Quotes About Inequality

The public school system is not about educating black children. Never has been. Inner-city schools are about social control. Period. They're operated as holding pens—miniature jails, really. It's only when black children start breaking out of their pens and bothering white people that society even pays any attention to the issue of whether these children are being educated.

The boarded-up homes, the decaying storefronts, the aging church rolls, kids from unknown families who swaggered down the streets - loud congregations of teenage boys, teenage girls feeding potato chips to crying toddlers, the discarded wrappers tumbling down the block - all of it whispered painful truths.

We're never so outraged as when a cabbie drives past us or the woman in the elevator clutches her purse, not so much because we're bothered by the fact that such indignities are what less fortunate coloreds have to put up with every single day of their lives—although that's what we tell ourselves—but because we're wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and speak impeccable English and yet have somehow been mistaken for an ordinary nigger.

Everybody knows that it makes no sense that you send a kid to the emergency room for a treatable illness like asthma. They end up taking up a hospital bed. It costs when, if you, they just gave, you gave, treatment early, and they got some treatment, and uhhh a breathalyzer, or uhh, an inhalator, not a breathalyzer...

These others, they have treated you badly. They are just too lazy to work for themselves.' And you know what he would say to me? He would say, 'How do you know that man does not need this small thing more than me?

In 1980, the average CEO made forty-two times what an average hourly worker took home. By 2005, the ratio was 262 to 1.

The government was taking money, jobs, college slots, and status away from hardworking, deserving people like us and handing it all to people like them—those who didn't share our values, who didn't work as hard as we did, the kind of people whose problems were of their own making.

I thought again about the Somali pirates I had ordered killed, Muslims all, and the many young men like them across the nearby borders of Yemen and Iraq, and in Egypt, Jordan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, whose earnings in a lifetime would probably never touch the cost of that necklace in my hands. Radicalize just 1 percent of those young men and you had yourself an army of half a million, ready to die for eternal glory—or maybe just a taste of something better.

The receptionist's salary, on the other hand, was taxed at almost twice that rate once FICA was included. From Buffett's perspective, the discrepancy was

Still, I couldn't help but connect the two events and consider the human costs of the world's dependence on fossil fuels: the number of people who each day were forced to risk lungs, limbs, and sometimes their lives to fill our gas tanks and keep the lights on—and generate otherworldly profits for distant executives and shareholders. I

Rather than evoke our sympathy, our familiarity with the lives of the black poor has bred spasms of fear and outright contempt. But mostly it's bred indifference.

Between 1971 and 2001, while the median wage and salary income of the average worker showed literally no gain, the income of the top hundredth of a percent went up almost 500 percent.

For most Americans, the basic bargain that made this country great has eroded … rooted in the nagging sense that no matter how hard they work, the deck is stacked against them. This kind of gaping inequality is the defining challenge of our time … and gives lie to the promise at the very heart of America: that this is the place where you can make it if you try

like most wealthy Americans, almost all his income came from dividends and capital gains, investment income that since 2003 has been taxed at only 15 percent.

It seems that politics is becoming a millionaire's club...a poor man just doesn't have a chance these days. It is true that America is becoming more and more anti-revolutionary and anti-democratic--but as long as Americans feel such awe and envy for wealth and power, men like Scranton have a tremendous glamour over any other person no matter how well qualified or intelligent. [1962]

You might discover that, nationwide, America's food banks are experiencing 'a torrent of need which [they] cannot meet' and that, according to a survey conducted by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, 67 percent of the adults requesting emergency food aid are people with jobs.

You can turn away the Mexicans, the African-Americans, the teenagers and other suspect groups, but there's no fence high enough to keep out the repo man.

Something is wrong, very wrong, when a single person in good health, a person who in addition possesses a working car, can barely support herself by the sweat of her brow. You don't need a degree in economics to see that wages are too low and rents too high.

Poor whites had always had the comfort of knowing that someone was worse off and more despised than they were; racial subjugation was the ground under their feet, the rock they stood upon, even when their own situation was deteriorating. That slender assurance is shrinking.

Si hablamos en términos globales, el mayor obstáculo para la felicidad es la pobreza. Las encuestas sobre felicidad, hasta donde podemos confiar en ellas, muestran siempre que los países más felices del mundo suelen ser los más ricos. Estados Unidos está en el puesto 23 y el Reino Unido en el 41, por ejemplo; mientras que la India aparece en el nada halagüeño puesto 125 (de 178 países).

But suburbanization, probably more than any other single factor, hid the poor from view.

The] strong belief in opportunity and upward mobility is the explanation that is often given for Americans' high tolerance for inequality. The majority of Americans surveyed believe that they will be above mean income in the future (even though that is a mathematical impossibility)."5

Durante siglos, al menos desde la reforma protestante, las elites económicas occidentales se han regocijado en la idea de que ser pobre es una situación voluntaria. Los calvinistas la consideraban una consecuencia de la dejadez y las malas costumbres; y los pensadores positivos la atribuyen a una incapacidad obstinada para abrazar la abundancia.

Political power, too, is concentrated within the top 20 percent, since its members are far more likely than the poor—or even the middle class—to discern the all-too-tiny distinctions between candidates that can make it seem worthwhile to contribute, participate, and vote.