Quotes About Inequality

Democrats like Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders want to raise taxes on the rich, saying it will solve inequality. It won't. All that will do is significantly reduce incentives to work, save, and invest. But I say inequality is not the problem. The problem is a lack of growth.

You can raise taxes on the rich in America! We should raise taxes on the rich in America. But we can't do that in Rhode Island.

Those on the downside of rising economic inequality generally do not want government policies that look like handouts. They typically do not want the government to make the tax system more progressive, to impose punishing taxes on the rich, in order to give the money to them. Redistribution feels demeaning. It feels like being labeled a failure.

There's nothing wrong with paying taxes; they should be paid in proportion to how rich you are. This idea that you're going to get better growth by cutting taxes at the top has no historical justification. And it's certainly not an argument in favor of capitalism.

Mom and pop shops paying taxes while Amazon got billions just to come to town didn't seem right, and, post-FoxxConn, people are less likely to fall for the promised jobs numbers.

It's wrong that members of Congress can purchase luxury airfare with taxpayer money when many families in my district and across the county are struggling to make ends meet.

Most of us are aware of the sacrificial slaughter of Bear Sterns. Some people call it a bailout, but I call it a handout - a government handout to some of the richest people on Earth, paid for by American taxpayers.

But what shouldn't happen is, you shouldn't have the taxpayers from states that are managing their situations well paying for those states that are not.

Poverty can teach lessons that privilege cannot.

There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself - whether it's Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc. - because that's the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else.

Arnold Schwarzenegger cut teacher's salaries and parks and libraries rather than raise taxes for the many California millionaires and billionaires.

The United States is the only civilized country in the world to class its teachers at the bottom of the social scale.

Within a single school, teachers often encounter differences in poverty levels, parent involvement, and student readiness.

And then the conditions of safety - or lack of safety - for teachers in public schools, and the disparity between public schools and private schools is shameful.

There will always be places in the world where good schools don't exist and good teachers don't want to go, not just in the developing world but in places of socioeconomic hardship.

There are teachers in the United States who cry in the daytime because they see a child or children who haven't eaten properly, children who haven't used soap in so long.

In too many ways, Ohio is being run for the benefit of those who have already made it, and too many of our friends and neighbors are being left behind. Nowhere is this more evident than in the cuts to police officers, firefighters, nurses, teachers, and to our local schools, while property and sales taxes are going up.

Voltaire had observed, history is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up.

An officer who lost an eye or a limb would receive a year's pay and medical expenses; the widows of officers killed in action would also get a year's pay, plus another third for each child. Those who died of their wounds within six months were "deemed slain in battle." No bonuses were announced for enlisted men.

But, as Voltaire had observed, history is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up.

Mahes does 90 days for stealing fish. It costs taxpayers $162 a day to feed, clothe and house him at Rikers Island His 90-day sentence will cost them $14,580, to punish him for refusing to pay the $51.31 check. In five years he has cost them more than $250,000. Your tax dollars at work. (...) All around us are inmates who just want to go home. Mahes is already there. He has no expectations, so there are no disappointments: he does not envy people who are free, because they are free to suffer.

The only thing poverty does is grind down your nerve endings to a point that you can work harder and stoop lower than most people are willing to. It chips away a person's dreams to the point that the hopelessness shows through, and the dreamer accepts that hard work and borrowed houses are all this life will ever be.

So Newark had the highest percentage of substandard housing of any American city: 7,097 units had no flush toilets; 28,795, no heaters. Twenty-eight babies died in a diarrhea epidemic in 1965, eighteen of them at City Hospital, which was also infested by bats.

Feed the hungry and you're a saint, ask why they are hungry and you're a communist.