"I don’t think we have to do it by government spending. My view is I’ve never heard of a poor person spending himself into prosperity. The government doesn’t create resources. The government redistributes them, and it redistributes them from workers and producers to people they get the resources based on some characteristic of the work effort. So what you really need to do is I think you need to incentivize producers, and what you need to go along, and my way of going would be Simpson-Bowles. Something to lower the tax rates, broaden the base, get rid of the loopholes. I mean really get a production base that officially starts, and that’s the way you really get out of this depression. The way we did in the Eighties to be honest with you."

“Sound money is the sine qua non of a prosperous society.”

“While discussing President Ford's ‘WIN’ proposal for tax increases, I supposedly grabbed my napkin and a pen and sketched a curve on the napkin illustrating the trade-off between tax rates and tax revenues. Wanniski named the trade-off ‘The Laffer Curve.’”

“Nations with the greatest stimulus spending had the deepest recessions — while those with the least stimulus spending performed the best. The bigger the spending stimulus, the slower the recovery. I also showed historically that spending has never been associated with faster growth of the US economy.”

“Have you ever heard of a poor person spending himself into prosperity?”

“In the 1990's, we had the largest cut in government spending as a share of GDP in the history of the U.S. In the 1990's, we were doing free trade, we passed NAFTA, we went through there. We were for lowering interest rates and controlling money far better. And we weren't regulating nearly as much. We had welfare reform and all of those wonderful things. We had the biggest tax cut in our nation's history. Any comparison between today and the 1990's, it's totally inappropriate. Bill Clinton, as bad a person as he was, was a good president.”

“People don’t work to pay taxes, they work to consume.”