Quotes About Income

Keep your section solvent, keep your job.

Quoted from Interview by "Jim Kramer-The Street-June 17, 2015." Some seniors take part-time jobs during retirement to supplement their income, especially if they have been hurt financially by stock market downturns. Others may choose part-time work to keep busy, to socialize and to maintain their social and mental acuity.

If Warren Buffett made his money from ordinary income rather than capital gains, his tax rate would be a lot higher than his secretary's. In fact a very small percentage of people in this country pay a big chunk of the taxes.

The Gini Coefficient quantifies how large a percentage of the total income of a society must be redistributed in order to achieve a perfectly equal distribution of wealth.

The welfare state is the most important innovation of any country in the postwar period. Before it, Denmark was split between 25 percent with the highest income, 25 percent at the bottom: now we have 4 percent at the top and 4 percent at the bottom.

Government inflation-protected securities (in the United States, these are Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities, or TIPS) A low-cost total U.S. domestic equity (stock) index fund, either a mutual fund or an exchange-traded fund (ETF—i.e., a sort of mutual fund that can be traded like stocks on an exchange) A low-cost total international equity index fund, either a mutual fund or an ETF Single-premium income annuities Low-cost term life insurance

Managers receiving hundreds of thousands a year—and setting their compensation for themselves—are not being paid wages, they are appropriating surplus value in the guise of wages.

Neoliberal enzymes aim to sedate the industrial host into believing that the financial sector is part of the real economy, not external to it and extractive. That is the first myth. Modern national income and GDP accounting formats treat tollbooth systems and other rent seeking as "output.

Junk Economics is the cover story for all this. Claiming to be scientific, it is sponsored by financial interests to redistribute income and wealth upward, reversing the policies urged by the 19th-century classical economists and Progressive Era reformers. Instead of progressive taxation, this ideology advocates shifting taxes off the One Percent onto the 99 Percent.

The way societies have coped with this deepening indebtedness should be the starting point of financial theorizing. Money is not a "factor of production." It is a claim on the output or income that others produce. Debtors do the work, not the lenders. Before a formal market for wage labor developed in antiquity, money lending was the major way to obtain the services of bondservants who were compelled to work off the interest that was owed.

So we are brought back to the fact that compound interest does not merely increase the flow of income to the rentier One Percent, but also transfers property into its hands.

The foundation myth of pro-rentier economics is that everyone receives income in proportion to the contribution they make to production. This denies that economic rent is unearned. Hence, there is no exploitation or unearned income, and no need for the reforms advocated by classical political economy.

A false alarm is sounded that government budget deficits will increase consumer prices — with no discussion of how private-sector credit deflates economies. The problem is that credit is debt — and paying debt service to bankers and bondholders (and various grades of loan sharks) leaves less income available to spend on goods and services. So debt deflation is today's major problem, not inflation.

When the volume of debt has grown as large as national income or GDP, and when it bears an interest rate (typically 5%) above the economy's rate of growth (typically just 1% to 2%), then all the growth in national income is taken by the creditors.

In fact, they are not taught in any university departments: the dynamics of debt, and how the pattern of bank lending inflates land prices, or national income accounting and the rising share absorbed by rent extraction in the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector. There was only one way to learn how to analyze these topics: to work for banks. Back in the 1960s there was barely a hint that these trends would become a great financial bubble.

then Rawls may have a point. Even effort can't be the basis of moral desert. The claim that people deserve the rewards that come from effort and hard work is questionable for a further reason: although proponents of meritocracy often invoke the virtues of effort, they don't really believe that effort alone should be the basis of income and wealth.

Recall the richly compensated meth dealer and the modestly paid high school teacher.)

There is striking evidence—now gathered and acknowledged by the OECD and IMF—that economies with more equal distributions of income and wealth have stronger and more stable economic growth than those with greater inequality.56 Redistributive policies which reduce inequality are found to have in general a positive impact on growth.57

Trump had asserted to the Times that he was worth "more than $200 million," even though a year earlier, Penn Central negotiators had estimated the Trump family holdings at about $25 million, all of it under Fred's control. In December 1976, a month after that article appeared, Fred Trump opened eight trusts for his children and grandchildren and transferred in $1 million each. Over the next five years, Donald would reap about $440,000 in income from that trust alone. Despite

A thought crossed his mind: How do you make poor people feel wealthy when wages are stagnant? You give them cheap loans.

In 1961, the National Football League's owners voted to sign a national television contract with CBS, and share the revenues from that deal equally among all of its teams, regardless of market size or national appeal. This was important at the time, when the individual team television revenues were wildly disparate and made up a sizable portion of a team's income. It would become crucial in the decades ahead, when television exploded into the largest source of revenue in professional football.

From 1968 to 2001, US per capita incomes doubled. During that same time, the average church member's giving fell from 3.10 percent to 2.66 percent of their total income.

As economist Lawrence Kudlow puts it, "Obama comes from a long line of liberals whose guiding star is the equality of result, i.e., income leveling, rather than the equality of opportunity, which is the heart of free-market capitalism.

The pie is increasing in size, so everyone gets a bigger slice, but when the rich's already bigger slice increases in size, the relative amount of wealth accumulates more on the upper end, making the incomes of those in the middle and bottom feel smaller.