Bruce Bartlett Quotations

When your team is on a losing streak, you schedule a game with a cream-puff opponent. Then you go with the hot hand.

Democrats will play the old Washington game of calling reductions in the rate of growth of spending for any program a 'cut'.

Many of my sharpest critics have decided to take a position of ignoring me - because they feel that by attacking me, they would draw attention to my book and give me more publicity and help me sell more books. So I think that they decided that the best thing for them to do is to say nothing. Also, I think that some of my critics simply can't refute my argument - and so it's easier for them to ignore it as well, so that they're not forced to confront the logical contradiction in their own position.

The break for me was the Medicare drug benefit in 2003. It's just grossly expensive, bad policy. After that, I no longer gave them the benefit of the doubt and started seeing the glass as half-empty.

So I think we shouldn't be overly concerned about the decline in personal saving at this particular moment and time, but it's something we certainly need to keep an eye on.

The problem we have had on the budget all along is a lack of adult supervision on the part of the White House. You can't blame members of Congress for looking out for their parochial interests. It is the president's responsibility to look out for the national interest.

There's bound to be a recovery in [capital spending] sometime soon. We have had basically no capital investment for about year. At some point, machinery wears out, and you've got to replace it.

With all due respect to Speaker Hastert, trying to eliminate the IRS by adopting a national retail sales tax is a very dumb idea.

I believe any decline would lock in a Fed increase with some certainty.

Up until 1986, the top marginal rate, the top statutory rate was 50 percent. Now it's 35 percent. And all the pressure is on to lower that even further. And this just doesn't make a great deal of sense. When people say, 'Oh, we can't raise taxes on the rich. They'll go on strike, they'll move to another country.' But within recent memory, it hasn't been that long ago that we had rates that were substantially higher. And these people did just fine. I just think that there's a disconnect between the facts of what taxes do and the sort of mythology of what they do.

The conservative side of our political spectrum has had an outsized voice over the last few years. I think especially since the establishment of Fox News, which has created an echo chamber in which people just hear the same ideas repeated ad infinitum. And you know, it's just basic advertising, basically. You hear the same idea over and over again. Or you can call it propaganda if you like.

Rick Perry's an idiot, and I don't think anyone would disagree with that,

It's obvious that a lot of Tea Party members tend to be elderly. You've seen that famous sign, 'Tell the government to keep its hands off my Medicare.' And I think as long as the government does keep its hands off their Medicare, they're fine with talking about low taxes. But once they start to realize that the Republicans really do want to not just cut Medicare, but essentially abolish it, you know, I just think those people are not going to be part of the Tea Party. They're going to be over with Occupy Wall Street.

People are increasingly concerned about unemployment, but Republicans have nothing to offer them.

The growing inequality of wealth and income distribution is both a moral and economic problem. If the wealthy are unwilling to pay more taxes, then this is going to lead to spending cuts. And if you put off the table things like national defense, then you're going to end up cutting more and more out of programs that aid the poor. So, I think there are consequences to this idea that tolerance for inequality requires us to - to just do nothing to make the wealthy contribute a higher share of resources to fund the government.

Republicans favor tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, but these had no stimulative effect during the George W. Bush administration, and there is no reason to believe that more of them will have any today. As for the idea that cutting regulations will lead to significant job growth, it's just nonsense. It's just made up.

Morally it was wrong to do so in this situation and certainly misleading to the officer,

He was the safe choice, somebody with unquestioned qualifications. They needed somebody that everybody, including the financial markets, would react positively to.

He failed to comply with the conditions and was perpetrating a fraud on the court. How can people think that is the right thing to do?

We lost the hose, the note, quite a bit of evidence there. It was just one thing after another.

I think that that's something that the Japanese are very concerned about and they're going to have to do something about in the near term. I think it's good for the world economy to have a strong Japanese economy. And their situation has been not very good for quite a long time.

Overall, I think what the sales number is telling us is that the consumer is starting to take up some of the slack we're seeing in the trade sector and inventories.

Remember, personal savings is only a small portion of total national savings,

I think perhaps Mr. Hoadley is experiencing remorse for his failure to become involved.

Why not interview those with opposing views separately and give each more than a minute or two to make their point without having to respond to another person's debating tactics? And why not encourage interviewers to intervene when blatant errors or falsehoods are offered as facts?

The total amount of debt that foreigners have bought this year is $66 billion, which is about the amount of the total federal deficit during the same period of time. So in other words, we benefit by basically eliminating the burden of the debt on domestic capital markets.

is just seriously out of control, and this administration has not been paying attention to those problems.

The situation today is so different than in the '70s. The laws are different, and people's understanding about economics is different. I don't see any serious move for such controls.

The significance of that is that there are a number of people that may view Intel as having reached peak margins and will view that as a negative.

Realistically, it's going to be very, very hard to extend existing tax cuts under current circumstances

And that worked for quite a while. But it was a shortsighted point of view, ... The Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy.

You're starting to see the beginnings of a shift in the center of gravity away from Bush and his agenda toward the next agenda and the next leader of the party.

A lot of conservatives have had reservations about him for a long time, but have been afraid to speak out for fear that it would help liberals and the Democrats.

It's absolutely stunning. It certainly shows that the economy is continuing to show very strong growth.

It's been my experience that these violent felons are not released.

It's pretty obvious Social Security is on its last legs,

It looked like a very solid case. You had a woman who tried to commit suicide with her kids. There was really no issue with the circumstances there.

They were obviously covering up for each other on the fight, both sides covering up the fight.

And no other think-tank has shown any interest in hiring me - for a variety of reasons. I think they're afraid of the White House. They're afraid of losing access. I think they're afraid of losing contributions. And some simply disagree with some aspects of my argument.