Quotes About Wealth

Keynes declared capitalism the best system ever devised to achieve a civilized economic society. But he recognized in it two major faults—"its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.

no one should confuse income for virtue, net worth for worthiness. The underlying reality is that capitalism is not working as it should or as it can.

Americans who are angry and suspicious of one another will fight over the crumbs rather than join together against those who have run off with most of the pie.

Don't assume that we're locked in a battle between capitalism and socialism. We already have socialism—for the very rich. Most Americans are subject to harsh capitalism.

Don't believe the system is a meritocracy in which ability and hard work are necessarily rewarded. Today the most important predictor of someone's future income and wealth is the income and wealth of the family they're born into.

The invisible hand of the marketplace is connected to a wealthy and muscular arm.

The question will arise, and arise in your day, though perhaps not fully in mine, 'Which shall rule—wealth or man; which shall lead—money or intellect; who shall fill public stations—educated and patriotic free men, or the feudal serfs of corporate capital?'

The rich don't create jobs. Jobs are created when the vast majority of Americans buy enough to make companies add capacity and hire more workers. But that won't happen unless the vast majority has enough money to do the buying.

Twenty-one of the corporations whose CEOs signed the statement paid no federal income taxes in 2018, courtesy of those lobbying efforts. One of the signers was Jeff Bezos, the multi-billionaire CEO of Amazon and of its Whole Foods subsidiary. Just weeks after the statement appeared, 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.

The meritocratic claim that people are paid what they are worth in the market is a tautology that begs the questions of how the market is organized and whether that organization is morally and economically defensible. In truth, income and wealth increasingly depend on who has the power to set the rules of the game.

If you took the greed out of Wall Street, all you'd have left is pavement.

Current patterns of economic segregation make a self-fulfilling prophecy of the claim that the poor are not like the rest of us.

Markets need rules for determining the degree to which economic power can be concentrated without damaging the system.

Edward G. Ryan, the chief justice of Wisconsin's Supreme Court, warned the graduating class of the state university in 1873. "The question will arise, and arise in your day, though perhaps not fully in mine, 'Which shall rule—wealth or man; which shall lead—money or intellect; who shall fill public stations—educated and patriotic free men, or the feudal serfs of corporate capital?

truth, income and wealth increasingly depend on who has the power to set the rules of the game.

President Woodrow Wilson explained the dangerous connection between excessive economic and political power in similar terms, in his 1913 book, The New Freedom: "I do not expect to see monopoly restrain itself. If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it.

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 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

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.

All flat-tax proposals benefit the rich more than the poor for one simple reason: today's tax code is still at least moderately progressive. The rich usually pay a higher percentage of their incomes in income taxes than do the poor. A flat tax would eliminate that slight progressivity.

It's unfair that middle- and lower-income Americans have been paying a smaller share of federal income taxes and some pay no income tax at all. There's nothing unfair about it. Fairness requires that people who make more money pay a higher portion of their incomes in taxes than people with less money. That's called a progressive tax system, and it's been a foundation stone of America's tax code.

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.