Economic Choices Quotes

More combat planes, missiles and soldiers won't provide additional bread for our families, desks for our schools, or medicine for our clinics.

Poor people choose now. Rich people choose balance.

A lot of wealthy people, they don't realize they have the alternatives of spending the money for good.

If this government can send 20 billion dollars to Latin America to some peasants who have never fought for this country or worked for this country or have - or - and is sending hundreds of millions of dollars to Africa and Asia to try and buy friendship of people who will never be friendly toward them, then they should be even more quick to spend some - whatever amount of money is necessary to get inside of their house straight, before it's too late.

None of us always make the best financial decisions.

While it is true that many people simply can't afford to pay more for food, either in money or time or both, many more of us can. After all, just in the last decade or two we've somehow found the time in the day to spend several hours on the internet and the money in the budget not only to pay for broadband service, but to cover a second phone bill and a new monthly bill for television, formerly free. For the majority of Americans, spending more for better food is less a matter of ability than priority. p.187

Australia must prioritise education spending. It is not a question of whether or not we have the money, it is a question of how we choose to spend it.

Happiness statistics may be most valuable in smaller, local discussions. Understanding how different sorts of programs affect the well-being of citizens would be enormously helpful to a mayor choosing between building a new bridge or offering a tax cut.

Budgets are moral documents. When you put your budget on the table, we see what you really are.

There's nothing magic about spending on tanks and bombs rather than roads and bridges.

Difficult economic conditions require us to face difficult economic choices.

Here are the choices I don't want to make: between paying additional fuel costs and flying and steaming less; between paying additional fuel costs and building fewer ships and planes.

If we are going to spend the bulk of our public dollars on the affluent - at least when it comes to housing - we should own up to that decision and stop repeating the canard about this rich country being unable to afford more.

People who are rich find it hard to understand the behavior of poor people. Economists are no exception, for they, too, find it difficult to comprehend the preferences and scarcity constraints that determine the choices that poor people make.

How wonderful would it be if the growth of scientific and technological innovation would come along with more equality and social inclusion. How wonderful would it be, while we discover faraway planets, to rediscover the needs of the brothers and sisters orbiting around us. How wonderful would it be if solidarity, this beautiful and, at times, inconvenient word, were not simply reduced to social work, and became, instead, the default attitude in political, economic and scientific choices, as well as in the relationships among individuals, peoples and countries.

We are ready to kill to keep our automobiles running. We're ready to kill to keep up our materialistic, wasteful economy.... I am sick and tired of 18-year-olds being coerced into bearing the burden of the failures of politicians to face the tough economic choices needed to end our dependency on foreign oil.