Quotes About Income Inequality

#1. Income inequality is troubling because, among other things, it means that many people in our society don't have the opportunities to advance themselves.

Ben Bernanke

#2. Income inequality and wage stagnation finally took their place among the principal moral issues of our time.

David Rolf

#3. The term 'income inequality' is a bit misleading because it suggests in a somewhat pejorative way that the rich are getting richer at the expense of the poor,

Edward Lazear

#4. Democracy was a terrifying concept for the old world of Europe, and even the new world of North America, where income inequality was rife. The finest minds of the nineteenth century warned against giving the vote to the workingman, for fear of mob rule or the tyranny of the majority.

George Megalogenis

#5. The best solution to income inequality is providing a high-quality education for everybody. In our highly technological, globalized economy, people without education will not be able to improve their economic situation.

Ben Bernanke

#6. In the first place, just as income tax returns allow us to study changes in income inequality, estate tax returns enable us to study changes in the inequality of wealth.

Thomas Piketty

#7. The biggest single challenge to America and our future is income inequality. We've got to fix it.

Kenneth Langone

#8. You want to close the income inequality gap in part? Give us better educated kids out of high school. Give us kids that can challenge and succeed in the challenge with technology. You give us those kinds of kids, and watch the needle move.

Kenneth Langone

#9. There is far too little discussion in Washington about the collapse of the middle class , almost no discussion at all about the incredible income inequality and wealth inequality in this country, and the fact that we're moving toward an oligarch form of society.

Bernie Sanders

#10. The problem is: income inequality is getting greater. There is no denying that. But this is not a distinction between Owner / Employee. This is a distinction between those with the Rich Employee mindset versus those with the Poor Employee mindset.

James Altucher

#11. Eye-popping tales of growing income inequality are hardly new. By now, nearly every American must be painfully aware of the widening pay gap between top executives and shop floor laborers; between 'Master of the Universe' financiers and pretty much everyone else.

Steven Rattner

#12. Income inequality is worse in towns run by Democrat mayors than in towns run by Republican mayors.

Rand Paul

#13. Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs did not start out wealthy, and actually added to income inequality, but we all benefit from their creative effort.

Foster Friess

#14. President Obama believes that income inequality is one of the most pressing matters facing the nation. If we are going to be a country that provides ladders of opportunity and believes in a thriving middle class, then we have to raise the minimum wage.

Thomas Perez

#15. I think Republicans need to take income inequality more seriously. Not because I favor equality of outcomes. I do not. I think the Right is correct to stress merit and earned rewards, not handouts and forced equality. But I think what Republicans are blind to is that power corrupts.

Jonathan Haidt

#16. The United States has worse income inequality than Nigeria.

Max Fisher

#17. The difference between rich and poor is becoming more extreme, and as income inequality widens the wealth gap in major nations, education, health and social mobility are all threatened.

Helene D. Gayle

#18. Half the U.S. population owns barely 2 percent of its wealth, putting the United States near Rwanda and Uganda and below such nations as pre-Arab Spring Tunisia and Egypt when measured by degrees of income inequality.

Eric Alterman

#19. In a world of massive wealth and income inequality, Europe must support Greece's efforts to build an economy which creates more jobs and income, not more unemployment and suffering.

Bernie Sanders

#20. In the same way that Occupy Wall Street forever elevated that concept of income inequality, the Black Lives Matter protesters have elevated the idea of inequity in policing as it relates to minority communities.

Charles M. Blow

#21. The devotion that young Chinese feel to the Internet is driven by deep factors ranging from youth unemployment and income inequality to political repression and the demographic imbalance between men and women.

Evan Osnos

#22. There is a huge number of people outside our borders who would love to come here. In fact, many of them come here, get well educated, and then are required to leave ... This is a factor in income inequality.

Alan Greenspan

#23. When the left party in a system severs its bonds to working people - when it dedicates itself to the concerns of a particular slice of high-achieving affluent people - issues of work and income inequality will inevitably fade from its list of concerns.

Thomas Frank

#24. The truth is, Hillary Clinton's ideas create more income inequality. Why? Because bigger government creates crony capitalism. When you have a 70,000 page tax code, you've got to be very wealthy, very powerful, very well connected to dig your way through that tax code.

Carly Fiorina

#25. I want to make a positive point of Ikea. It makes income inequality a minor distraction.

Greg Gutfeld

#26. a very substantial and growing inequality of capital income since 1980 accounts for about one-third of the increase in income inequality in the United States - a far from negligible amount.

Thomas Piketty

#27. Hillary Clinton is making income inequality a central theme in her campaign. Yeah, for example, today she pointed out that her husband makes $300 million a year. She has to get by on $200 million a year, and that's not fair.

Conan O'Brien

#28. 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.'

Timothy Noah

#29. Income inequality has no necessary connection with poverty, the lack of material resources for a decent life, such as adequate food, shelter, and clothing. A society with great income inequality may have no poor people, and a society with no income inequality may have nothing but poor people.

Robert Higgs

#30. I'm 40 years old. What I have seen my whole life is widening income inequality.

Robert Reich

#31. Income inequality has gotten worse under President Barack Obama.

Timothy Noah

#32. They talk about income inequality. I'm for income inequality.

Rick Santorum

#33. The weak economy, widening income inequality, gridlock in Congress and a presidential election: Those were perhaps the dominant economic and political themes of 2012.

Steven Rattner

#34. Income inequality increased quite sharply in the United States during the 1920s, however, peaking on the eve of the 1929 crash with more than 50 percent of national income going to the top decile -

Thomas Piketty

#35. In order to counteract income inequality, it's essential to tackle poverty in an integrated way that has long-term impact. We need to give people the capacity to be resilient, to take on challenges and to learn the skills they need to work toward more prosperous futures.

Helene D. Gayle

#36. Everything in America is so stratified by class now. We have the 93rd level of income inequality in the world. You're already seeing highway lanes that are for pay and ones that aren't.

Adam McKay

#37. When the topic is growing income inequality, it's hard to prettify an imbalance between the rich and everybody else, so instead, conservatives try to argue that it doesn't exist.

Timothy Noah

#38. There's five factors or characteristics of places where kids from poor backgrounds don't do very well. And those are places that have more economic and racial segregation, places with more income inequality.

Gwen Ifill

#39. A holistic solution to income inequality is going to take a lot of work, but every time you prove that one of the strands is achievable and that it has a positive impact on people's lives you take another step towards proving the bigger theory of the case.

Bill De Blasio

#40. Liberals talk about the 'income inequality' and the 'unfairness' and the disparity of the haves and the have-nots in New York City. Who has been running that city for all this time? Who has created the underclass in this country? It's the Democrat Party.

Rush Limbaugh

#41. Austerity, especially when it cannot be offset by a significant lowering of interest rates, brings with it increases in unemployment
particularly enduring unemployment
suppression of wages for the majority, and deepening income inequality.

Alex Himelfarb

#42. One of the most important of all the causes of great inequality of income is the inheritance of a great fortune by a small minority.

Hugh Dalton

#43. The decision is I'm going to do everything I can to fight for the working class of this country, the low-income people against income and wealth inequality, do everything we can about climate change.

Bernie Sanders

#44. Idiots are always in favour of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and the really great in favour of equality.

George Bernard Shaw

#45. All told, over the period 1932-1980, nearly half a century, the top federal income tax rate in the United States averaged 81 percent.

Thomas Piketty

#46. Our focus should be on making the most of our own lives, regardless of whether we start at the bottom or the top- not on envying the advantages and achievements of others.

Yaron Brook

#47. In middle-income countries, inequality becomes a problem because you can see there is a layer of people who are doing well, while the poor are still stuck there. We have 300 million poor in India.

Sri Mulyani Indrawati

#48. Here's what income and wealth inequality is about. Last year, the top 25 hedge fund managers made more than 24 billion, enough to pay the salaries of 425,000 public school teachers. This level of inequality is neither moral or sustainable

Bernie Sanders

#49. Increasing inequality in income distribution in this country has broader policy implications, and there is also the growing problem of perverse incentives that result from executives receiving grossly disproportionate compensation based on decisions they themselves take.

Barney Frank

#50. By now, they rank people by income level or wages roughly the same: The bottom seventy per cent or so are virtually disenfranchised; they have almost no influence on policy, and as you move up the scale you get more influence. At the very top, you basically run the show.

Noam Chomsky

#51. Income and wealth inequality in America today has reached levels not seen since the 1920s. Corporate

Hillary Rodham Clinton

#52. 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

#53. It would, I think, be hard for anyone to make the case that the United States is a just society or anything close to a just society. In America today, there is massive injustice in terms of income and wealth inequality. Injustice is rampant.

Bernie Sanders

#54. Because the true root cause of hunger is inequality, any method of boosting food production that deepens inequality will fail to reduce hunger. Conversely, only technologies that have positive effects on the distribution of wealth, income, and assets, that are pro-poor, can truly reduce hunger.

Miguel A. Altieri

#55. By some estimates, income and wealth inequality are near their highest levels in the past hundred years, much higher than the average during that time span and probably higher than for much of American history before then.

Janet Yellen

#56. The gap between median black family income and median white family income hasn't changed in twenty years," he told me. "That is not a society moving toward equality. It's a society that's reproducing inequality by race."56

Christopher L. Hayes

#57. The inequality of income and fortunes is essential in capitalism.

Ludwig Von Mises

#58. Today, the United States is No. 1 in corporate profits, No. 1 in CEO salaries, No. 1 in childhood poverty and No. 1 in income and wealth inequality in the industrialized world.

Bernie Sanders

#59. The top 10 per cent of the US population appropriated 91 per cent of income growth between 1989 and 2006, while the top 1 per cent took 59 per cent.

Ha-Joon Chang

#60. Monetary policy is a blunt tool which certainly affects the distribution of income and wealth, although whether the net effect is to increase or reduce inequality is not clear.

Ben Bernanke

#61. The past few decades of widening inequality can be summed up as significant income and wealth gains for those at the very top and stagnant living standards for the majority

Janet Yellen

#62. Does inequality in the distribution of income increase or decrease in the course of a country's economic growth?

Simon Kuznets

#63. Conventional wisdom on government's role in inequality often has it backwards. Tax reforms have resulted in a more progressive federal income tax; government transfer payments have become less progressive.

Paul Ryan

#64. The increase in inequality in income is a longtime trend, but the pressure on middle- and low-income workers is going up rapidly. Especially if they live in an area where there are high housing and gas prices, like California.

Alice Rivlin

#65. I think the issue of income and wealth inequality is in fact a moral issue.

Bernie Sanders

#66. Since the end of the 1970s, something has gone profoundly wrong in America. Inequality has soared. Educational progress slowed. Incarceration rates quintupled. Family breakdown accelerated. Median household income stagnated.

Nicholas Kristof

#67. Trickle down economics is a fraud. Giving tax breaks to the rich and large corporations does not create jobs. It simply makes the rich richer, enlarges the deficit and increases income and wealth inequality. We need economic policies which benefit working families, not the billionaire class.

Bernie Sanders