"Laffer, 74, is best remembered for the ‘Laffer Curve,’ which he scribbled on a napkin in 1974 to illustrate the negative effect of high tax rates on government revenues. If you hike taxes beyond a certain rate—a sweet spot, so to speak—then you end up collecting less revenue, he argued."

“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.”