Laffer Quotes

The story of how the Laffer Curve got its name begins with a 1978 article by Jude Wanniski in 'The Public Interest' entitled, 'Taxes, Revenues, and the Laffer Curve.' ~ Arthur Laffer

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. ~ Arthur Laffer

What I'm not saying is that all government spending is bad. It's not - far, far from it, but there is no free lunch, as a former colleague of mine used to say. There is no public tooth fairy. Father Christmas does not work on the Treasury staff this year. You can never bail someone out of trouble without putting someone else into trouble. ~ Arthur Laffer

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. ~ Arthur Laffer

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. ~ Arthur Laffer

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. ~ Arthur Laffer

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. ~ Arthur Laffer

Taxes are not trivial - they're a huge portion of this overall economy. And that's why I focused on them. ~ Arthur Laffer

Let's take the nine states that have no income tax and compare them with the nine states with the highest income tax rates in the nation. If you look at the economic metrics over the last decade for both groups, the zero-income-tax-rate states outperform the highest-income-tax-rate states by a fairly sizable amount. ~ Arthur Laffer

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. ~ Arthur Laffer

... economists recognize that, other things equal, cuts in tax rates reduce tax revenues in percentage terms by less than the tax-rate reductions. Similarly, tax-rate increases do not raise tax revenues by as much in percentage terms as the tax-rate increases. This is true because changes in marginal tax rates alter taxpayer behavior and thus affect taxable income. ~ Campbell R. McConnell

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. ~ Arthur Laffer

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. ~ Arthur Laffer

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. ~ Arthur Laffer

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

The zero-income-tax-rate states have far faster growth in tax revenues than did the states with highest income tax rate over the same period. ~ Arthur Laffer

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

It is not true that Congress spends money like a drunken sailor. Drunken sailors spend their own money. Congress spends our money. ~ Arthur Laffer

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. ~ Arthur Laffer

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. ~ Arthur Laffer

The income effects in an economy always sum to zero. ~ Arthur Laffer

I mean, everyone agrees with stress tests for banks. I mean that's clear. But banks should do that on their own. And they should worry about their own capital functioning. That's what they should do. It shouldn't be a government function. ~ Arthur Laffer

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. ~ Arthur Laffer

Raising taxes is not a frivolous venture that you do on the editorial page of 'The New Republic,' for god sakes. It's something that you really have to think about and go through carefully. ~ Arthur Laffer

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. ~ Arthur Laffer

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

If you look at the performance of the zero-income-tax-rate states and the highest-income-tax-rate states, I believe a large amount of their difference is due to taxes. Not only is it true of the last decade, but I took these numbers back 50 years. And, there's not one year in the last 50 where the zero-income-tax-rate states have not outperformed the highest-income-tax-rate states. ~ Arthur Laffer

In 2010 the U.S. will have a payroll tax rate increase, an estate tax increase, and income tax increases. There's also a tax increase coming in 2010 on carried interest. This rate will rise from its current level of 15 percent to 35 percent, and then it will rise again in 2011. ~ Arthur Laffer

In 1994, Estonia became the first European country to adopt a flat tax, and its 26 percent flat tax dramatically energized what had been a faltering economy. Before adopting the flat tax, the Estonian economy was literally shrinking. In the eight years after 1994, Estonia experienced real economic growth - averaging 5.2 percent per year. ~ Arthur Laffer

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. ~ Arthur Laffer

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. ~ Arthur Laffer

There are lots of other things that affect state growth besides state taxes. However, the reason I look at taxes is because these are policy variables that can be changed by state governments in order to get better results than they otherwise had. ~ Arthur Laffer

California is the highest-tax state in the nation and has been for a long time. It has the highest-paid teachers in the nation, by far - $400 a month more than New Jersey - and yet California is the third lowest state on test scores for fourth and eighth grade English and math in the nation, and has been at the low level for a long, long time. ~ Arthur Laffer

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

There are 11 states in the United States that in the last 50 years instituted an income tax. So I looked at each of those 11 states over the last 50 years, and I took their current economic metrics and their metrics for the five years before they put in the progressive income tax. Every single state that introduced a progressive income tax has declined as an overall share of the U.S. economy. ~ Arthur Laffer

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. ~ Arthur Laffer

Tax rates aren't everything with regard to incentives to work. I would probably work at a 100% tax rate next to a nude modeling studio. I'm joking, but you know what I'm saying. There's a lot more to it than just tax rates. It's economics that I do; I don't do nude modeling studio economics. People do respond to taxes. ~ Arthur Laffer

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

It has always amazed me how tax cuts don't work until they take effect. Mr. Obama's experience with deferred tax rate increases will be the reverse. The economy will collapse in 2011. ~ Arthur Laffer