I don't know where the stock market is going, but I will say this, that if it continues higher, this will do more to stimulate the economy than anything we've been talking about today or anything anybody else was talking about.
Alan GreenspanRead
That's the problem with very high taxes - they don't redistribute wealth; they redistribute people.
Interpretation
What this quote means
High taxes can drive people away rather than effectively redistributing wealth.
This quote highlights a critical perspective on the impact of high taxation on society. It suggests that rather than achieving a more equitable distribution of wealth, excessive taxes can lead to individuals relocating to places with lower taxes, thereby undermining the intended goals of wealth redistribution and potentially harming local economies. The implication is that high taxes may be counterproductive, as they do not bring about the social change desired by their proponents, but rather result in a loss of human capital and economic vitality.
Themes
TaxesWealth RedistributionEconomicsCapital FlightGovernment Policy
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech on fiscal policy, one might use this quote to illustrate the unintended consequences of high taxation.
Similar quotes
It is a singular advantage of taxes on articles of consumption that they contain in their own nature a security against excess. They prescribe their own limit, which cannot be exceeded without defeating the end purposed - that is, an extension of the revenue.
Alexander HamiltonRead
There's nothing in Keynesian economics that would allow you to solve stagflation. But there's nothing in neoclassical economics that would allow you to solve stagflation, either.
Paul SamuelsonRead
The shortage of buyers, which the world is suffering from, is readily understood, not as due to people not wishing to obtain possession of goods, but as people being unwilling to part with something which might earn a regular income in exchange for those goods.
Paul DiracRead
Inequality has risen to the point that it seems to me worthwhile for the U.S. to seriously consider taking the risk of making our economy more rewarding for more of the people.
Janet YellenRead
It had been held that the economic system, any capitalist system, found its equilibrium at full employment. Left to itself, it was thus that it came to rest. Idle men and idle plant were an aberration, a wholly temporary failing. Keynes showed that the modern economy could as well find its equilibrium with continuing, serious unemployment. Its perfectly normal tendency was to what economists have since come to call an underemployment equilibrium.
John Kenneth GalbraithRead