Quotes from Robert Reich

It's true that redistributing income to the needy is politically easier in a growing economy than in a stagnant one.

In the 1980s, corporate raiders began mounting unfriendly takeovers of companies that could deliver higher returns to their shareholders - if they abandoned their other stakeholders.

A society - any society - is defined as a set of mutual benefits and duties embodied most visibly in public institutions: public schools, public libraries, public transportation, public hospitals, public parks, public museums, public recreation, public universities, and so on.

Universities have to tame their budgets, especially for student amenities that have nothing to do with education.

Government subsidies to elite private universities take the form of tax deductions for people who make charitable contributions to them.

Medical costs are soaring because our health-care system is totally screwed up. Doctors and hospitals have every incentive to spend on unnecessary tests, drugs, and procedures.

No company can be expected to build a nuclear reactor, an oil well, a coal mine, or anything else that's one hundred percent safe under all circumstances. The costs would be prohibitive. It's unreasonable to expect corporations to totally guard against small chances of every potential accident.

To get back to the kind of shared prosperity and upward mobility we once considered normal will require another era of fundamental reform, of both our economy and our democracy.

A leader is someone who steps back from the entire system and tries to build a more collaborative, more innovative system that will work over the long term.

The faith that anyone could move from rags to riches - with enough guts and gumption, hard work and nose to the grindstone - was once at the core of the American Dream.

Much of what's called 'public' is increasingly a private good paid for by users - ever-higher tolls on public highways and public bridges, higher tuitions at so-called public universities, higher admission fees at public parks and public museums.

Drug company payments to doctors are a small part of a much larger strategy by Big Pharma to clean our pockets.

More people are killed by stray bullets every day in America than have been killed by Ebola here. More are dying because of poverty and hunger.

The liberal ideal is that everyone should have fair access and fair opportunity. This is not equality of result. It's equality of opportunity. There's a fundamental difference.

Conservatives believe the economy functions better if the rich have more money and everyone else has less. But they're wrong. It's just the opposite.

A lot of attention has been going to social values - abortion, gay rights, other divisive issues - but economic values are equally important.

The job creators are members of America's vast middle class and the poor, whose purchases cause businesses to expand and invest.

I wish it were simply a nightmare, but I think that any reasonable person watching American politics would come to the conclusion that a second Bush administration would in fact incorporate a more radicalized version of what we've seen in the first administration.

You might say those who can't repay their student debts shouldn't have borrowed in the first place. But they had no way of knowing just how bad the jobs market would become.

Bankruptcy laws allow companies to smoothly reorganize, but not college graduates burdened by student loans.

America's real business leaders understand unless or until the middle class regains its footing and its faith, capitalism remains vulnerable.