Quotes About Inequality

At eight or nine I passed the exam for Notting Hill and Ealing High, a private school. I had an assisted place; I was always the one who, for financial reasons, didn't go on the skiing trip or whatever.

I remember one of my first international trips to Poland. After a long, tortuous journey, we arrived at the hotel exhausted but without the team management, who had gone ahead of us from the airport in cars, checked into the best rooms, and left us with what was left.

The triumph of economic liberalization has coincided with a sharp increase in income inequality.

Capitalism might everywhere be spreading havoc, but it is also triumphant everywhere.

If we want to jack up the tax rates on the really rich, the amounts of money that would bring in are trivial compared to jacking up rates on the middle class.

The stunning thing about the world as it is, is that we have a tremendously large problem in it: namely, one-third of all human deaths, 80-million every year from poverty-related causes, trivial diseases and so on, and stunningly, nobody is really paying attention to it.

Americans think they're the leader of the world and yet can say that they're putting their economic interests ahead of the lives of - quite possibly - tens of millions of people who over the next 50 years will die because of floods or storms or tropical diseases or whatever. I guess that sort of thing makes me angry.

The trouble with the profit system has always been that it was highly unprofitable to most people.

The trouble with capitalism as a system is that only those who have or can get capital can make it work for them, and that leaves out damn near all of us.

Trouble brews when we steal from the poor and give to the rich.

According to the IRS, the wealthiest 400 Americans, who earned an average of roughly $270 million in 2008, paid an average tax rate of just 18.2 percent that year. That's about the same rate paid by a single truck driver in Rhode Island. It's not right, and we need to restore fairness to our tax code.

This 90/10 rule holds true in almost anything financial. Take the game of golf, for example. Ten percent of the professional golfers make 90 percent of the money.

It's true that globalization, with all its fantastic improvements in the world and the technological progress linked to it, has increased inequality at country level, especially inside countries. And there are people that were left behind - people, sectors, regions - that has created a sense of frustration in the rust belts of the world.

The second truism that we must understand is that poverty does not create our social problems, our social problems create our poverty.

The daily deluge of tales of lechery and trauma holds a hidden but crucial truism: sexual harassment routinely feeds on income inequality. After all, it's much harder to exploit an equal.

My greatest fear about a world in which racial reassignment surgery becomes common is that it then becomes an expression of all kinds of class privilege. You have a truly dystopian society divided between the people who can afford to be racially altered and perfected and the ones who can't.

Barack Obama destroyed the middle class. Whatever you want to say about his rhetoric, the rich got richer, but the poor got poorer, and the middle class got wiped out. That's really what Trump appealed to and inspired in the forgotten man.

The base of the party, the middle-aged white working class, has suffered at least as much as any demographic group because of globalization, low-wage immigrant labor, and free trade. Trump sensed the rage that flared from this pain and made it the fuel of his campaign.

Coming from where I come from, I didn't have the luxury of having a trust fund. Or money from generations. Or the luxury of hoppin' into the family business, you know?

Obama seems to want to do something to damage rich people.

Especially as a teenager, I was always being racially profiled by the police. You just see all this injustice, and you want to do something about it, but you don't know how.

All these people talking about morality should just take a walk downtown. They don't want to go downtown because instantly they see homeless people and they don't want to.

We need wealthy dogs off the seats of power. They're taking us back to feudalism and I really don't want that. But I'm very far from being a socialist.

The real tragedy of minimum wage laws is that they are supported by well-meaning groups who want to reduce poverty. But the people who are hurt most by higher minimums are the most poverty stricken.