Herbert Feis Quotes
We [are] surrounded by endless small jets of dirty water and are not able to locate the points at which the pipe was leaking.
Herbert Feis, 1893-1972, Economist, Description of the American economy at the start of the Great Depression, Feis Memoranda, January 27, 1933, Feis Papers
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This is the kind of advice that Presidents have given the Congress for years. What makes this quotation noteworthy is the person who made the statement, President George W. Bush. It was made in the 7th year of his Presidency which had in those 7 years, at his urging, gone from a balanced budget and a national surplus projected, to the largest deficit of any nation in history and a projected deficit that even dwarfed that. So the irony of the quotation was that the politician who produced the largest economic burden on future generations was lecturing other politicians on the evils of doing exactly what he himself had been doing. Bush, if nothing else, was one of the most audacious politicians in this respect, though his most severe detractors claim that he did not have the intellectual perspective to even understand the hypocrisy of his quotation,
Herbert Feis was an American historian, author, and economist who was the Economic Advisor for International Affairs to the US Department of State in the Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt administrations.
