Quotes About Inequality

Moreover, people who believe the game is rigged are easy prey for political demagogues with fast tongues and dumb ideas.

Economic bullying takes many forms but almost always preys on individuals and families that have little or no power and are at the mercy of those who do.

Don't separate race from class. Racial discrimination is aggravating class divides, and wider inequality is worsening racial divides.

2018, the stock market posted its worst annual performance since the financial crisis. The median shareholder return for the largest five hundred corporations was a negative 5.8 percent. But their top executives got raises of 5 percent or more, with the typical CEO pay reaching a record $12.4 million, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal.

Being rich now means having enough money that you don't have to encounter anyone who isn't.

The 400 richest Americans now have more wealth than the entire bottom half of earners—150 million Americans—put together.

We're not in trouble because gays want to marry or women want to have some control over when they have babies. We're in trouble because CEOs are collecting exorbitant pay while slicing the pay of average workers, because the titans of Wall Street demand short-term results over long-term jobs, and because of a boardroom culture that tolerates financial conflicts of interest, insider trading, and the outright bribery of public officials through unlimited campaign "donations.

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

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.

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.

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.

It's no mere coincidence that over the last century the top earners' share of the nation's total income peaked twice, in 1928 and 2007—the two years just preceding the biggest downturns.

According to the Commerce Department, employee pay is down to the smallest share of the economy since the government began collecting wage and salary figures data in 1929. Meanwhile, corporate profits now constitute the largest share of the economy since 1929. In

The tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003—and extended for two years in 2010—in 2011 saved the richest 1.4 million taxpayers (the top 1 percent) more money than the rest of America's 140,890,000 taxpayers received in total income. Leading to… The fifth dot: Government budgets are squeezed.

According to Commerce Department data, private sector wage gains over the last decade have even lagged behind wage gains during the decade of the Great Depression (4 percent over the last ten years, adjusted for inflation, versus 5 percent from 1929 to 1939).

Personal responsibility is completely foreign to the highest echelons of the Street. Citigroup's stock fell 44 percent in 2011, but its CEO, Vikram Pandit, got at least $5.45 million on top of a retention bonus of $16.7 million. The stock of JPMorgan Chase fell 20 percent, but its CEO, Jamie Dimon, was awarded a package worth $22.9 million.

It's scandalous that the four hundred richest Americans should pay an average of 17 percent tax on their incomes, a rate lower than that paid by many in the middle class.

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.

Socialism for the Rich, Harsh Capitalism for the Rest

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.

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.