Quotes by William Vickrey

• There is no reason inherent in the real resources available to us why we cannot move rapidly within the next two or three years to a state of genuine full employment.
• Practically, the desirable situation ought to be one in which any reasonably responsible person willing to accept available employment can find a job paying a living wage within 48 hours.
• The great increase in longevity has produced a surge in the desire to accumulate assets for retirement. It has outpaced the ability of the private sector to produce assets, so we need a larger government debt.
• The insane pursuit of the holy grail of a balanced budget in the end is going to drive the economy into a depression.
• The nominal budget is a poor indicator of the impact of government outlays and revenues.
• Nearly all educational expenditure should be considered a capital outlay, whether it provides a future return in the form of enhanced taxable income or in terms of an enhanced quality of life.
• There is no real justification for a requirement that a budget of any sort should be balanced, except as a rallying point for those who seek to hamstring government.
• If unemployment could be brought down to say 2 percent at the cost of an assured steady rate of inflation of 10 percent per year, or even 20 percent, this would be a good bargain.
• This paper was one of my digressions into abstract economics.
• The supply-side effect of a restrictive monetary policy is likely to be perverse, in that high interest rates enter into costs and thus exert inflationary pressure.
• Larger deficits are necessary and proper means to mitigate unemployment as the far greater evil in terms of human welfare.
• Increasingly prices are set by sellers to raise their prices without a loss of sales sufficient to wipe out the gain.
• I define genuine full employment as a situation where there are at least as many job openings as there are persons seeking employment, probably calling for a rate of unemployment, as currently measured, of between 1 and 2 percent.
• Firms would be given initial entitlements to gross markup on the basis of past performance. These entitlements would be transferable and a market in them would be developed.
• Don't you think you're just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic?
• Deficits do not in themselves produce inflation, nor does a balanced budget assure a stable price level.
• Currently a level of unemployment of 7 percent or more seems to be required to keep inflation from accelerating, a level quite unacceptable as a permanent situation.
• Balancing a nominal budget will solve nothing, and attempting to achieve such a spurious balance will produce much mischief.
• It's insane to try to balance the budget.