Mark Meadows Quotes

Years ago, I noticed one thing about economics, and that is that economists didn't get anything right.

Sometimes economists are right, and sometimes economists are wrong.

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen.

Economists have predicted seven of the last two recessions.

The Treasury has enough trouble with forecasts even when they are trying to get them right.

Economics was the only profession where a person could be considered an expert without having once been right.

The Congressional Budget Office has been embarrassed repeatedly by making projections based on the assumption that tax revenues and tax rates move in the same direction.

The markets are much more interested in America's long-term trajectory than they are in feeling that there is an acute short-term crisis.

Why should we, however, in economics, have to plead ignorance of the sort of facts on which, in the case of a physical theory, a scientist would certainly be expected to give precise information?

I'm an economist. I'm not a political servant.

If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.

Economists have allowed themselves to walk into a trap where we say we can forecast, but no serious economist thinks we can.

A natural way that an economist approaches a problem is to say, here's where I think the economy is going; this is what we need to deal with the problem.

If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion.

I believe that economists put decimal points in their forecasts to show they have a sense of humor.

Any econometrician who wants to see practical application of his science will be highly concerned with applications to economic planning at the national level.

[Discussing economic trends:] You can find a study that says anything.

Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.

We have professional economists who can defend any viewpoint with statistics and they do that everywhere in the world.

Economics is a highly sophisticated field of thought that is superb at explaining to policymakers precisely why the choices they made in the past were wrong. About the future, not so much.

We're not very good at forecasting, and we don't know how to measure the impact of economic policy.

If done correctly, dynamic scoring will provide a more complete picture of Congress's actions. This is exactly the type of modeling the private sector uses, and advances in data collection and analysis create an opportunity for it to be employed accurately.

I don't think we should run government based on economists' predictions.

Economists are about as useful as astrologers in predicting the future (and, like astrologers, they never let failure on one occasion diminish certitude on the next).

Most work in macroeconomics in the past 30 years has been useless at best and harmful at worst.