Quotes About Economy

over the last 16 years, we have spent trillions of dollars on wars when we could have been investing that money productively.

What's truly immoral is not what adults choose to do with other consenting adults but what those with great power have chosen to do to the rest of us. America's problems have nothing to do with private morality. The breakdown is in public morality—abuses of public trust that undermine the integrity of our economy and democracy

I recently debated a conservative Republican who insisted the best way to revive the American economy was to shrink government. When I asked him to explain his logic, he said, simply, "Government is the source of all our problems." When I noted government spending had brought the economy out of the Great Depression, he disagreed. "The Depression ended because of World War II," he pronounced, as if government had played no part in World War II.

We are perilously close to losing an economy and a democracy that are meant to work for everyone and to replacing them with an economy and a government that will exist mainly for a few wealthy and powerful people.

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 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.

the mammoth deficits that will be racked up beyond 2020 are due almost entirely to rapidly rising health-care costs along with seventy-seven million baby boomers whose bodies will slowly be deteriorating.

Growth of Average Hourly Compensation and Productivity, 1947–2008

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

Extending the Bush tax cuts will add $1.2 trillion to the nation's budget deficit in just two years.

In other words, the real reason the American economy tanked in 2008, and why we're still struggling to recover, is that the basic bargain has been broken. The big news isn't the slow return of jobs. It's the drop in pay. Most of the jobs we've gained over the last two years pay less than the jobs we've lost.

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).

Socialism inevitably produces stagnation, corruption and often worse—such as authoritarian government officials who often have an increasing ability to interfere with both the economy and individual lives—which they frequently do to maintain power," he wrote, adding that socialism would be "a disaster for our country.

Republicans claim public sector workers now take home more generous pay and benefits packages than private sector workers. It's not true on the wage side if you control for level of education, but it wasn't even true on the benefits side until private sector benefits fell off a cliff.

Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States but contracts with over 700,000 workers abroad.

China has a national economic strategy designed to create more and better jobs. We have global corporations designed to make money for their shareholders. No contest.

China has a national economic strategy designed to create more and better jobs. We have global corporations designed to make money for their shareholders.

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.

The problem was not that Americans spent beyond their means but that their means had not kept up with what the larger economy could and should have been able to provide them. the American economy had been growing briskly, and America's middle class naturally expected to share in that growth. But it didn't. A larger and larger portion of the economy's winnings had gone to people at the top.

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

we still haven't learned the essential lesson of the two big economic crashes of the last seventy-five years: when the economy becomes too lopsided—disproportionately benefiting corporate owners and top executives vis-à-vis average workers—it tips over.

For three decades almost all the gains from economic growth have gone to the top. In the 1960s and 1970s, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans got 9–10 percent of our total income. By 2007, just before the Great Recession, that share had more than doubled, to 23.5 percent. Over the same period the wealthiest one-tenth of 1 percent tripled its share. We haven't experienced this degree of concentrated wealth since the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century.

It is no great feat for an economy to create a large number of very-low-wage jobs. Slavery, after all, was a full employment system.