Quotes About Inequality

the rise of knowledge jobs for those with the skills and education to grab them and, simultaneously, the rise of third-rate service jobs for those without.

A farmer in Jhalsu village loses a whole day's earnings if he goes to a bank branch, a couple of km away, for a simple transaction like depositing or withdrawing cash.

The modern individual family is based on the open or disguised domestic enslavement of the woman; and modern society is a mass composed solely of individual families as its molecules. Today, in the great majority of cases, the man has to be the earner, the breadwinner of the family, at least among the propertied classes, and this gives him a dominating position which requires no special legal privileges. In the family, he is the bourgeois; the wife represents the proletariat.

One of Aristotle's most interesting discoveries is that social conflicts arise from the inequality in Economic and Social conditions…

I'm right and you're wrong, I'm big and you're small, and there's nothing you can do about it.

In 1980, the richest one-hundredth of 1 percent of Americans provided 10 percent of contributions to federal elections. By 2012, they provided 40 percent. The Supreme Court has made all this worse through a series of decisions holding that money is speech under the First Amendment and corporations are people.

By 2016, the typical American household had a net worth 14 percent lower than the typical household in 1984, while the richest one-tenth of 1 percent owned almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent put together. Income has become almost as unequal as wealth: Between 1972 and 2016 the pay of the typical American worker dropped 2 percent, adjusted for inflation, although the American economy nearly doubled in size. Most of the income gains went to the top.

Nearly one out of every five is in a part-time job. Two-thirds are living paycheck to paycheck. Along with pay, employment benefits have been shriveling. The gap in life expectancy between the nation's most affluent and everyone else is widening as well.

Rather than come together for the common good, we come together to get the best possible deal. We're clustering by income—attracting members who can contribute the most while excluding those who are more costly.

Americans who are angry and suspicious of one another will fight over the crumbs rather than join together against those who have run off with most of the pie.

Don't assume that we're locked in a battle between capitalism and socialism. We already have socialism—for the very rich. Most Americans are subject to harsh capitalism.

Don't believe the system is a meritocracy in which ability and hard work are necessarily rewarded. Today the most important predictor of someone's future income and wealth is the income and wealth of the family they're born into.

The invisible hand of the marketplace is connected to a wealthy and muscular arm.

In all, 62 percent of the budget cuts would come from low-income programs. Yet at the same time, the Republican budget would provide a substantial tax cut to the rich—who are already taking home an almost unprecedented share of the nation's total income.

Their aim is to divide and conquer: pit unionized workers against nonunionized, public sector workers against nonpublic, older workers within sight of Medicare and Social Security against younger workers who don't believe these programs will be there for them, and the middle class against the poor.

The rich don't create jobs. Jobs are created when the vast majority of Americans buy enough to make companies add capacity and hire more workers. But that won't happen unless the vast majority has enough money to do the buying.

The biggest political divide in America today is not between Republicans and Democrats. It's between democracy and oligarchy. Hearing and using the same old labels prevents most people from noticing they're being shafted.

Twenty-one of the corporations whose CEOs signed the statement paid no federal income taxes in 2018, courtesy of those lobbying efforts. One of the signers was Jeff Bezos, the multi-billionaire CEO of Amazon and of its Whole Foods subsidiary. Just weeks after the statement appeared, 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 most important political competition over the next decades will not be between the right and left or between Republicans and Democrats. It will be between a majority of Americans who have been losing ground and an economic elite that refuses to recognize or respond to the majority's growing distress.

Current patterns of economic segregation make a self-fulfilling prophecy of the claim that the poor are not like the rest of us.

Social work, teaching, nursing, and caring for the elderly or for children are among the lowest-paid professions, yet evidence suggests that talented and dedicated people in these positions generate societal benefits far out of proportion to their pay. One such study found that good teachers increase the average present value of their students' lifetime income by $250,000 per classroom

Listen carefully to today's Republican right and you hear the same social Darwinism that was used more than a century ago to justify the brazen inequality of the Gilded Age: survival of the fittest. Don't help the poor or the unemployed or anyone who's fallen on bad times, they say, because this only encourages laziness. America will be strong only if we reward the rich and punish the needy.

Listen to today's Republicans and you hear a continuous regurgitation of Sumner. "Civilization has a simple choice," Sumner wrote in the 1880s. It's either "liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest" or "not-liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest. The former carries society forward and favors all its best members; the latter carries society downwards and favors all its worst members." Sound familiar?

Wall Street is a casino in which high-stakes wagers are placed within a limited number of betting houses that keep a percentage of the wins for themselves and fob off losses on others, including taxpayers.