Quotes from Christina Romer

Honest talk about the deficit is risky. Voters are more enthusiastic about the abstract notion of deficit reduction than about the painful details of accomplishing it.

Raising the minimum wage, as President Obama proposed in his State of the Union address, tends to be more popular with the general public than with economists.

You care about the deficit because it allows you to do things you need to do to help people who are suffering.

The central question is whether Medicare and Medicaid should remain entitlement programs guaranteeing a certain amount of care, as Democrats believe, or become defined contribution programs in which federal spending is capped, as Republicans suggest.

As an economic historian, I appreciate what manufacturing has contributed to the United States. It was the engine of growth that allowed us to win two world wars and provided millions of families with a ticket to the middle class. But public policy needs to go beyond sentiment and history.

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.

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.

The stock market crash in October 1929 didn't destroy a particularly large amount of wealth or make people highly pessimistic. Rather, it made companies and consumers very unsure about future income, and so led them to stop spending as they waited for more information.

Our estimates suggest that a tax increase of 1 percent of GDP reduces output over the next three years by nearly 3 percent. The effect is highly significant.

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

Fewer people working means permanently lower tax revenues.

President Obama has repeatedly urged Congress to let the Bush tax cuts expire for those earning more than $250,000 a year. Increasing rates on top earners is an obvious way to raise revenue from those who can afford it most.

The basic idea that if you increase government spending or you cut people's taxes that stimulates the economy and lowers the unemployment rate, is a very widely accepted idea. It's in every economics textbook, that's what we teach our undergraduates, and I certainly try to teach them the truth.

We're committed to working with Congress to doing what the president said he was always going to do, which is cut the deficit in half over the - over his first term.

What we're going to do is redouble our efforts on financial regulatory reform, because that has in it sensible things like say on pay, so at least the shareholders are minding the store, sensible things like saying, for heaven's sakes, compensation should be focused on - on long term, so that you don't have rewards for short-term risk-taking.

Thanks to former President George W. Bush - remember the compassionate conservative? - I have a good name for the fundamental principle that should guide the Democratic alternative: compassionate deficit reduction.

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.

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.

The right way to deal with a budget problem that was years in the making is by formulating a credible plan to reduce the deficit over time and as the economy is able to withstand the necessary fiscal belt-tightening. That is what President Obama is doing.

Recent research suggests that New Deal programs may actually have had their primary impact on the economy by influencing consumer and business expectations of future growth and inflation.

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.

If every other store in town is paying workers $9 an hour, one offering $8 will find it hard to hire anyone - perhaps not when unemployment is high, but certainly in normal times. Robust competition is a powerful force helping to ensure that workers are paid what they contribute to their employers' bottom lines.

Most arguments for instituting or raising a minimum wage are based on fairness and redistribution. Even if workers are getting a competitive wage, many of us are deeply disturbed that some hard-working families still have very little.

Many of my students assume that government protection is the only thing ensuring decent wages for most American workers. But basic economics shows that competition between employers for workers can be very effective at preventing businesses from misbehaving.