Quotes About Inequality

They treat you as if you are a different kind of human or life form when you are a celebrity - as if we don't breathe the same air, or we don't bleed the same - and I hate that. I really hate that.

You talk to people, and they don't understand our water. They come and turn on a tap and drink clean water, and to them, that's amazing. Millions of people around the world have to carry water miles and miles, and that's all they have. It's hard for fat Americans like myself to even understand that.

The biggest revenue target is the preferential rate for long-term capital gains, which raises a perennial question: Why should capital income be taxed at a much lower rate than ordinary income? Capital assets are owned overwhelmingly by the rich.

Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse.

We need to rethink a system that has targeted young people, particularly young people of color, for nonviolent crimes.

Spanish Harlem is like every ghetto in America. There's every distraction possible. To make it up out of there is really a task itself.

One of the more difficult tasks for me as president was to decide on the issue of confirming capital punishment awarded by courts... to my surprise... almost all cases which were pending had a social and economic bias.

Tax laws favor capital over labor, giving capital gains a lower rate than ordinary income. The rich get humongous mortgage interest deductions while renters get no deduction at all.

It is fast becoming an article of political faith that financing America's public schools by way of the local property tax is a shame and a civic scandal.

To tax the community for the advantage of a class is not protection: it is plunder.

What is not fair now is that corporations pay less and less tax, which means that you and I pay more because we're rooted somewhere, they've got our address, right?

I fail to understand how you can justify a poll tax on the entire population, yet exclude a significant proportion of that population from programmes that this tax is paying for.

If we choose to keep those tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, if we choose to keep a tax break for corporate jet owners, if we choose to keep tax breaks for oil and gas companies that are making hundreds of billions of dollars, then that means we've got to cut some kids off from getting a college scholarship.

I've had enough of giving millionaires like Dick Cheney and myself tax breaks and giving America's kids a mountain of debt.

I have fought so heavily against corporate tax breaks, especially because I've seen our schools in Detroit close down.

If giving tax breaks to millionaires created jobs or grew our economy, I would be in favor of them, but they are the same failed policies of the past that just don't work.

Some of the huge tax breaks that we gave to the wealthiest 1 percent of the population in this country during the Bush era have contributed significantly to the deficit.

The 'fiscal cliff' is a ruse, an invention by the right and the rich, to try and keep their huge tax breaks.

Tax breaks and other financial breaks that favor the wealthiest among us do not create greater prosperity for all; they simply siphon off more and more money to those who already have it, and more and more money away from those who do not.

There is no golden age of public spending for the working class under any form of Conservative future, only the endless pursuit of tax breaks for the comfortably-off.

America's corporate and political elites now form a regime of their own and they're privatizing democracy. All the benefits - the tax cuts, policies and rewards flow in one direction: up.

If you want to leave move money in the hands of poor people, you cannot do it through personal income tax cuts. You have to just give them money.

The tax relief that this Congress has given now in terms of four tax cuts has overwhelmingly gone to the people at the very top of the income scale in America.

Sadly, this is the same old Republican story of Robin Hood in reverse - tax cuts for the rich while programs for average and low income Americans suffer.