Austan Goolsbee

“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 always felt my role was like the pit crew in a NASCAR race, and President Obama was Dale Jr.- he's driving, and my job is to change the tires and get him back on the road.”

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

“We have to do everything we can to try to create jobs and get people back to work.”

“Whenever I interview someone for a job, I always ask them whether they want to sit in Bernanke's chair. The only wrong answer is, 'Who's Bernanke?'.”

“I am a data hound and so I usually end up working on whatever things I can find good data on. The rise of Internet commerce completely altered the amount of information you could gather on company behavior so I naturally drifted toward it.”

“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.'”

“When Texans suffered from the collapse of the oil market in the 1980s, they could rely on the fiscal union to help them. When Texas boomed with rising oil prices in the 2000s, it contributed to the union to help harder hit regions.”

“Research professors don't watch a whole lot of TV.”

“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.”

“If you look at the Greek economic record, it's been very similar to the U.S. experience in the first four years of the Great Depression. And after having a Depression-sized event, they've cut the unit-labor cost in Greece - they've closed something like half the gap with Germany.”

“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.”

“If we hit the debt ceiling, that's... essentially defaulting on our obligations, which is totally unprecedented in American history. The impact on the economy would be catastrophic.”

“If you're going to be an academic who's involved in the world of policy, you have to be involved in the world that exists.”

“It's clear that the medium and long-run fiscal challenges facing the country have to do with the rise of entitlement spending, they have to do with the longer run imbalances that we've created in the structure of the system.”

“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.”

“We've gone through rounds of tax cutting and rounds of tax increases in modern U.S. history. We haven't really had a big igniting of a trade war belligerence since the Depression era, and that's not an era that we want to repeat.”

“My impression is the Trump administration is in imminent danger of violating the gunfighter's credo, which is 'Do not pick seven fights if you are carrying a six shooter.'”

“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.”

“The data does not support that high-income tax cuts are the main drivers of growth, so I don't think that uncertainty over what the tax rate will be for someone that makes a million dollars a year has that big an impact on the economic growth rate in the country.”