Arthur Laffer

I mean, everyone agrees with stress tests for banks. I mean that's clear. But banks should do that on their own. And they should worry about their own capital functioning. That's what they should do. It shouldn't be a government function.

Which would you rather have, capital lined up on your borders, trying to get into your country or trying to get out of your country? We are the capital magnet of this planet and we are the savior for not only people, for not only freedom, but also for capital.

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.

We are having the single worst recovery the U.S. has had since the Great Depression. I don't care how you measure it. The East Coast knows it. The West Coast knows it. North, South, old, young, everyone knows it's the worst recovery since the Great Depression.

I think the inflation prospects for the U.S. over the next five or six, seven years, are quite serious. You cannot have a bumper crop in apples without the value or the price of each apple falling. The Fed has had the largest increase in the monetary base in the history of the U.S., from colonial times to the present, times ten.

I've been truly blessed. I've been a fly on the wall of history. I've been just so many lucky places just by chance and serendipity, and obviously a huge portion of that serendipity had to do with my relationship with the real president, Ronald Reagan.

Raising taxes is not a frivolous venture that you do on the editorial page of 'The New Republic,' for god sakes. It's something that you really have to think about and go through carefully.

And let the Fed sell bonds to bring bank reserves back down to required reserve levels, so we have restraint on bank lending and bank issuances of liability.

A carbon tax by itself would make driving more expensive, that's very true. But in exchange for that, there are going to be more jobs, more output, more employment, and more products available. So really, as long as you're going to collect the revenues you're going to collect, you're going to have to trade off one tax for the other.

People can also change the timing of when they earn and receive their income in response to government policies.

People can change the volume, the location and the composition of their income, and they can do so in response to changes in government policies.

California is the highest-tax state in the nation and has been for a long time. It has the highest-paid teachers in the nation, by far - $400 a month more than New Jersey - and yet California is the third lowest state on test scores for fourth and eighth grade English and math in the nation, and has been at the low level for a long, long time.