Quotes About Income

Advice? Look at your pay statements.

American capitalists, enthralled by the doctrines of finance, have put their income statements in service of the balance sheet.

We package everything as a product so we can derive income from it. Then we can occupy ourselves with higher-order psychological lifestyle things. This is a very new issue. Money still matters, but other factors have joined the status game - like how interesting, how meaningful your work is.

At some point, extra incomes don't go to sate desires but to attempt to buy status through 'positional goods' - like the hottest car on the block. The problem is that there can only be one hottest car on the block.

But a married spouse at whatever income level is almost always going to improve the economy of a household over a lifetime, whether that spouse is adding the proceeds of a minimum-wage job or the inestimable value of being a stay-at-home parent while the other one works.

Some liberals think that describing any role that education gaps play in creating income inequality is some sort of sellout - that, in essence, you're telling the middle class, 'Tough luck; you should have stayed in college.'

Without productivity gains, any growth in GDP is exactly offset by population growth, and the average income stays the same.

I'd always assumed that by 40 I'd have at least a modicum of stability - a steady income, an established career, a bountiful fullness, like a pillow into which I could sink as I entered the second half of my life.

A comparison of the average professional baseball salary to the national average salary over the last one hundred years shows that for the first fifty years, 1920-1970, baseball players held a steady multiple of about 3.4 times the national average income.

A lot of people don't know this: when I was young, I wanted to be a garbage man. I asked my mom, and she said they made good money, and it was steady work.

Playing baseball for a living is like having a license to steal.

I might go my whole life stealing money. I got paid to play basketball, which is a scam. I get paid to watch basketball, which is a scam.

Fairness is not just about getting equal pay for equal work (though it is that too!) - it's about taking bold and challenging steps to raise incomes and protect those with little or no economic power.

When I received my first paycheck from my now known day job, I spent it on a period Craftsman chair and a Frank Lloyd Wright-wannabe lamp. With my second paycheck, I bought a stereo.

guaranteed jobs and decent wages

What were we saying to the country, to our young people, when we lowered capital gains taxes and raised taxes on those who earned their living by working?," asked Joseph Stiglitz: "That it is far better to make your living by speculation than by any other means."39

This much is clear, though, from the elections of the last ten years: those parts of Johnson County with the lowest per capita income and lowest median housing values consistently generated the strongest support for the conservative faction. The areas with the highest income and highest real-estate values—Mission Hills and Leawood—were just as reliably loyal to the moderate machine.22 The more working-class an area is, the more likely it is to be conservative. This

Class is about what one drives and where one shops and how one prays, and only secondarily about the work one does or the income one makes. What makes one a member of the noble proletariat is not work per se, but unpretentiousness, humility, and the rest of the qualities that our punditry claims to spy in the red states that voted for George W. Bush.

You are no longer a boy, and one of the first duties which a man owes to his friends and to society is to live within his income.

If you're not yet wealthy but want to be someday, never purchase a home that requires a mortgage that is more than twice your household's total annual realized income.

Multiply your age times your realized pretax annual household income from all sources except inheritances. Divide by ten. This, less any inherited wealth, is what your net worth should be.

How can well-educated, high-income people be so naive about money? Because being a well-educated, high-income earner does not automatically translate into financial independence. It takes planning and sacrificing.

To build wealth, minimize your realized (taxable) income and maximize your unrealized income (wealth/capital appreciation without a cash flow).

Wealth is not the same as income. If you make a good income each year and spend it all, you are not getting wealthier. You are just living high. Wealth is what you accumulate, not what you spend.