Robert B. Reich Quotes

#1. Fewer and fewer large and medium-sized companies offer their workers full health-care coverage - 74 percent did in 1980, under 10 percent do today. As a result, health insurance premiums, co-payments, and deductibles are soaring.

Robert B. Reich

#2. 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

Robert B. Reich

#3. At the same time, most of what government does that helps them is now so deeply woven into the thread of daily life that it's no longer recognizable as government.

Robert B. Reich

#4. Along with individual responsibility goes some societal responsibility to enable young people and their parents to do what they need to do. Otherwise, what is a society?

Robert B. Reich

#5. It is no great feat for an economy to create a large number of very-low-wage jobs. Slavery, after all, was a full employment system.

Robert B. Reich

#6. A smaller government reflecting the needs of the middle class and poor is superior to a big government reflecting the needs of the privileged and powerful.

Robert B. Reich

#7. An Apple executive told The New York Times, "We don't have an obligation to solve America's problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.

Robert B. Reich

#8. It is still possible to find people who believe that government policy did not end the Great Depression and undergird the Great Prosperity, just as it is possible to uncover people who do not believe in evolution.

Robert B. Reich

#9. Wall Street has blanketed America in a miasma of cynicism, and much of it is directed against Wall Street. The Street has only itself to blame.

Robert B. Reich

#10. It's no mere coincidence that over the last century the top earners' share of the nation's total income peaked in 1928 and 2007 - the two years just preceding the biggest downturns.

Robert B. Reich

#11. The simultaneous rise of both the working poor and non-working rich offers further evidence that earnings no longer correlate with effort.

Robert B. Reich

#12. Keynes declared capitalism the best system ever devised to achieve a civilized economic society. But he recognized in it two major faults - its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.

Robert B. Reich

#13. Yet the notion that you're paid what you're "worth" is by now so deeply ingrained in the public consciousness that many who earn very little assume it's their own fault.

Robert B. Reich

#14. Figure out for yourself what you want to be really good at, know that you'll never really satisfy yourself that you've made it, and accept that that's okay

Robert B. Reich

#15. A market - any market - requires that government make and enforce the rules of the game. In most modern democracies, such rules emanate from legislatures, administrative agencies, and courts. Government doesn't "intrude" on the "free market." It creates the market.

Robert B. Reich

#16. The idea of a "free market" separate and distinct from government has functioned as a useful cover for those who do not want the market mechanism fully exposed. They have had the most influence over it and would rather keep it that way. The mythology is useful precisely because it hides their power.

Robert B. Reich

#17. Powerlessness can be a self-fulfilling prophesy. There is much that is wrong with America. But it will only be made right only if we force change to occur.

Robert B. Reich

#18. It turns out that what money buys has rapidly diminishing emotional returns ... As long as we're not destitute, happiness depends less on getting what we want than appreciating what we already have.

Robert B. Reich

#19. Indentured servitude is banned, but what about students seeking to sell shares of their future earnings in exchange for money up front to pay for their college tuitions?

Robert B. Reich

#20. 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.

Robert B. Reich

#21. The tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 - and extended for two years in 2010 - in 2011 saved the richest 1.4 million taxpayers (the top 1 percent) more money than the rest of America's 140.89 million taxpayers received in total income.

Robert B. Reich

#22. Few ideas have more profoundly poisoned the minds of more people than the notion of a "free market" existing somewhere in the universe, into which government "intrudes.

Robert B. Reich