William Vickrey Quotations

Balancing a nominal budget will solve nothing, and attempting to achieve such a spurious balance will produce much mischief.

Larger deficits are necessary and proper means to mitigate unemployment as the far greater evil in terms of human welfare.

Don't you think you're just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic?

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.

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.

Increasingly prices are set by sellers to raise their prices without a loss of sales sufficient to wipe out the gain.

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.

Deficits do not in themselves produce inflation, nor does a balanced budget assure a stable price level.

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 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.

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.

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.

It's insane to try to balance the budget.

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.

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.

This paper was one of my digressions into abstract economics.

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.

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.

We felt it was time we received a report card from the public about how they feel about their court system so we can be guided about what to focus on in the future.

There are some significant concerns, ... especially in the area of whether or not our system is listening carefully to what (litigants) have to say and their ability to participate. This includes how they are treated by the first person they meet to how they perceive what's happening in the courtroom, whether the system is concerned about how people are impacted by what it does and how it does it.

The achievement of a reasonably full degree of employment without accelerating inflation will require development of some additional tool.

This news reflects the great strides that state courts have made to reach out to the public in the past decade.

Ten billion dollars less of deficit means $10 billion less of disposable income ... and a loss of at least 100,000 jobs.

The bottom line for me out of this is that from 1992 to today, researchers can't find a defining reason why the public view of the courts has improved. The only thing that has changed is the way we do business. The good news is we can make a difference.

I had had intimations that (a nomination was) in the works for the Nobel Prize, ... I didn't put my chances more than about 50/50.

Currently a level of unemployment of 7% or more seems to be required to keep inflation from accelerating, a level quite unacceptable as a permanent situation.

To stick to the present situation would be something like a man who was observed in Times Square looking earnestly along the pavement. He was asked what he was looking for. He said "I lost my watch."

Economists are almost unanimous in conceding that the land tax has no adverse side effects. ...Landowners ought to look at both sides of the coin. Applying a tax to land values also means removing other taxes. This would so improve the efficiency of a city that land values would go up more than the increase in taxes on land.

... often analysis seems to be based on the assumption that future economic output is almost entirely determined by inexorable economic forces independently of government policy so that devoting more resources to one use inevitably detracts from availability for another.

It (land value taxation) guarantees that no one dispossess fellow citizens by obtaining a disproportionate share of what nature provides for humanity.