Wealth & Money Quote by Arthur Laffer

Laffer’s line has the slick certainty of a chalkboard mic drop: “That’s accounting.” It’s a rhetorical trapdoor. By ending with an appeal to bookkeeping rather than lived economics, he frames outsourcing as a closed-loop system where money can’t really leave “us” because dollars ultimately circle back to U.S. assets or products. The intent is clear: defuse the moral and political heat around offshoring by reclassifying it as a neutral financial identity, not a distributional choice.

The subtext is where the move gets sharp. “Every dollar we spend” quietly swaps out workers for consumers and shareholders. Even if a company’s savings return as domestic investment, that doesn’t tell you who benefits, how fast, or whether the communities that lost wages ever see the rebound. Accounting can prove flows; it can’t prove fairness. It can also hide power: if the “return” shows up as higher stock prices, buybacks, or real estate appreciation, the winners are already the people with capital.

Context matters because Laffer is a supply-side celebrity, famous for turning complex macro debates into punchy certainties. This sentence is built for cable news and boardrooms: outsource, relax, the ledger balances. Critics will hear a category error dressed up as math. The question isn’t whether dollars can be reinvested in the U.S.; it’s whether outsourcing restructures bargaining power, hollowing out job ladders and local tax bases while rewarding the most mobile firms. “That’s accounting” doubles as a dismissal: if you’re upset, you’re being emotional about what he insists is merely arithmetic.