Opinions from economists

Sam Bowman,

A tax on sugary soft drinks is the first step on the road to fat taxes and sugar taxes more generally. It makes little sense to tax sugary drinks on their own, rather than sugar more generally – a couple of Mars bars are just as bad as a bottle of Coke – but the Chancellor probably reckons that the public won’t care if he only targets soft drinks. Once the tax is in place, he will follow the lead ... See More

John Lott,

disagrees Assault weapons should be banned

We have tried an assault weapons ban in the United States for ten years and there's no evidence it has any impact.

MIchael Hudson, Economist. Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.

disagrees Fracking

You have a choice. Either you can have more oil, or more clean water. Fracking is not good for the water supply.

Farid Khavari,

disagrees Fracking

By the time the frackers are done in the other states our water will be worth more than oil.

Winona LaDuke,

disagrees Fracking

Someone needs to explain to me why wanting clean drinking water makes you an activist, and why proposing to destroy water with chemical warfare doesn't make a corporation a terrorist.

Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate economist based at Columbia University

agrees Universal Health Care

As the gap between rich and poor keeps growing and part-time jobs become more common, we must strengthen the social safety net. Universal health coverage would give essential protection, and needs to be part of every society.

Elizabeth Warren, 28th united states senator from massachusetts (class 1)

agrees Universal Health Care

Disease, sickness, and old age touch every family. Tragedy doesn't ask who you voted for. Health care is a basic human right.

Alan Greenspan, American economist

disagrees Tariffs

Protectionism will do little to create jobs and if foreigners retaliate, we will surely lose jobs.

Stephen Harper, Canadian economist

disagrees Tariffs

We have to remember we're in a global economy. The purpose of fiscal stimulus is not simply to sustain activity in our national economies, but to help the global economy as well, and that's why it's so critical that measures in those packages avoid anything that smacks of protectionism.

Juan Manuel Santos,

disagrees Tariffs

Protectionism is something that will hurt everybody, but especially the United States.

Robert Mundell, Canadian economist

agrees Tariffs

The United States can't keep a completely open system if the rest of the world is less open. The United States may have to take a leaf out of the book of Japan, China, and Germany, and have protectionism inside the system.

Lawrence Kudlow,

disagrees Tariffs

The biggest flaw in the Trump economic plan is the tilt toward protectionism. I have parted company with him on this. The question here is whether his campaign bark will turn out to be bigger than his government-policy bite.

Manmohan Singh, Former prime minister of India

disagrees Tariffs

Protectionism is a very real danger. It is understandable that in times of a severe downturn protectionist pressures mount but the lessons of history are clear. If we give in to protectionist pressures, we will only send the world into a downward spiral.

Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate economist based at Columbia University

disagrees Tariffs

With the election of Trump, America's soft power has taken a big hit. The United States has moved from a position of leadership in the creation of a rules-based international system to a position of leadership in its destruction and the creation of a regime of global protectionism. The damage will be long-lasting.

Peter Navarro, American economist

agrees Tariffs

Our view is that these actions [Trump's tariffs] are necessary to defend this country, and that they are ultimately bullish for Corporate America, for the working men and women of America, and for the global trading system.

Paul Krugman, Economist (nobel laureate) and NY Times columnist

disagrees Tariffs

Trump’s tariffs are badly designed even from the point of view of someone who shares his crude mercantilist view of trade. In fact, the structure of his tariffs so far is designed to inflict maximum damage on the U.S. economy, for minimal gain.

Michael Pettis, Professor of finance

disagrees Tariffs

Put differently, surpluses don’t arise because surplus countries can produce goods more productively or efficiently. They arise from the need to export domestic savings caused by the low household income share of GDP. Because surplus countries direct their excess savings mainly to the US, the only economy deep, flexible and open enough to absorb them, it is the US that must inevitably run capital ... See More

Nicholas Bloom, Professor of economics

disagrees Tariffs

Many people who have lost out in the last few decades voted for Trump. Trump will have a difficult time turning them into winners. The jobs of these people are not at risk because of Chinese or Mexican workers, but because of robots and computers. And new trade barriers and higher tariffs are not going to change that.

Walter E. Williams,

disagrees Tariffs

Tariff policy beneficiaries are always visible, but its victims are mostly invisible. Politicians love this. The reason is simple: The beneficiaries know for whom to cast their ballots, and the victims don't know whom to blame for their calamity.

Milton Friedman, American economist

disagrees Tariffs

The benefits of a tariff are visible. Union workers can see they are "protected". The harm which a tariff does is invisible. It's spread widely. There are people that don't have jobs because of tariffs but they don't know it.

Thomas Sowell, American economist

disagrees Tariffs

Tariffs that save jobs in the steel industry mean higher steel prices, which in turn means fewer sales of American steel products around the world and losses of far more jobs than are saved.

Elaine Chao,

disagrees Tariffs

Smoot and Hawley ginned up The Tariff Act of 1930 to get America back to work after the Stock Market Crash of '29. Instead, it destroyed trade so effectively that by 1932, American exports to Europe were just a third of what they had been in 1929. World trade fell two-thirds as other nations retaliated. Jobs evaporated.

Francine Blau, Economist

agrees Immigrants are net contributors (tax paid vs. benefits received) in their host country

The evidence does not suggest that current immigrant flows cost native-born taxpayers money over the long-run nor does it provide support for the notion that lowering immigration quotas or stepping up enforcement of existing immigration laws would generate savings to existing taxpayers.

George Borjas, Economist

agrees Immigrants are net contributors (tax paid vs. benefits received) in their host country

The presence of all immigrant workers (legal and illegal) in the labor market makes the U.S. economy (GDP) an estimated 11 percent larger ($1.6 trillion) each year.

Jonathan Portes,

agrees Immigrants are net contributors (tax paid vs. benefits received) in their host country

HMRC has also published important new data about the fiscal contribution made by recently arrived EEA nationals, showing that they paid more than £3bn in taxes on income while claiming about £0.5bn in HMRC benefits. This provides further confirmation that EU migrants have made a strongly positive contribution to the UK economy and public finances.

Christian Dustmann, Economist

agrees Immigrants are net contributors (tax paid vs. benefits received) in their host country

A key concern of the public debate on migration is whether immigrants contribute their fair share to the tax and welfare systems. Our new analysis draws a positive picture of the overall fiscal contribution made by recent immigrant cohorts, particularly of immigrants arriving from the EU.

John Key, 38th prime minister of new zealand

agrees Euthanasia

If I had terminal cancer, I had a few weeks to live, I was in tremendous amount of pain - if they just effectively wanted to turn off the switch and legalise that by legalising euthanasia, I'd want that.

Sheryl Sandberg, American technology executive, activist, and author

agrees Net neutrality

Today’s decision from the Federal Communications Commission to end net neutrality is disappointing and harmful. An open internet is critical for new ideas and economic opportunity – and internet providers shouldn't be able to decide what people can see online or charge more for certain websites. We’re ready to work with members of Congress and others to help make the internet free and open for eve... See More

Robert J. Shiller, Professor of economics at Yale and Nobel laureate

agrees Robot Tax

A moderate tax on robots, even a temporary tax that merely slows the adoption of disruptive technology, seems a natural component of a policy to address rising inequality. Revenue could be targeted toward wage insurance, to help people replaced by new technology make the transition to a different career. This would accord with our natural sense of justice, and thus be likely to endure.

Dean Baker, Macroeconomist and codirector of the Center for Economic and Policy Research

disagrees Robot Tax

[This] is a tax on productivity growth.

Vince Cable,

agrees Legalise recreational drugs

I’m very anti-drugs. I’m very puritanical about it. But the simple truth is that by turning over the marijuana trade to the underworld, it’s creating opportunities for them and it’s making things worse.

Juan Manuel Santos,

agrees Legalise recreational drugs

The business of illicit drugs is behind violence, corruption and crime in almost the entire planet, and we have to recognize that the so-called War on Drugs - which has been going on for half a century - has not been won or won.

Lawrence Summers, Economist and Harvard University Professor

agrees Artificial intelligence and robots might cause mass unemployment

It is widely feared that half the jobs in the economy might be eliminated by innovations such as self-driving vehicles, automatic checkout machines and expert systems that trade securities more effectively than humans can.

Christopher Pissarides, Nobel Prize winner in Economics

agrees Basic Income

I am very much in favour, as long as we know how to apply it without taking away incentive to work at the lower end of the market

Erik Brynjolfsson, Professor at MIT

agrees Carbon Tax

If we're willing to send half a million fellow citizens into battle, to protect oil supplies and our economic way of life, we should be no less willing to make the small sacrifice of paying more for gasoline. A revenue-neutral plan that reduced Social Security taxes by $1 billion for every penny a gallon of gas tax would leave the working poor and middle class better off than before. In the long t... See More

Andrew McAfee,

agrees Artificial intelligence and robots might cause mass unemployment

As digital devices like computers and robots get more capable thanks to Moore’s Law (the proposition that the number of transistors on a semiconductor can be inexpensively doubled about every two years), they can do more of the work that people used to do. Digital labor, in short, substitutes for human labor.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader, and risk analyst

disagrees Crops and foods improved through biotechnology (GMOs)

There are resilient ways to solve problems, say feed the world, without complicated technologies that entail fragility and unkown possibilities.

William A. Darity, Professor of Public Policy at Duke University

agrees Job Guarantee

Each job offered under a federal employment assurance would be at a wage rate above the poverty threshold, and would include benefits like health insurance. A public sector job guarantee would establish a quality of work and the level of compensation offered for all jobs. The program would be great for the country: It could meet a wide range of the nation’s physical and human infrastructure needs,... See More

Yanis Varoufakis, Former finance minister of Greece, is Professor of Economics at the University of Athens

agrees Basic Income

Either we are going to have a basic income that regulates this new society of ours, or we are going to have very substantial social conflicts that get far worse with xenophobia and refugees and migration and so forth.

Paul Krugman, Economist (nobel laureate) and NY Times columnist

agrees Carbon Tax

Emissions taxes are the Economics 101 solution to pollution problems; every economist I know would start cheering wildly if Congress voted in a clean, across-the-board carbon tax.

David Autor, Economist

disagrees Artificial intelligence and robots might cause mass unemployment

It doesn’t really make sense to ask whether automation will affect jobs. Yes, 100 percent of jobs will be affected. Jobs change all of the time. The content of jobs will change. But it’s not as if there’s a fixed amount of work to do. The net number of jobs is rising. Job tasks are changing. In many cases that automation is complementary to the tasks that people do. For example, doctors’ work i... See More

Joel Mokyr,

agrees Artificial intelligence and robots might cause mass unemployment

I don’t see an easy way of solving it [mass unemployment]. It’s an inevitable consequence of technological progress.

Greg Mankiw, Harvard professor in economics

agrees Carbon Tax

People don't want to think about climate change every time they do every decision. They can't. What a carbon tax does is it nudges them in the direction of doing the right thing. But you can cut other taxes in response.

Bill Mitchell, Professor of Economics and Musician

disagrees Basic Income

A basic income guarantee is a neo-liberal strategy for serfdom without the work ... In addition to a Job Guarantee we also demand a Services Guarantee. It is no good having a bare minimum income if the dentists and doctors and shops in your town are closed and the public transport system is deficient.

Ha-Joon Chang, Economist. University of Cambridge

disagrees Basic Income

The right-wing version of UBI (...) is that the government should provide its citizens with a basic income at the subsistence level, while providing no (or little) further goods and services. As far as I can see, this is the version of UBI supported by the Silicon Valley companies. I am totally against this. There are left-wing libertarians who support UBI, who would set its level quite high, whi... See More

William C. Dudley, President of Federal Reserve Bank of New York

disagrees Cryptocurrencies

[Bitcoin is] more of a speculative activity.

Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate economist based at Columbia University

disagrees Cryptocurrencies

[Governments will] regulate it out of existence.

Christine Lagarde, IMF Managing Director

disagrees Cryptocurrencies

It's clearly a domain where we need international regulation and proper supervision.

Nouriel Roubini,

disagrees Cryptocurrencies

Bitcoin is the mother of all bubbles, favoured by charlatans and swindlers.

Lawrence H. Summers, Harvard economist and former US Treasury secretary

agrees Soda taxes

We have strong evidence from around the world that raising taxes on products like tobacco, sugar sweetened beverages and alcohol is highly effective at reducing harmful consumption and saving lives. I think this is about as close to free-lunch, win-win policy as economists have found

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