GDP Quotes
Britain is a textbook case of how growing inequality leads to economic crisis. The years before the crash were marked by a sharp rise in remortgaging and the growth of 0% balance transfer credit cards. By 2008 the UK had the highest ratio of household debt to GDP of any major economy.
Frances O'Grady
Thanks to the work of John Maynard Keynes and of Milton Friedman, we now have a better understanding of how governments can (at least in principle) reduce the severity of major economic downturns. Keynesian economics taught us that government spending can raise GDP and reduce unemployment.
Martin Feldstein
The economy is doing fine-if you gauge it in traditional ways. The growth of GDP is 6.2%, which is good. [...] But do we compare Russia to developed countries or to a country like China that has the GDP growth of 9%-or oil producers like Azerbaijan with 12%, or Kazakhstan with 19%. This way, we see that Russia's achievement is more than modest. Under oil windfall profits, Russia's GDP should have grown by 15% to 16% in 2005. Once you dismiss the windfall profits, you see a poor quality of the economic policy that has proven negative to the tune of losing some 9% to 10% of the GDP growth.
Andrey Illarionov
Nothing could be further from the truth than the claim that we have a choice between cutting tax and cutting unemployment, for the two go hand in hand. It is no accident that the two most successful economies in the world, both overall and specifically in terms of job creation-those of the United States and Japan-have the lowest level of tax as a proportion of GDP. Reductions in taxation motivate new businesses and improve incentives at work. They are a principal engine of the enterprise culture, on which our future prosperity and employment opportunities depend.
Nigel Lawson
Look at London. Of course it matters to all of us that London's economy flourishes. But the test of the enormous wealth generated in patches of the capital is not that it contributed 20%-30% to Britain's GDP but how it affects the lives of the millions who live and work there. What kind of lives are available to them? Can they afford to live there? If they can't, it is not compensation that London is also a paradise for the ultra-rich. Can they get decently paid jobs or jobs at all? If they can't, don't brag about all those Michelin-starred restaurants and their self-dramatising chefs. Or schooling for children? Inadequate schools are not offset by the fact that London universities could field a football team of Nobel prize winners.
Eric Hobsbawm
Russian GDP equals that of Italy – it should not be an existential threat to the West. We must shake ourselves free from the Kremlin's masterful fiction and confront the truth that we are in an asymmetric war. This is a war that we can win, and it matters that we do. We are sleepwalking through the end of our era of peace. It is time to wake up.
Eerik-Niiles Kross
Government is taking 40 percent of the GDP. And that's at the state, local and federal level. President Obama has taken government spending at the federal level from 20 percent to 25 percent. Look, at some point, you cease being a free economy, and you become a government economy. And we've got to stop that.
Mitt Romney
Growth can also involve producing services instead of goods. In particular, a major expansion of public and caring services (like child care, education, elder care, and other life-affirming programs) would generate huge increases in GDP and incomes, with virtually no impact on the environment.
Jim Stanford
You get a tax break for a racehorse, why in God's name couldn't we provide an $8,000 tax credit for everybody who has childcare costs? It would put 720 million women back in the workforce. It would increase the GDP, to sound like a wonk here, by about eight-tenths of one percent. It would grow the economy.
Joe Biden
It's a terrible blow for the world when countries as rich and talented and stable and well-off as this country doesn't fulfil the global responsibility of at least 0.7% of 1% of GDP in development aid. It's a terrible blow. If we all did it, we would save millions of lives, we would have all the kids in school. They would be growing up to be productive members of their society, we wouldn't have the mass refugee movements. We would have a completely different dynamic in the world. My country's spending 30 times more on the military than it is on development assistance right now.
Jeffrey D. Sachs
If you have a private firm and you spend a ton of money to pay employees, but what you produce is a flop, there will be no value to GDP. But government spending all gets counted as contributing to economic growth. That's why in the early days of creating these measurements, some people didn't want to count government spending.
Robert Higgs