Tax increases appear to have a very large sustained and highly significant negative impact on output.

Climate change and dependence on foreign oil are problems that won’t go away on their own. Tabling plans to deal with them doesn’t make it easier for companies to plan and invest; it makes it harder.

I think where I differ a little bit, we absolutely have to think about the deficit looking down the road. And certainly that’s something the president has said that we need to, as the economy recovers, have a plan in place for getting it down.

A successful argument for a government manufacturing policy has to go beyond the feeling that it’s better to produce ‘real things’ than services. American consumers value health care and haircuts as much as washing machines and hair dryers.

Tax increases appear to have a very large sustained and highly significant negative impact on output. Since most of our exogenous tax changes are in fact reductions, the more intuitive way to express this result is that tax cuts have very large and persistent positive output effects.

A natural way that an economist approaches a problem is to say, here’s where I think the economy is going; this is what we need to deal with the problem.

If increasing income equality is the goal, it might be wiser to put money into infrastructure than to subsidize manufacturing. Construction also pays good wages, but with lower educational requirements. And America’s infrastructure needs are enormous.

If you look at the studies coming out of the Congressional Budget Office, the number one thing that’s going to blow a hole in the deficit as we go forward 20, 30 years is government spending on healthcare.

As a former member of President Obama’s economic team, I have a soft spot for the fiscal stimulus legislation he signed just a month after his inauguration.

There’s a joke in economics about the drunk who loses his keys in the street but only looks for them under the lightposts. When asked why, he says, ‘because that’s where the light is.’ That’s the problem with the deficit.