Quotes from Robert B. Reich

How many billionaires and big corporations does it take to buy the presidency and Congress? We would soon find out—although we would not know many of their names.

A few years ago Michele Bachmann remarked that if the minimum wage were repealed, "we could potentially virtually wipe out unemployment completely because we would be able to offer jobs at whatever level." If you accept her logic, why stop there? After all, slavery was a full-employment system.

In 2013, Apple spent $3,370,000 on lobbying; Amazon, $3,456,000; Facebook, $6,430,000; Microsoft, $10,490,000; and Google, $15,800,000, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

What's the "best" trade-off? Such decisions typically are buried within antitrust or antimonopoly laws, as enforced by administrative agencies and interpreted by prosecutors and courts.

The threat to America is not coming from peaceful demonstrators. And it's not coming from a government that's too large. It's coming from unprecedented amounts of money now inundating our democracy, mostly from big corporations and a handful of the super-rich.

In the half century spanning 1958 to 2008, the average effective tax rate of the richest 1 percent of Americans—including all deductions and tax credits—dropped from 51 percent to 26 percent.

when real people without money assemble to express their dissatisfaction with all this, they're told the First Amendment doesn't apply.

During the same period the typical middle-class taxpayer went from paying 15 percent of income in taxes to 16 percent.

Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States but contracts with over 700,000 workers abroad.

Medicare's administrative costs are in the range of 3 percent—well below the 5–10 percent costs borne by large companies that self-insure, even further below the administrative costs of companies in the small-group market (amounting to 25–27 percent of premiums), and much lower than the administrative costs of individual insurance (30 percent).

Socialism for the Rich, Harsh Capitalism for the Rest

We cannot tolerate inordinate wealth for the few along with unbridled money in politics. 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.

China has a national economic strategy designed to create more and better jobs. We have global corporations designed to make money for their shareholders. No contest.

Whole Foods announced it would be cutting medical benefits for its entire part-time workforce—at a total annual savings of what Bezos himself made in two hours.

The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 and its companion, the Clayton Act of 1914, were designed not only to improve economic efficiency by reducing the market power of economic giants like the railroads and oil companies but also to prevent companies from becoming so large that their political power would undermine democracy. Trustbusters during the first decades of the twentieth century tamed American industry and arguably saved capitalism from its own excesses.

China has a national economic strategy designed to create more and better jobs. We have global corporations designed to make money for their shareholders.

Fifty years ago, when General Motors was the largest employer in America, the typical GM worker earned $35.00 an hour in today's dollars. By 2014, America's largest employer was Walmart, and the average hourly wage of Walmart workers was $11.22.

An aggressive enforcer of antitrust laws could win a court victory that forced the giant to relinquish market share, although the giant's army of litigators would probably halt any such assault, and its legislative allies would discourage the assault to begin with. The more likely threat to one of the giants comes from another giant seeking to expropriate its market.

When Republicans recently charged the President with promoting 'class warfare,' he answered it was 'just math.' But it's more than math. It's a matter of morality. Republicans have posed the deepest moral question of any society: whether we're all in it together. Their answer is we're not. President Obama should proclaim, loudly and clearly, we are.

It turns out that what money buys has rapidly diminishing emotional returns ... As long as we're not destitute, happiness depends less on getting what we want than appreciating what we already have.

The idea of a "free market" separate and distinct from government has functioned as a useful cover for those who do not want the market mechanism fully exposed. They have had the most influence over it and would rather keep it that way. The mythology is useful precisely because it hides their power.

The problem was not that Americans spent beyond their means but that their means had not kept up with what the larger economy could and should have been able to provide them. the American economy had been growing briskly, and America's middle class naturally expected to share in that growth. But it didn't. A larger and larger portion of the economy's winnings had gone to people at the top.

The simultaneous rise of both the working poor and non-working rich offers further evidence that earnings no longer correlate with effort.

Today the great divide is not between left and right. It's between democracy and oligarchy.