Quotes About Wealth

What America has been experiencing in recent years is the opposite of trickle-down economics: the riches accruing to the top have come at the expense of those down below.21

over the last three decades those with low wages (in the bottom 90 percent) have seen a growth of only around 15 percent in their wages, while those in the top 1 percent have seen an increase of almost 150 percent and the top 0.1 percent of more than 300 percent.27 Meanwhile

the six heirs to the Wal-Mart empire command wealth of $69.7 billion, which is equivalent to the wealth of the entire bottom 30 percent of U.S. society.

Those at the top have managed to design a tax system in which they pay less than their fair share—they pay a lower fraction of their income than do those who are much poorer.

The true sources of wealth are the productivity, creativity, and vitality of our people; the advances of science and technology that have been so marked over the past two and a half centuries; and the advances in economic, political, and social organization that have occurred over the same period, including the rule of law, competitive, well-regulated markets, and democratic institutions with checks, balances, and a broad range of "truth-telling" institutions.

The true wealth of a nation is measured by its capacity to deliver, in a sustainable way, high standards of living for all of its citizens.

The more divided a society becomes in terms of wealth, the more reluctant the wealthy are to spend money on common needs. The rich don't need to rely on government for parks or education or medical care or personal security. They can buy all these things for themselves. In the process, they become more distant from ordinary people.

Already, data showed that the American dream of rags to riches, the Horatio Alger story, was largely a myth. Economic mobility was extremely limited. The abolition of the estate tax could solidify these changes, creating a new "class" society, based not on ancient nobility as in Europe, but on the bonanza of the Roaring Nineties. The

there are two ways to become wealthy: to create wealth or to take wealth away from others.

Trump doesn't have a plan to help the country; he has a plan to continue the robbery of the majority by those at the top.

The American economy today is characterized, to too great an extent, by underregulated, monopolistic markets, where wealth creation has been replaced by exploitation.

Oxfam found that the top 1 percent of the world now owned nearly half the world's wealth— and are on track to own as much of the rest of the 99 percent combined by 2016.

Americans like to think of wealth inequality here as being different from that in old Europe, based on a landed aristocracy of a bygone era. But we have been evolving into a twenty-first-century inherited plutocracy.

It shouldn't, of course, come as a big surprise that some of the wealthiest Americans are promoting an economic fantasy in which their further enrichment benefits everyone. It is, perhaps, a surprise that they've done such a good job of selling these fantasies to so many Americans. The

Como Trump, Reagan explotaba el miedo y la intolerancia: en su caso, apuntaba que quien había despojado de su dinero a los estadounidenses mejor situados era la reina malvada del Estado de bienestar. El mensaje omitía, por cierto, a los afroamericanos.

In America the share of national income going to the top .01% (some 16,000 families) has risen from just over 1% in 1980 to almost 5% now—an even bigger slice than the top .01% got in the Gilded Age."9

The failures in politics and economics are related, and they reinforce each other. A political system that amplifies the voice of the wealthy provides ample opportunity for laws and regulations—and the administration of them—to be designed in ways that not only fail to protect the ordinary citizens against the wealthy but also further enrich the wealthy at the expense of the rest of society. This

from 2007 to 2010, median wealth—the wealth of those in the middle—fell by almost 40 percent

Trickle-up economics can work, even when trickle-down economics doesn't. Even

the criterion a wealthy character sets for buying art is "that a picture should repel his sense and intelligence. Only then could he be sure of having bought a valuable modern work.

Donald Trump is worth I don't know how many millions, but his confident vulgarity will always keep him from being viewed as other than monstrously rich (perhaps more monster than rich), and if he were to be certified as upper class, many others put in that category would doubtless do what they could to find a new social class to fit into.

Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.   —HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Yossarian marveled that children could suffer such barbaric sacrifice without evincing the slightest hint of fear or pain. He took for granted that they did submit so stoically. If not, he reasoned, the custom would certainly have died, for no craving for wealth or immortality could be so great, he felt, as to subsist on the sorrow of children.

As soon as there was profit, there were people who wanted to make it, more than they wanted to make anything else.