Unless you reduce the long-term spending burden, you cannot cut taxes in any lasting way, but can only shift the burden of taxes from the present to the future.
Interpretation
Sustainable tax cuts require addressing long-term spending obligations.
The quote emphasizes that in order to implement lasting tax reductions, it is essential to first manage and reduce long-term spending commitments. Without addressing these underlying financial burdens, temporary tax cuts only defer the financial responsibility to future generations rather than resolve it.
In practice
During a town hall meeting discussing fiscal policy, one might use this quote to illustrate the importance of budgeting sustainability.
Four things have almost invariably followed the imposition of controls to keep prices below the level they would reach under supply and demand in a free market: (1) increased use of the product or service whose price is controlled, (2) Reduced supply of the same product or service, (3) quality deterioration, (4) black markets.
Inflation is as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber and as deadly as a hit man.
We need to revise our economic thinking to give full value to our natural resources. This revised economics will stabilize both the theory and the practice of free-market capitalism. It will provide business and public policy with a powerful new tool for economic development, profitability, and the promotion of the public good.
Capitalism is not an 'ism.' It is closer to being the opposite of an 'ism,' because it is simply the freedom of ordinary people to make whatever economic transactions they can mutually agree to.
There should be no unemployment. There is large percentage of labor now which cannot make a living because wages are not high enough. That is industry's 2nd job. 1st job is to make good product. 2nd pay a good wage.
Automation provides us with wondrous increases of production and information, but does it tell us what to do with the men the machines displace? Modern industry gives us the capacity for unparalleled wealth - but where is our capacity to make that wealth meaningful to the poor of every nation?
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