Quotes About Wealth Inequality

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

Bernie Sanders

#2. 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

#3. 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

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

Hillary Rodham Clinton

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. Poverty and wealth inequality are a form of instability into the future.

Tavis Smiley

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. The very existence of government at all, infers inequality. The citizen who is preferred to office becomes the superior to those who are not, so long as he is the repository of power, and the child inherits the wealth of the parent as a controlling law of society.

James F. Cooper

#13. I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.

Eugene V. Debs

#14. Poverty was nature surviving in society; that the limitedness of food and the unlimitedness of men had come to an issue just when the promise of boundless increase of wealth burst in upon us made the irony only the more bitter.

Karl Polanyi

#15. Today, the top one-tenth of 1% owns nearly as much wealth as the bottom 90%. The economic game is rigged, and this level of inequality is unsustainable. We need an economy that works for all, not just the powerful.

Bernie Sanders

#16. Actions that exemplify the limitations of a singular devotion to the profit motive, also draw a troublesome distinction between what is legal and what is moral.

Usman W. Chohan

#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 a capitalist society there are always inequalities of class and wealth. People who inherit money and property will always see themselves as being superior to those who have to work for it.

Sally Wentworth

#21. Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.

Matthew Arnold

#22. The rule of law does not do away with the unequal distribution of wealth and power, but reinforces that inequality with the authority of law. It allocates wealth and poverty in such calculated and indirect ways as to leave the victim bewildered.

Howard Zinn

#23. 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

#24. Global inequality means that while the wealthy have too few needs, the needy have too little wealth. Capitalism is stymied, courting long-term disaster.

Benjamin Barber

#25. We need to start talking about inequality again; we need to start talking about the inequities and unfairnesses and the injustices of an excessively divided society, divided by wealth, by opportunity, by outcome, by assets and so forth.

Tony Judt

#26. We cannot buy it. We are too poor. Then men who have made the law have taken our own drink from us, and have not left us wherewith to buy it. Yet they can buy it, because they are rich. I have a feeling that that is not just. I do not grudge them their riches and all it can buy for them.

Neil M. Gunn

#27. 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

#28. The United States in many ways resembles a Third World country - far more elevated, but it has many of those structural characteristics: the extreme inequality of wealth, the deterioration of infrastructure because it only serves poor people, predatory operations, huge corruption, and so on.

Noam Chomsky

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. Root cause of inequality is the mass scale digital disruption advantage as means of wealth creation is concentrated.

Ziad K. Abdelnour

#32. It's important to realize that innovation and growth in itself are not sufficient to moderate inequality of wealth.

Thomas Piketty

#33. The dream of capitalism is to co-opt people with higher living standards without redistributing any wealth. Without co-optation, widespread repression is the only guarantor of gross inequality.

Holly Sklar

#34. We have growing wealth creation and growing social inequality. Powerful

Don Tapscott

#35. 'Egalitarians' who complain about inequality view the wealth of the wealthiest as bad in itself: it disfigures society. They would enact a wealth tax to extirpate the offending wealth.

Edmund Phelps

#36. The democratic ideal has always been related to a moderate level of inequality. I think one big reason why electoral democracy flourished in 19th century America better than 19th century Europe is because you had more equal distribution of wealth in America.

Thomas Piketty