Paul Krugman Quotes

Promises to get beyond partisanship are the most perfunctory sort of campaign rhetoric, almost as empty as the partisanship itself.

You know the way Washington works. Once you start floating ideas, they are immediately attacked by all the different interest groups before the ideas can be brought to fruition.

Every Republican is on record as saying Obamacare is unacceptable, intolerable, and they're gonna do everything they could to keep it from happening. But, at the moment of truth, they're not.

'Yes' is a far more potent word than 'no' in American politics. By adopting the positions which animate the political agenda for the other side, one can disarm them and leave them sputtering with nothing to say.

Ted Cruz may be an intelligent person, but he doesn't carry out an intelligent debate. He oversimplifies, he exaggerates, and he basically led the Republican Party over the cliff in the fall of 2013. He has shown no qualifications, no legislation being passed, doesn't provide leadership, and he has no real experience.

Jon Tester's priorities are with the liberal, extreme minority of Democrats in the Senate unwilling to compromise. He does not have Montana's best interests in mind. He has failed to represent Montanans.

Despite overwhelming and irrefutable evidence to the contrary, President Obama continues to believe that he can negotiate with Republicans.

The term congressional hearing is an oxymoron. No congressional hearing is ever called to gather information. Rather, it is an exercise designed strictly for posturing, by people who have already made up their minds, looking for ammunition to support their positions.

There are always going to be people who want to be president, and some days I'd like to give it to them.

The nation, as you know, is at a critical point. At a time like this we can't risk partisan bickering and political posturing. Our leaders have to reach across the aisle to do the people's work.

The wrong one will start saying things like "withdraw with honor." We've heard phrases like that before, and they led to thousands and thousands of deaths. Democrats always want to look tough.

Normally what happens in a new presidency is the president has a big agenda, and Congress is full of people with human weaknesses. And so the president indulges the human weaknesses of members of Congress in order to pass his agenda. This time it's the other way around. Donald Trump does not have much of an agenda. Congress burns with this intense Republican agenda and so does Congress that has to put up with the human weaknesses of the president in order to get a signature on the things it desperately wants to pass.

A president of the United States, again, has to bring people together, have a position. We need to be able to penetrate these people when they are involved in these plots and these plans. And we have to give the local authorities the ability to penetrate to disrupt. That's what we need to do.

I would be very, very strong on the debt limit. And I would be asking for a very big pound of flesh if I were the Republicans. And the problem with the Republicans, they have two sides. The smaller side is very strong and the other side is always agreeing and, you know, you can't do that.

If it turns out that President Barack Obama can make a deal with the most intransigent, hard-line, unreasonable, totalitarian mullahs in the world but not with Republicans? Maybe he's not the problem.

To get people to compromise, you have to give them stuff.

President Obama wants to raise taxes on the country's richest people. And you thought Donald Trump hated him before.

I'm often at odds with my colleagues, but I've managed to get legislation passed which will not even be attempted in other states. Rather than use the word "cooperate," I'll say there's kind of a peaceful coexistence, a wary watching of each other. I'm very courteous and polite, and people allow me to be. Some people have applied the term charming to me. I don't use that term unless I'm the snake charmer and they're the snake.

If you can clean up the cesspool of the tax code and give us a pro-growth tax code, that is how you grow the economy. That's how you take power and money out of Washington and give it back to the people and we are so excited. We have a president [Donald Trump] that is here to work with us in doing that.

I love all these politicians, they all say the same thing - 'We'll give California back to the people.' Yeah, great, now that it's not worth anything, they want to give it back to us.

The Republicans didn't get rolled by anybody. Chuck Schumer didn't outsmart Mitch McConnell, and Nancy Pelosi sure as hell did not outsmart Paul Ryan. I don't care what you think of Ryan, he's not an idiot, folks. These people are not dumb. They're not sitting up there thinking, "All we gotta do is be nice to the Democrats and the media."

I sometimes call Donald Trump the placebo president. He will talk a big game, but for domestic policy I think change remarkably little.

As a Democrat, one of the things that frustrates me the most is there are a lot of times we just don't get in the fight. We ask pretty please if we can have things or we make the argument for why it is the best thing to do, and then wait patiently for the other side to agree to come along. We negotiate. We start our opening position by negotiating.

As president, I will take that work, that bipartisan work, that finding common ground, because you have to be able to get along with people to get things done in Washington.

Theres a lot of blowhards in the political process, you know, a lot of hot-air artists, people who have got something fancy to say.