel items famous all over America.

John McCain

Wars are popular. Contractors make profits; the aristocracy glean honour.

Ramsay MacDonald

Firms would be given initial entitlements to gross markup on the basis of past performance, adjusted by changes in labor and capital inputs. This is somewhat similar to the definition of normal profits under some versions of the wartime excess -profits tax. Entitlements would be transferable and a competitive market established.

William Vickrey

Through most of its wars, the United States successfully used the attrition approach. It is easier to be proficient at this type of warfare. You need to master only the simplest military skills and possess enormous quantities of arms and munitions.

Jim Dunnigan

This Iraq war has been the most "privatized" war in America's history. It has seen the most extensive use of contractors. The contractors have increased the costs; but they have been necessary - the military simply could not have done it on their own. we would have had to increase the size of the military. But the George W. Bush Administration wanted America to believe that it could have a war, essentially for free, without raising taxes, without increasing the size of the armed forces.

Joseph Stiglitz

During the period of capital moving from one employment to another, the profits on that to which capital is flowing will be relatively high, but will continue so no longer than till the requisite capital is obtained.