Robert Kuttner Quotes (23 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Robert Kuttner: 23 quotes0 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

“Technological change is beneficial only when other jobs replace the ones lost.”

Robert Kuttner

Guardian Weekly, August 08, 1993

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

“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)

“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