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 LafferWe 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 LafferI think the inflation prospects for the U.S. over the next five or six, seven years, are quite serious. You cannot have a bumper crop in apples without the value or the price of each apple falling. The Fed has had the largest increase in the monetary base in the history of the U.S., from colonial times to the present, times ten.
Arthur LafferThere 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 LafferWhen 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 LafferIf 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