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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 -
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
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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 -
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 -
Applying cost-benefit analysis to regulation is no different than what most regulatory agencies do.
Austan Goolsbee -
History teaches that the level of unemployment is not as important as whether the rate's going down.
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 -
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
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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 -
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 -
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 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 -
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 -
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
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We have to do everything we can to try to create jobs and get people back to work.
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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
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I was named DC's funniest celebrity.
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 -
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 -
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