Quotes About Income

I am a person who can't teach writing or make a living in any public way, as I get confused when interrupted or overstimulated. In a classroom or crowded room, I all but blank out. So my only income is from novels.

My dad was a high school teacher and made no money.

My mother was an English teacher who decided to become a math teacher, and she used me as a guinea pig at home. My father had been a math teacher and then went to work at a steel mill because, frankly, he could make more money doing that.

My mother and my father were teachers. My grandmother and my grandfather were teachers. This is something I really know about. Even when I was a kid, it was a profession my father couldn't stay in, because he couldn't make enough money.

Just saying 'I want this and I want that' doesn't do it. My boys share and share alike in the income that the organization brings in, so that teaches them the lesson: If you work, you can earn some money. That's how life is; it's the American way.

One thing I don't want to feel is marketplace pressure, so I'm really glad I enjoy teaching because I can rely on that for a salary. I think it would be such a different game if I had to write a book that has to sell well.

Those things that you just do, if you put that together in a DVD program, let's say, for $97, to teach people how to do that. Well, if you sold 100 of those a month, that's $9,700 of income a month just teaching what you already do and know to people who want to learn how to do the same.

The scale spun to the truth of it. The two women, together, had picked more than six hundred pounds of cotton--at two dollars per one hundred pounds, they made six dollars each, and a little change. They had picked three times their weight.

My Vegas act is how I make my money.

Marx never had a steady income or a permanent job or a bank account… But what he couldn't earn for his own family, he won for Millions of others through his writings…

By 2016, the typical American household had a net worth 14 percent lower than the typical household in 1984, while the richest one-tenth of 1 percent owned almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent put together. Income has become almost as unequal as wealth: Between 1972 and 2016 the pay of the typical American worker dropped 2 percent, adjusted for inflation, although the American economy nearly doubled in size. Most of the income gains went to the top.

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.

In all, 62 percent of the budget cuts would come from low-income programs. Yet at the same time, the Republican budget would provide a substantial tax cut to the rich—who are already taking home an almost unprecedented share of the nation's total income.

Do you recall a time when the income of a single schoolteacher or baker or salesman or mechanic was enough to buy a home, have two cars, and raise a family?

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.

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

The 400 richest Americans now have more wealth than the entire bottom half of earners—150 million Americans—put together.

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

Regressives say small businesses would be hurt by a higher marginal tax. Don't believe this, either. Only just over 1 percent of small-business owners earn enough to be taxed at the top rate—and that's just on the portion of their incomes exceeding $379,000. The

The big economic news isn't the slow return of jobs. It's the continuing drop in pay. Most of the jobs we've gained since the Great Recession pay less than the jobs lost during it. An analysis from the National Employment Law Project shows that the biggest losses were in jobs paying between $19.05 and $31.40 an hour; the biggest increases have been in jobs paying an average of $9.03 to $12.91 an hour.

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.

Growth of Average Hourly Compensation and Productivity, 1947–2008

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.