Quotes from Robert B. Reich

Republicans want us to believe that the central issue is the size of government, but the real issue is whom government is for. Public

We are perilously close to losing an economy and a democracy that are meant to work for everyone and to replacing them with an economy and a government that will exist mainly for a few wealthy and powerful people.

CEOs are hauling in more than three hundred times the pay of average workers (up from forty times the pay only three decades ago).

The rich are "job creators," so tax cuts for the rich trickle down to everyone else while higher taxes on the rich hurt the economy and slow job growth. Untrue. Look at recent history. George W. Bush cut taxes on the rich, and what happened? A fraction of the number of jobs were created under Bush than had been created under Bill Clinton, and the median wage dropped, adjusted for inflation. Trickle-down economics is a cruel joke. As

The chairman of Merck took home $17.9 million in 2010, as Merck laid off sixteen thousand workers and announced layoffs of twenty-eight thousand more. The CEO of Bank of America raked in $10 million, while the bank announced it was firing thirty thousand employees. Even

Regressives say small businesses would be hurt by a higher marginal tax. Don't believe this, either. Only just over 1 percent of small-business owners earn enough to be taxed at the top rate—and that's just on the portion of their incomes exceeding $379,000. The

The big economic news isn't the slow return of jobs. It's the continuing drop in pay. Most of the jobs we've gained since the Great Recession pay less than the jobs lost during it. An analysis from the National Employment Law Project shows that the biggest losses were in jobs paying between $19.05 and $31.40 an hour; the biggest increases have been in jobs paying an average of $9.03 to $12.91 an hour.

When it comes to fiber connections, the United States is behind Sweden, Estonia, South Korea, Hong Kong, Japan, and most other developed countries, putting us twenty-eighth worldwide in terms of speed of Internet access and twenty-third in terms of cost.

Medicare's administrative costs are only 3 percent, far below the 30 percent average administrative costs of private insurers.

As the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr has written, "The most common form of hypocrisy among the privileged classes is to assume that their privileges are the just payments with which society rewards specially useful or meritorious functions," while accusing the underprivileged of "lacking what they have been denied the right to acquire.

Companies are not citizens. They are bundles of contracts. The purpose of companies is to play the economic game as aggressively as possible. The challenge for us as citizens is to stop them from setting the rules. Keeping supercapitalism from spilling over into democracy is the only constructive agenda for change. All else, as I shall make clear, is frolic and detour.

The other big budgetary expense is national defense. America spends more on our military than do China, Russia, Britain, France, Japan, and Germany combined.

S&P's intrusion into American politics is also ironic because much of our current debt is directly or indirectly due to S&P's failure (along with the failures of the two other major credit-rating agencies, Fitch and Moody's) to do its job before the financial meltdown.

My conclusion is that the only way to reverse course is for the vast majority who now lack influence over the rules of the game to become organized and unified

the mammoth deficits that will be racked up beyond 2020 are due almost entirely to rapidly rising health-care costs along with seventy-seven million baby boomers whose bodies will slowly be deteriorating.

As the great jurist and Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis once said, "We may have democracy or we may have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.

A far better way to slow medical costs is to use Medicare and Medicaid's bargaining power over drug companies and hospitals to get lower prices and to move from a fee-for-service system to a fee-for-healthy-outcomes system. And because Medicare has far lower administrative costs than private health insurers, we should make Medicare available to everyone.

America is one of the few advanced nations that allow direct advertising of prescription drugs to consumers.

Reform of our common life will not be led by socially responsible corporations or by enlightened CEOs. It will be led by concerned and active citizens.

All flat-tax proposals benefit the rich more than the poor for one simple reason: today's tax code is still at least moderately progressive. The rich usually pay a higher percentage of their incomes in income taxes than do the poor. A flat tax would eliminate that slight progressivity.

the only antidote for big lies is big truth—told relentlessly and powerfully. You must be armed with it.

One explanation for their complicity is that Trump's divisiveness is politically helpful to them. It keeps Americans fighting each other rather than discovering their common interest in fighting oligarchy.

In order to generate high profits and share prices, they have to attract consumers rather than serve citizens. This has transformed journalists from investigators and analysts offering serious news to "content providers" competing for attention.

Growth of Average Hourly Compensation and Productivity, 1947–2008