Quotes About Income

Every two weeks, I'd get a small pay-check and notice the line where federal and state income taxes were deducted from my wages. At least as often, our drug-addict neighbor would buy T-bone steaks, which I was too poor to buy for myself but was forced by Uncle Sam to buy for someone else.

I probably make more money in a year on 'Newhart' than 70 percent of your working top-name stars. Some weeks I just have six lines, but it doesn't bother me.

Servers make very little in regular wages and largely rely on tips to pay the bills and budget for weeks ahead.

I feel intensely guilty for working... You have to be able to provide for your kids. But I feel like it's a weird modern phenomenon that you always feel guilty for it.

Poverty is not just about income: it's about aspiration. It's not just about giving people a couple of extra pounds a week, welcome though that is.

It is true that globalization has fueled greater income inequality. But much of this increase should be welcomed, not condemned. There is nothing inherently bad about inequality. Whether it is bad depends on how it comes about and what it does.

The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income as defined by the GDP.

The most important social welfare program in America is a job.

An unmarried adult who cannot navigate the welfare system has no choice but to work, but a married working parent is constantly evaluating the relative merits of staying home with the kids versus bringing home that second paycheck.

Jobs for every American is doomed to failure because of modern automation and production. We ought to recognize it and create an income-maintenance system so every single American has the dignity and the wherewithal for shelter, basic food, and medical care. I'm talking about welfare for all. Without it, you're going to have warfare for all.

It was such a struggle for me to make it off welfare. I was getting $630 a month for myself and my children with no support from their fathers. The rent was $600 a month, and if you got a job, they took it out of your welfare.

We need to make sure that people are progressively better off in work than they would be on welfare.

There's a thing called a 'welfare cliff,' and what happens is you get up to a threshold - which is a very firm line - and if you jump over it, then you lose all of your benefits.

The biggest and most deadly 'tax' rate on the poor comes from a loss of various welfare state benefits - food stamps, housing subsidies and the like - if their income goes up.

Twentieth-century welfare state capitalism was historically unique in that national income was split between wages and profits, labour and capital.

The pandemic has proved true over and over again what was already well known: that income and wealth are protective when it comes to health.

The right to private property meant at the same time the right and duty to be personally concerned about your own well-being, to be personally concerned about your family's income, to be personally concerned about your future. This is hard work.

Evidence suggests jobs are crucial not only to economic well-being but also to self-esteem.

'Mr. Robot,' in particular, signals the rise of a fresh post-Occupy portrayal of the wealth gap. No longer is the story of income inequity delivered via a well-meaning, crushingly earnest indie film by John Sayles or in a single laugh line on 'Roseanne.'

The philosophical point is that our happiness and wellbeing is not based on incomes rising. This is not just the wisdom of sages but of ordinary people. Prosperity is more social and psychological: it's about identification, affiliation, participation in society and a sense of purpose.

You can't take a coal miner making $95,000 a year, the only work in these parts where you can support a family without having to hold down three jobs at once... and tell them, 'You can make minimum wage,' or, 'We can give you job training for jobs that don't exist in West Virginia.'

We were postwar middle-class white kids living in the slipstream of the greatest per-capita rise in income in the history of Western civilization; we were 'teen-agers' - a term, coined in 1941, that was in common usage a decade later - a new, recognizable franchise. We had money, mobility, and problems all our own.

I'm a practical actor and work keeps me occupied. It takes care of my bills, so there are many reasons for which I work.

There's a very practical reason why Pete Sampras, for example, makes a lot more money than Martina Hingis does. He's much, much better than she is.