Here are a couple excellent videos of excerpts from Peter Schiff's testimony and answering questions before the House committee on the jobs bill and the economy.
Here is the text of his testimony entitled "How the Government Can Create Jobs." If more politicians and inviduals were listening to this well-reasoned and intelligent businessman and others like him we would not be in the mess we are today.
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COMMENT: New York Times columnist and Nobel-Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman weighs in on the thinking of European political leaders. (Perhaps one could say German political leadership, in that they seem to be calling this particular tune.)
Noting that the austerity programs being prescribed for Eurozone economies in trouble are being linked to memory of the German inflation of the 1920’s, Krugman notes that the current policies of German and European leaders mimic those of German Chancellor Heinrich Bruning.
One might note in this context that those same austerity programs are being advocated by the GOP and American right wing!
“Euro Zone Death Trip” by Paul Krugman; The New York Times; 9/26/2011.
EXCERPT: . . . . And I see no sign at all that European policy elites are ready to rethink their hard-money-and-austerity dogma.
Part of the problem may be that those policy elites have a selective historical memory. They love to talk about the German inflation of the early 1920s — a story that, as it happens, has no bearing on our current situation. Yet they almost never talk about a much more relevant example: the policies of Heinrich Brüning, Germany’s chancellor from 1930 to 1932, whose insistence on balancing budgets and preserving the gold standard made the Great Depression even worse in Germany than in the rest of Europe — setting the stage for you-know-what. . . .
1) Gerald Ford (14 July 1913 – 26 December 2006) , the 38th President of the United States.
"A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.
Presidential address to a joint session of Congress (12 August 1974)
Ford has also been quoted as having made a similar statement many years earlier, as a representative to the US Congress: "If the government is big enough to give you everything you want, it is big enough to take away everything you have."
"If Elected, I Promise…" : Stories and Gems of Wisdom by and About Politicians (1960) p. 193"
Source:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Gerald_Ford
2) Misattributed to Thomas Jefferson:
"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have ... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases.
Commonly quoted on many websites, this quotation is actually from Gerald Ford's August 12th, 1974 address to Congress."
Source:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson
Although A.K. is more knowledgeable about economics than I and may wish to give a longer response, I will briefly reply to Anonymous. First, Paul Krugman is a pretty poor authority on which to base any claim. The guy writes a political hack column for one of the most left-wing newspapers in the country. He is such an extreme partisan that he blamed Sarah Palin for the Tucson shooting of Congresswoman Giffords within an hour of the attack with zero evidence -- and never apologized for it. Let's just say if reckless partisan rhetoric were a crime, Krugman would be on death row. In addition, Krugman has been consistently wrong in his economic predictions for decades. For more information on Krugman's sorry track record, check out the following links:
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/269428/paul-krugman-prophet-socialism-donald-luskin
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/225981/krugmans-posthumous-nobel-donald-luskin
These articles show that not only has Krugman demonstrated a laughable inability to correctly predict economic outcomes, but also that he promotes political propaganda at the expense of journalistic integrity. And for those who are impressed by Krugman's Nobel Prize credentials, may I point out that both Yassir Arafat and Barack Obama were Nobel Peace Prize winners -- and Obama was selected after being in the White House for one month (and accomplishing nothing remotely beneficial to world peace prior to that).
Second, may I point out that the "austerity" to which you refer so derisively is code for the extremely rational concepts of a government not spending more money than it has, balancing its budgets, and avoiding inflation and high debt. If you were to proclaim from the housetops that these are bad things, 90% of Americans would laugh in your face. We know instinctively that failing to live within one's economic means is foolish and dangerous, both for individuals and governments. Indeed, both Democrats and Republicans pay lip-service to balanced budgets and controlled spending (although fail miserably in practice).
Keynesian ideals as implemented in the form of FDR's New Deal did virtually nothing for a decade to get us out of the Great Depression. Much more recently, they did nothing to help Japan out of a decade-long recession. And of course, Obama's $800 billion dollar stimulus bill and big-spending budgets did nothing to jumpstart our economy and create jobs, but increased our deficit so dramatically that our country's credit rating was recently downgraded. And of course, Europe is also collapsing under the weight of uncontrolled entitlement spending and massive debt. Germany's current leaders are merely responding in a commonsense way to the obvious truth that a lack of "austerity" has led Europe to the brink of financial ruin. And I don't think any amount of lecturing from a washed-up economist and wild-eyed partisan named Paul Krugman is going to change their minds.
With regard to Anonymous's other comment, after a little more research I have concluded that he is correct that this quote actually originated with Gerald Ford. I hardly think it is incompatible with Jefferson's beliefs, however. He was concerned about an overly powerful federal government, and he did write that "The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground." So I agree that the source of the quotation needs to be corrected, but I am sure that it accurately reflects Jefferson's opinions.
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