Luis Fortuno Quotes

Whatever the economy needs to maintain itself, the government will do it.

Where we're coming down is we currently have $787 billion of stimulus that's been passed. We're certainly focusing on spending that money as quickly and as efficiently and as transparently as we can. We think that's absolutely the right strategy.

As a former member of President Obama's economic team, I have a soft spot for the fiscal stimulus legislation he signed just a month after his inauguration.

Obama's explanation for the slowdown in economic growth is that the public sector is hurting, and that's where Washington must step in and act.

We have to change course. And we have to do so now. That is why I worked with my colleagues in Washington to pass the Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

The vaunted Democratic stimulus bill has failed to stimulate anything other than a few federal bureaucrats.

Larger deficits are necessary and proper means to mitigate unemployment as the far greater evil in terms of human welfare.

What the president announced yesterday, is that somehow magically, if we just continue to prime the pump of taxpayer dollars, we're going to see magically an economic recovery.

The American people know the economy is too weak. Too many of them are suffering. So the question for Washington is, are we going to continue to play political games and - and - or are we going to say, we can do something right now to create jobs, to put money in the pockets of the middle-class, hire construction workers, teachers, veterans?

Actually, I have been very supportive of a very robust stimulus package from day one. I think this economy has to have a major stimulus initiative because the only group with liquidity is the federal government.

And people talk about the stimulus package and the jobs that it was supposed to create, it certainly didn't have the intended effects that everybody was hoping for or that the president and administration certainly was hoping for. So I think it's time to lay some new solutions on the table, some new ideas.

The economy is too weak right now. We need to jump-start it. The American Jobs Act will provide that jump-start, to help us into next year and the year after that.

Why don't we stop the stimulus spending? There's still about $400 billion or $500 billion of the stimulus plan that has not been spent. Why don't we stop it? It's not working.

The Recovery Act is working, but it's going to continue to work. It's not over. A lot's going to happen this summer. And even after the summer, there's more to come with the act.

And taking more money out of the private economy and having the government perform as it has poorly done with the stimulus I don't think is the right way to go.

One of Obama's first major acts as president was to sign the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and some of the money in that bill went to Saft.

Surely, the best and most effective measure is to get the economy moving and shorten the period of recession or slowdown. That's the rationale for Gordon Brown's 'fiscal stimulus' and it sounds like a good one to me.

In response to the recession, the Obama administration chose to emphasize costly, short-term fixes - ineffective stimulus programs, myriad housing programs that went nowhere, and a rush to invest in 'green' companies. As a consequence, uncertainty over policy - particularly over tax and regulatory policy - slowed the recovery.

Yes. We do think that the stimulus package is raising GDP and raising employment relative to what would have happened otherwise.

Every proposal I'm making, every idea I'm advancing has a single, central purpose: to revive a failing economy and give working Americans the help and security they need.

The Democrats want government to do the spending. Senator McCain wants families to do the spending.

The tax relief package enacted in 2001 was central to pulling the economy out of the post 9-11 recession. It's the reason we've got low unemployment and have created more than two million jobs in the last year.

Three years ago, this week, a newly elected President Obama faced the American people and he said, look, if I can't turn this economy around in three years, I'll be looking at a one-term proposition, and we're here to collect! You know the results. It's been 35 months of unemployment above 8 percent.

I want to use every tool in the toolbox that's at our disposal to help our economy and put people back to work.

At the end of the day, the only things that are shovel ready around here are the words coming out of Barack Obama and Joe Biden's mouth.