Quotes from 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.'

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.

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.

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.

If Democrats don't go on Fox News, it doesn't mean that people stop watching.

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.'

In several quarters in the 2000s, if you added up all the private savings of everyone in the United States, it was less than nothing. You can't sustain that as a driver of growth.

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.

I don't see why anybody's playing chicken with the debt ceiling.

If a lobbyist sets up shop, or a lawyer, in which they're receiving income through what is something like a tax loophole so that it's not counting as corporate income, that is what this is counting as a small business.

I don't believe, the president doesn't believe, that the high income tax cuts work, period. I don't think the evidence supports that.

The president is 100 percent for extending the tax cuts for 98.7 percent of small businesses.

That is what happened in 2010. The administration and the leadership of the Republicans thought, 'Well, we're making a deal together; we're showing the world things can be done in a bi-partisan way. We're extending all our tax cuts for two years.'

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.

The only question where there is disagreement is should the highest income rates above a quarter million dollars a year go back to where they were under Bill Clinton. That is the dispute about the taxes.

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.

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.

Yes, prices go up in health care. They have been doing so for 80 straight years.

What Disneyland was to my kids at age 10, that's kind of what Chicago is for economists.

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.

I'm not afraid to take a punch.

If we get to the point where we damage the full faith and credit of the United States, that would be the first default in history caused purely by insanity.

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.

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.