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The United States prides itself on being the richest country in the world. Yet we can't balance the budget, pay for education, or take care of the aged and infirm.

It's not enough to have economic growth. You have to distribute wealth throughout all of society.

We need banks and financiers and entrepreneurs to take risks because that's how economies grow over time.

We absolutely have to restrain concentrations of wealth in industry from spoiling the situation for everybody.

It is a foregone opportunity that we could have a trillion dollars more of income for the United States if we were producing at capacity rather than falling so far short of it.

The key to wealth is not what we earn. It is in what is spent on us.

We can't just cut our way to prosperity. Even as we look for ways to reduce deficits over the long term, we must grow the economy in a way that strengthens the middle class and everyone willing to work hard to get into it.

The financial doctrines so zealously followed by American companies might help optimize capital when it is scarce. But capital is abundant. If we are to see our economy really grow, we need to encourage migratory capital to become productive capital - capital invested for the long-term in empowering innovations.

Naturally we are aware of the strength of our economy and naturally we don't want to downplay it.

If we didn't have the rest of the world growing, the United States economy would be in much worse shape than it is today.