Political Quotes

“this will be the third and last of the papers I have presented to the Senate in opposition to House Joint Resolution 1, Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to require a balanced budget. In the first paper I described the development of fiscal policy in postwar America, following the huge swings of the Great Depression and the Second World War. I described an economic profession growing in understanding and reach. I made the point that I saw this happen. In 1961, I joined the Kennedy administration. I became Assistant Secretary of Labor for policy planning and research. Unemployment that year reached 6.7 percent, the second highest it had been since annual rates were first recorded in 1948. There was a sense of emergency. But also a confidence that we knew what to do. The Federal Government was running a surplus. The result was fiscal drag. We would contrive to spend more and tax less, so as to stimulate the economy toward full employment. We did and it worked. By 1966, unemployment dropped to 3.8 percent and by 1969, it reached 3.5 percent. A level, incidentally, never reached since. Those were heady days. In 1965, in an article in "The Public Interest" entitled, "The Professionalization of Reform," I noted that the Council of Economic Advisers forecast for GNP for 1964 was off by only $400 million in a total of $623 billion, while the unemployment forecast was on the nose.…”