Arthur Laffer

"Both sides have a bad incentive. The people you tax, who do work, they are going to stop working. The people who learn to live getting income without working, they are going to work less too."

"Don’t confuse fiscal discipline with party label. All those parties are all fiscally unsound. I mean, every Republican wants to spend more. Every Democrat wants to spend more. It is not their money… T…"

"And you can’t have a prosperous economy when the government is way overspending, raising tax rates, printing too much money, over regulating and restricting free trade. It just can’t be done."

"I have never heard of an economy being taxed into prosperity."

"Over the past 100 years, there have been three major periods of tax-rate cuts in the U.S.: the Harding-Coolidge cuts of the mid-1920s; the Kennedy cuts of the mid-1960s; and the Reagan cuts of the ear…"

"I used the so-called Laffer Curve all the time in my classes and with anyone else who would listen to me to illustrate the trade-off between tax rates and tax revenues."

"The trade deficit is the capital surplus and don't ever think of having a capital surplus as being a bad thing for our country."

"Stimulus packages don’t work. Every president that I have ever heard of has wanted a free lunch. They just don’t get it."