Austan Goolsbee Quotes

I don't see why anybody's playing chicken with the debt ceiling.

- Austan Goolsbee

If we hit the debt ceiling, that's... essentially defaulting on our obligations, which is totally unprecedented in American history. The impact on the economy would be catastrophic.

- Austan Goolsbee

The debt ceiling is not something to toy with.

- Austan Goolsbee

One of the most interesting things that I'm seeing of the Trump picks is such a heavy business and financial focus. I can't help but feel like this is going to throw a lot of policy weight and details back to Congress, because these are not people who have a lot of experience drafting legislation.

- Austan Goolsbee

We know there are a lot of people in the unemployment pool that do not match up in their skill set for what jobs are going to be created, and that's an area we've got to keep pressing on.

- Austan Goolsbee

The data does not support that high-income tax cuts are the main drivers of growth, so I don't think that uncertainty over what the tax rate will be for someone that makes a million dollars a year has that big an impact on the economic growth rate in the country.

- Austan Goolsbee

Giving Northern Europe a veto over Southern Europe's budgets will not hold a monetary union together. The euro zone will continue to need the weaker countries to stomach decades of high unemployment to grind down wages.

- Austan Goolsbee

In Michigan, in the mid-'80s, the unemployment rate goes way up because a lot of factories shut down. And then, the mid-2000s, to pick a date, the unemployment rate in Michigan isn't that much higher than in the rest of the country. But the main way that happened is people moved.

- Austan Goolsbee

Trade has helped the economy grow. Simultaneously, a sizable number of Americans haven't shared in that bounty, and if we don't pay attention to their concerns, all the political favor for open markets will dry up.

- Austan Goolsbee

When I was at MIT, they had a beta test of Mosaic, the first popular browser. I remember looking at it, and there was a weather map or something. Now, in fairness to me, there weren't any websites then. But I remember saying, 'This is stupid - what's the point?' Now, of course, it's obvious.

- Austan Goolsbee

Whenever I interview someone for a job, I always ask them whether they want to sit in Bernanke's chair. The only wrong answer is, 'Who's Bernanke?'.

- Austan Goolsbee

I don't believe, the president doesn't believe, that the high income tax cuts work, period. I don't think the evidence supports that.

- Austan Goolsbee

I was always a data guy, not a theorist. Theorists can maintain total purity. The data are always messy.

- Austan Goolsbee

It's clear that the medium and long-run fiscal challenges facing the country have to do with the rise of entitlement spending, they have to do with the longer run imbalances that we've created in the structure of the system.

- Austan Goolsbee

In this country, we have partnerships, we have S corps, we have LLCs, we have a series of entities that do not pay corporate income tax.

- Austan Goolsbee

You have to be looking for a job to get unemployment benefits. If you stop looking for work, you are no longer eligible to receive benefits.

- Austan Goolsbee

Let's pass the small business credit enhancement bill so small business can get back on its feet.

- Austan Goolsbee

I get massive invective, massive abuse, via email, phone messages, and Twitter. From people way, way to the right of center - scary, abusive kind of stuff. Really freaks out my assistant and my wife. Hate-filled.

- Austan Goolsbee

The only question where there is disagreement is should the highest income rates above a quarter million dollars a year go back to where they were under Bill Clinton. That is the dispute about the taxes.

- Austan Goolsbee

Cutting taxes for very high income people an average of more than $100,000 a year for people that make more than a million dollars a year is not an effective way to get the economy going.

- Austan Goolsbee

What happened is we went into a recession beginning in December of 2007 that was the worst since 1929. And it is a very deep hole that we have been struggling to get out of.

- Austan Goolsbee

If it was up to me, I would have put more money into the state fiscal relief.

- Austan Goolsbee

I believe - I'm not a political expert, but I believe there is a broad consensus, a middle ground if you will, that Democrats and Republicans, business people and workers can agree on, to get this - the economy growing faster, getting people back to work.

- Austan Goolsbee

The share of income that small business people are paying in taxes is the lowest it has been in 65 years - since Obama has cut taxes 18 or 22 times for small business.

- Austan Goolsbee

The president is 100 percent for extending the tax cuts for 98.7 percent of small businesses.

- Austan Goolsbee

All I'll say is if you look at countries where it is - where they are rapidly growing, they're investing in their infrastructure. They're investing in their educations. They are trying to streamline regulations, but they're not neglecting key investments.

- Austan Goolsbee

Koch Industries is a multibillion-dollar business.

- Austan Goolsbee

They set a low bar for Donald Trump, and he banged his head on it.

- Austan Goolsbee

If you look at the Greek economic record, it's been very similar to the U.S. experience in the first four years of the Great Depression. And after having a Depression-sized event, they've cut the unit-labor cost in Greece - they've closed something like half the gap with Germany.

- Austan Goolsbee

When Texans suffered from the collapse of the oil market in the 1980s, they could rely on the fiscal union to help them. When Texas boomed with rising oil prices in the 2000s, it contributed to the union to help harder hit regions.

- Austan Goolsbee

I'm pretty happy not to be an insider anymore. There's just no common ground. I don't know if it's distrust or that the politics is substantially more partisan than the public. But there's no pressure to make a grand bargain on fiscal matters, on growth, on anything.

- Austan Goolsbee

You can't look back at the worst financial crisis of our lifetimes that started in 2008 and not have some important lessons about the critical nature of oversights in financial markets and institutions.

- Austan Goolsbee

I am a data hound and so I usually end up working on whatever things I can find good data on. The rise of Internet commerce completely altered the amount of information you could gather on company behavior so I naturally drifted toward it.

- Austan Goolsbee

So more than 8 million people lost their jobs. It's going to take a significant push on our part and time before that comes down. I don't anticipate it coming down rapidly.

- Austan Goolsbee

In several quarters in the 2000s, if you added up all the private savings of everyone in the United States, it was less than nothing. You can't sustain that as a driver of growth.

- Austan Goolsbee

I can't remember exactly, but the White House is not keen on people going on Fox News. It's my view that while people in the administration feel that Fox News doesn't give them a fair shake, the fact of the matter is there are a lot of people who watch Fox News.

- Austan Goolsbee

For every criticism of the U.S. economy, whenever people go into a panic, they look around and say, 'That's the cleanest shirt I have. So I'm putting it on.'

- Austan Goolsbee

There were 14,000 people at the rally for the president in Ohio. There were another 8,000 people in Virginia. If all 22,000 of those people opened their wallets and gave $1,000 each, that would be less than one donation from a billionaire to the super PACs. And that's why he's in for the fight of his life.

- Austan Goolsbee

If a lobbyist sets up shop, or a lawyer, in which they're receiving income through what is something like a tax loophole so that it's not counting as corporate income, that is what this is counting as a small business.

- Austan Goolsbee

The U.S. is still in a pretty good spot, especially relative to other advanced countries. The aging of our population is not as pronounced as almost anyone else's.

- Austan Goolsbee

There's a certain kind of academic that comes to Washington and can't survive. They're the ones starting each sentence with 'The economic model says.'

- Austan Goolsbee

This recession is the deepest in our lifetimes, the deepest since 1929. If you take the people thrown out of work in the 1982 recession, the 1991 recession, the 2001 recession, not only is this bigger, this is bigger than all of those combined.

- Austan Goolsbee

A lot more people are willing to invest in bonds denominated in euros. And there was the fiscal discipline argument, which is that this tied the hands of countries the market hasn't always trusted, which also helped them borrow at low rates.

- Austan Goolsbee

My impression is the Trump administration is in imminent danger of violating the gunfighter's credo, which is 'Do not pick seven fights if you are carrying a six shooter.'

- Austan Goolsbee

The U.S. fiscal union has worked, in no small part, by enabling subsidies to the Mississippis without requiring the approval of the Minnesotas. It creates an important form of insurance.

- Austan Goolsbee

Only Barack Obama consistently opposed NAFTA.

- Austan Goolsbee

At the time of the formation of the euro, I would say most American economists said that's not a good idea; that's not a currency area that makes sense. And the answer from Europe was, 'How is Missouri and Mississippi a currency area?' But the flaw in that was not recognizing the importance of mobility.

- Austan Goolsbee

History teaches that the level of unemployment is not as important as whether the rate's going down.

- Austan Goolsbee

We enter the government essentially in a hotel that is on fire. We're throwing people from the windows into the pool to save their lives and this is the evaluation of the Olympic diving committee: Well, the splash was too big.

- Austan Goolsbee

I always felt my role was like the pit crew in a NASCAR race, and President Obama was Dale Jr.- he's driving, and my job is to change the tires and get him back on the road.

- Austan Goolsbee

For policy makers interested in using tax policy to stimulate investments or especially to smooth business cycle fluctuations, the results are not promising.

- Austan Goolsbee

What Disneyland was to my kids at age 10, that's kind of what Chicago is for economists.

- Austan Goolsbee

If we get to the point where we damage the full faith and credit of the United States, that would be the first default in history caused purely by insanity.

- Austan Goolsbee

We've gone through rounds of tax cutting and rounds of tax increases in modern U.S. history. We haven't really had a big igniting of a trade war belligerence since the Depression era, and that's not an era that we want to repeat.

- Austan Goolsbee

To the extent that the Trump administration doesn't like a strong dollar, something has got to give, and just yelling at other countries for devaluing when you're raising rates and they're cutting rates is not going to work.

- Austan Goolsbee

Look, I don't dispute that the deficit has increased.

- Austan Goolsbee

Research professors don't watch a whole lot of TV.

- Austan Goolsbee

Yes, prices go up in health care. They have been doing so for 80 straight years.

- Austan Goolsbee

I'm not afraid to take a punch.

- Austan Goolsbee

I was named DC's funniest celebrity.

- Austan Goolsbee

That is what happened in 2010. The administration and the leadership of the Republicans thought, 'Well, we're making a deal together; we're showing the world things can be done in a bi-partisan way. We're extending all our tax cuts for two years.'

- Austan Goolsbee

If you had asked people in 1929, 'Here is what is about to happen. How much would you pay to avoid the Great Depression from occurring?' The answer is they would have paid a lot. They would have borrowed money if it could be used to prevent the Great Depression.

- Austan Goolsbee

If you're going to be an academic who's involved in the world of policy, you have to be involved in the world that exists.

- Austan Goolsbee

Applying cost-benefit analysis to regulation is no different than what most regulatory agencies do.

- Austan Goolsbee

If Democrats don't go on Fox News, it doesn't mean that people stop watching.

- Austan Goolsbee

When the Internet first appeared, this heated debate developed among economists. One side said the Internet will make it easier for companies to price-discriminate, and it'll be fabulously profitable.

- Austan Goolsbee