Quotes About Inequality

Some odd optical property of our highly polarized and unequal society makes the poor almost invisible to their economic superiors.

When I watch TV over my dinner at night, I see a world in which almost everyone makes $15 an hour or more, and I'm not just thinking of the anchor folks. The sitcoms and dramas are about fashion designers or schoolteachers or lawyers, so it's easy for a fast-food worker or nurse's aide to conclude that she is an anomaly—the only one, or almost the only one, who hasn't been invited to the party.

Barbara Ehrenreich

Lo que de verdad tiene el pensamiento positivo de ideología conservadora es su apego al sistema, con todas sus desigualdades y sus abusos de poder.

Nearly a third of the American workforce—41.7 million laborers—earn less than $12 an hour, according to a 2016 study.3

Se suele hablar de la arraigada creencia en la oportunidad y en la movilidad social para explicar la alta tolerancia de los estadounidenses ante la desigualdad. La mayoría de los estadounidenses encuestados cree que en el futuro ganará más que la media (a pesar de que eso sea una imposibilidad matemática).

For most people, throughout most of the twentieth century, medical care necessarily involved an encounter with a social superior—a white male from a relatively privileged background.

No one ever said that you could work hard—harder even than you ever thought possible—and still find yourself sinking ever deeper into poverty and debt.

La proporción entre el sueldo del presidente y el de uno de sus trabajadores medios pasó, de ser de 24 a 1 en 1965, a ser de 300 a 1 en 2000; como también aumentó la distancia entre el sueldo del presidente y el de su tercer cargo más alto.29

nearly one-fifth of all homeless people (in twenty-nine cities across the nation) are employed in full-or part-time jobs.

1997 there were only thirty-six such units for every one hundred families

So if low-wage workers do not always behave in an economically rational way, that is, as free agents within a capitalist democracy, it is because they dwell in a place that is neither free nor in any way democratic.

The shocking thing is that the majority of American workers, about 60 percent, earn less than $14 an hour.

I can think of no honorable answer. Why must some of us deliberate between brands of toothpaste, while others deliberate between damp dirt and bone dust to quiet the fire of an empty stomach lining? There is nothing about the United States I can really explain to this child of another world.

War so conspicuously benefits rich men and kills the poor ones.

All God's children have to take a shit, but you'd never know it from the way they treat the ones who have to clean it up.

Why must some of us deliberate between brands of toothpaste while others deliberate between damp dirt and bone dust to quiet the fire of an empty stomach lining?

Food culture in the United States has long been cast as the property of a privileged class. It is nothing of the kind. Culture is the property of a species.

Well, yeah, Dovey said. That's America. We watch shows about rich people's houses and their designer dresses and we drool. It's patriotic.

But a Congolese life is like the useless Congolese bill, which you can pile by the fistful or the bucketful into a merchant's hand, and still not purchase a single banana. It's dawning on me that I live among men and women who've simply always understood their whole existence is worth less than a banana to most white people. I see it in their eyes when they glance up at me.

Because DSS pay is basically the fuck-you peanut butter sandwich type of paycheck. That's what the big world thinks it's worth, to save white-trash orphans.

Isn't it crazy? Rich people in the United States don't even know how to use money properly.

One percent of the brotherhood has their hands on most of the bread. They own the country, their god is the free market, and most people are so unhorrified they won't even question the system. If it makes a profit, that's the definition of good. If it grows, you have to stand back and let it. The free market has exactly the same morality as a cancer cell.

The dads at home drinking beer in their underwear, the moms at the grocery with their SNAP coupons. The army recruiters in shiny gold buttons come to harvest their jackpot of hopeless futures.