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Robert Kuttner Quotes

Robert L. Kuttner is an American journalist and writer whose works present a liberal/progressive point of view. Kuttner is the co-founder and current co-editor of The American Prospect, which was created in 1990 as an "authoritative magazine of liberal ideas," according to its mission statement. He was a 20-year columnist for Business Week and The Boston Globe, and continues to write columns in and for the Huffington Post.Kuttner is also one of five 1986 co-founders of the Economic Policy Institute, and currently serves on its executive committee. Between 2007 and 2014, Kuttner joined the liberal Demos research and policy center as a Distinguished Senior Fellow. Wikipedia  

✵ 17. April 1943
Robert Kuttner photo
Robert Kuttner: 23   quotes 0   likes

Famous Robert Kuttner Quotes

“We are already well down the road toward a managed-trade regime. It would be far better to acknowledge that reality, and seek a set of reasonable rules, than to pretend that Ricardian trade is the norm and allow mercantilist states to overwhelm U. S. industry and ratchet down wages, in the name of free trade.”

Robert Kuttner

Source: The Economic Illusion (1984), Chapter 3, Trade, p. 124

“If Boeing got a big head start on the 707 from multibillion-dollar military contracts to develop an air force transport, is that a sin against free trade?”

Robert Kuttner

Source: The Economic Illusion (1984), Chapter 3, Trade, p. 96

“Political conservatives have focused on tax reduction as an economic growth strategy for three reasons. First it is self-serving; it saves rich people lots of money. Second, it comports with their ideological allegiance to laissez-faire economics. And third, tax incentives are less intrusive to business-as-usual than any other form of government planning.”

Robert Kuttner

Source: The Economic Illusion (1984), Chapter 5, Taxes, p. 227

“If social security depresses savings rates, it is only because it is unfunded.”

Robert Kuttner

Source: The Economic Illusion (1984), Chapter 2, Capital, p. 77

“Keynes, like Freud and Marx, deserves to be read in the original, not through the glosses of his lesser disciples.”

Robert Kuttner

Source: The Economic Illusion (1984), Chapter 1, Equality and Efficiency, p. 27

Robert Kuttner Quotes

“Unfortunately, the Laffer curve did not work as advertised. Lower tax rates did not produce more tax revenues. They produced deficits.”

Robert Kuttner

Source: The Economic Illusion (1984), Chapter 5, Taxes, p. 208
Context: The total impact of the Reagan tax cuts on capital lowered the effective cost of capital to American industry by an estimated 1.2 percent. Unfortunately, the Laffer curve did not work as advertised. Lower tax rates did not produce more tax revenues. They produced deficits.

“But of course you can have your cake and eat it, too - if you decide to to bake a second cake. And you may well find that baking two cakes does not take twice the work of baking one.”

Robert Kuttner

Source: The Economic Illusion (1984), Chapter 1, Equality and Efficiency, p. 14

“By default, we have created a "system" of nursing-home care for the aged in which middle-class people pay exorbitant rates to for-profit nursing-home entrepreneurs - and then when private resources are consumed and the patient qualifies as a pauper, the nursing home begins billing Medicaid. This is precisely the antithesis of social citizenship; instead of the poor being accorded the dignity associated with the middle class, equality of treatment is achieved by making the middle class undergo pauperization.”

Robert Kuttner

Source: The Economic Illusion (1984), Chapter 6, Welfare, p. 239

People , Age , Home

“The economic illusion is the belief that social justice is bad for economic growth.”

Robert Kuttner

Introduction, p. 1 (First text line.)
The Economic Illusion (1984)

Justice

“When laissez-faire creates instability, the move to a freer market can be something less than pure gain.”

Robert Kuttner

Source: The Economic Illusion (1984), Chapter 2, Capital, p. 85

“In America, we build public housing by creating lucrative inducements to private developers, and then wax indignant at the public waste.”

Robert Kuttner

Source: The Economic Illusion (1984), Chapter 1, Equality and Efficiency, p. 37

Housing

“American critics of welfare statism are often surprised to learn that countries like West Germany, with a much more comprehensive welfare state and a statistically "larger" public sector, have fewer government employees per capita than the United States does.”

Robert Kuttner

Source: The Economic Illusion (1984), Chapter 1, Equality and Efficiency, p. 23

Learning , Country

“Why, then, should we have to lower our living standards? What is the mysterious source of the economic loss? If productivity is increasing, why should we sacrifice services and wages?”

Robert Kuttner

Epilogue: Politics, p. 272
The Economic Illusion (1984)

Loss

“It is more than a little ironic that "capital accumulation" once a rather tendentious Marxian view of a supposed capitalist obsession, should have become - of all things - Wall Street's own slogan.”

Robert Kuttner

Source: The Economic Illusion (1984), Chapter 2, Capital, p. 51

“Henry Ford, in a sense, was the first Keynesian. He paid his assembly workers high wages so they could afford to buy his cars.”

Robert Kuttner

Source: The Economic Illusion (1984), Chapter 4, Labor, p. 169

Cars , Sense

“Britain, with the most completely socialized health system in the West, now spends the lowest fraction of GNP on health care of any major nation. There are frequent complaints of excessive waits for elective surgery and other inconveniences, but British citizens live slightly longer than Americans, on average, and our overall health conditions are comparable.”

Robert Kuttner

Source: The Economic Illusion (1984), Chapter 6, Welfare, p. 250

Health , Waiting

“Not surprisingly, extensive effort in Britain and America goes into finding tax shelter. the system is "efficient" for the shelter industry, not for the economy.”

Robert Kuttner

Source: The Economic Illusion (1984), Chapter 5, Taxes, p. 188

Effort

“In practice, a good deal of the outcomes produced by the market reflect nothing more than luck - good or bad.”

Robert Kuttner

Source: The Economic Illusion (1984), Chapter 1, Equality and Efficiency, p. 16

“In a world where technology and capital are highly transferable, there is a real risk that comparative advantage comes to be defined as whose labor force will work for the lowest wage.”

Robert Kuttner

Source: The Economic Illusion (1984), Chapter 3, Trade, p. 102

World

“Technological advance often thrives in sheltered and subsidized markets, which defy free trade.”

Robert Kuttner

Source: The Economic Illusion (1984), Chapter 3, Trade, p. 97

“Can we reverse these deeply rooted sources sources of inequality? Or are they just endemic to a capitalist economy?”

Robert Kuttner

Guardian Weekly, June 30, 1996

“I have tried to suggest that injustice is not necessary economics; that the economics can work, and has often worked, when the constituency for it is animated. The politics of equality - that is a little harder.”

Robert Kuttner

Epilogue: Politics, p. 278 (Last text lines...)
The Economic Illusion (1984)

Animals

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