Daily Inspiration Quote by Christina Romer

Romer’s sentence is doing something economists rarely get credit for: it’s an argument in the guise of a measurement. The phrasing is clinical, but the intent is political in the small-p sense of “what should we do next.” “Appear” signals methodological caution, yet everything after it tightens into a verdict: “very large,” “sustained,” “highly significant.” Those aren’t decorative adjectives; they’re an attempt to preempt the familiar escape hatches - short-run pain, statistical noise, partisan cherry-picking. She’s not just saying taxes can hurt. She’s saying the damage is big, it lasts, and it clears the bar of econometric skepticism.

The subtext is aimed at two audiences at once. To policymakers, it reads like a warning label: don’t treat revenue hikes as free money. To fellow economists, it’s a claim about causality. Romer’s work is closely associated with “narrative” identification - isolating tax changes not driven by the business cycle - so this line quietly asserts, we’ve handled the endogeneity problem; the hit to output isn’t just correlation.

Context matters: Romer is a prominent macroeconomist who served in the Obama White House, which makes the line more charged. Coming from a Democrat associated with stimulus and recovery policy, it resists easy ideological sorting. That’s part of why it works: it borrows credibility from unexpectedness. In a discourse where taxes are often treated as moral symbols (fairness, responsibility, punishment), Romer drags the debate back to mechanics and consequences - and does it with numbers-scented language that’s meant to end the argument, not decorate it.