Robert Kuttner quotes

Technological advance often thrives in sheltered and subsidized markets, which defy free trade. (Robert Kuttner)
If Boeing got a big head start on the 707 from multibillion-dollar military contracts to develop an air force transport, is that a sin against free trade? View quote
Robert Kuttner
We are already well down the road toward a managed-trade regime. It would be far better to acknowledge that reality, and seek a set of reasonable rules, than to pretend that Ricardian trade is the norm and allow mercantilist states to overwhelm U. S. industry and ratchet down wages, in the name of free trade. View quote
Robert Kuttner
But of course you can have your cake and eat it, too - if you decide to to bake a second cake. And you may well find that baking two cakes does not take twice the work of baking one. View quote
Robert Kuttner
By default, we have created a "system" of nursing-home care for the aged in which middle-class people pay exorbitant rates to for-profit nursing-home entrepreneurs - and then when private resources are consumed and the patient qualifies as a pauper, the nursing home begins billing Medicaid. This is precisely the antithesis of social citizenship; instead of the poor being accorded the dignity associated with the middle class, equality of treatment is achieved by making the middle class undergo pauperization. View quote
Robert Kuttner
The economic illusion is the belief that social justice is bad for economic growth. View quote
Robert Kuttner
When laissez-faire creates instability, the move to a freer market can be something less than pure gain. View quote
Robert Kuttner
American critics of welfare statism are often surprised to learn that countries like West Germany, with a much more comprehensive welfare state and a statistically "larger" public sector, have fewer government employees per capita than the United States does. View quote
Robert Kuttner
Henry Ford, in a sense, was the first Keynesian. He paid his assembly workers high wages so they could afford to buy his cars. View quote
Robert Kuttner
Britain, with the most completely socialized health system in the West, now spends the lowest fraction of GNP on health care of any major nation. There are frequent complaints of excessive waits for elective surgery and other inconveniences, but British citizens live slightly longer than Americans, on average, and our overall health conditions are comparable. View quote
Robert Kuttner
Not surprisingly, extensive effort in Britain and America goes into finding tax shelter. the system is "efficient" for the shelter industry, not for the economy. (Robert Kuttner)
Technological change is beneficial only when other jobs replace the ones lost. View quote
Robert Kuttner
In practice, a good deal of the outcomes produced by the market reflect nothing more than luck - good or bad. View quote
Robert Kuttner
If social security depresses savings rates, it is only because it is unfunded. View quote
Robert Kuttner
In a world where technology and capital are highly transferable, there is a real risk that comparative advantage comes to be defined as whose labor force will work for the lowest wage. View quote
Robert Kuttner
It is more than a little ironic that "capital accumulation" once a rather tendentious Marxian view of a supposed capitalist obsession, should have become - of all things - Wall Street's own slogan. View quote
Robert Kuttner
Can we reverse these deeply rooted sources sources of inequality? Or are they just endemic to a capitalist economy? View quote
Robert Kuttner
I have tried to suggest that injustice is not necessary economics; that the economics can work, and has often worked, when the constituency for it is animated. The politics of equality - that is a little harder. View quote
Robert Kuttner
Political conservatives have focused on tax reduction as an economic growth strategy for three reasons. First it is self-serving; it saves rich people lots of money. Second, it comports with their ideological allegiance to laissez-faire economics. And third, tax incentives are less intrusive to business-as-usual than any other form of government planning. View quote
Robert Kuttner
In America, we build public housing by creating lucrative inducements to private developers, and then wax indignant at the public waste. View quote
Robert Kuttner
Why, then, should we have to lower our living standards? What is the mysterious source of the economic loss? If productivity is increasing, why should we sacrifice services and wages? (Robert Kuttner)
Keynes, like Freud and Marx, deserves to be read in the original, not through the glosses of his lesser disciples. View quote
Robert Kuttner