Poverty, By America Quotes
"Poverty is an injury, a taking. Tens of millions of Americans do not end up poor by a mistake of history or personal conduct. Poverty persists because some wish and will it to."
"In all probability, yes, if we increased the wages of the poorest workers, would that increase unemployment?"
"Work is not what keeps scores of low-paid Americans from plunging into deep poverty. The government is."
"But capitalism is inherently about workers trying to get as much, and owners trying to give as little, as possible."
"As corporations have amassed more market power, they’ve made every effort to keep wages low and productivity high."
"Our biggest antipoverty program for the working poor is the Earned Income Tax Credit."
"The United States now offers some of the lowest wages in the industrialized world, a feature that has swelled the ranks of the working poor."
"There is no evidence that the United States has become stingier over time. The opposite is true."
"We were promised economic dynamism in exchange for inequality. We got the inequality, but dynamism is actually declining."
"In a perfectly competitive market, incomes could rise by at least a third, just from making markets fair."
"Corporate profits rise when labor costs fall. This is why Wall Street is so quick to pummel companies when they bump up wages."
"Who benefits from this? The shareholders, of course, but who are they? It’s tempting to picture them as a group of men in pinstriped suits and power ties, gathered in some high-rise Manhattan boardroom."
"We have become masters in this new servant economy, where an anonymized and underpaid workforce does the bidding of the affluent."
"What do we deny workers when we deny them living wages so that we may enjoy more wealth and cheap goods? Happiness, health—life itself."
"Poverty isn’t simply the condition of not having enough money. It’s the condition of not having enough choice and being taken advantage of because of that."
"Every year: over $11 billion in overdraft fees, $1.6 billion in check cashing fees, and up to $9.8 billion in payday loan fees."
"The American government gives the most help to those who need it least."
"Proposition 13 is still on the books in California. The nation has never recovered from Reagan’s tax cuts, and many of us pine for more."
"We went from banning certain kinds of people from our communities to banning the kinds of housing in which those people lived."
"Most Americans want the country to build more public housing for low-income families, but they do not want that public housing in their neighborhood."
"The progressive policies that well-off white liberals have tended to support have been those that pose no real threat to their affluence."
"We could afford it if we allowed the IRS to do its job."
"To be poor is miserable, but to be poor and surrounded by poverty on all sides is a much deeper cut."
"Poor neighborhoods are also the wellspring for family and familiarity, community and love."
"We remain very separate and very unequal. But this corruption of opportunity can end with us."
"We should embrace policies that foster goodwill and be suspicious of those that kindle resentment."
"Doing the right thing is often a highly inconvenient, time-consuming, even costly process, I know."
"This community’s long-standing tradition of segregation stops with me. I refuse to deny other children opportunities my children enjoy by living here."
"When the ground feels unsteady underfoot, we tend to hunker down and protect our own."
"Poverty abolitionists do the difficult thing. They donate to worthy organizations, yes, but they must do more."
"Our institutions have socialized us to scarcity, creating artificial resource shortages and then normalizing them."
"Scarcity mindset frames so much of our politics, crippling our imaginations and stunting our moral ambitions."
"How many times have we all heard legislators and academics begin their remarks with 'In a world of scarce resources…'"
"Significantly expanding our collective investment in fighting poverty will cost something."
"The scarcity mindset shrinks and contorts poverty abolitionism, forcing it to operate within fictitious fiscal constraints."
"Manufactured scarcity empowers and justifies racism."
"Choosing abundance means recognizing that this country has a profusion of resources—enough land and capital to go around."
"Why do we continue to accept scarcity as given, treating it as the central organizing principle of our economics?"
"Ending segregation, at last, would require affluent families to give up some things, but what we’d gain in return would be more valuable."
"An America without poverty would be neither a utopia nor a land of gray uniformity."
"Ending poverty wouldn’t lead to social collapse, nor would it erase income inequality."
"Poverty anywhere is a threat to prosperity everywhere."
"The citizens of the richest nation in the world can and should finally put an end to it."
"We don’t need to outsmart this problem. We need to outhate it."
"When the SPM was released, the United States officially gained 3 million more poor people."
"Investments in government programs have borne fruit—but they’re clearly not enough."
"Most of the poverty reductions observed... took place over two periods: between 1970 and 1980 and between 1995 and 2000."
"The poverty rate has fallen by roughly 40 percent over the past fifty years."
"We would all be transformed into royalty, as most of us have electricity in our homes and cars in our driveways."
"Conventional wisdom about renting in poor communities may emphasize the risk and not the reward."
"If we anchored the poverty rate to today’s standards of living and ran the clock back to 1800, then plantation owners... would be reduced to peasants."
"The Supplemental Poverty Measure is not a flawless measure, either."
"The same pattern is repeating itself today in large farms across America."
"The children of poor single mothers grow up to be poor themselves at high rates."
"In neglecting to ensure that its people were eating well, the country had seriously hindered its ability to raise a standing army." - General Lewis Hershey
"The country as a whole became healthier and more knowledgeable when it addressed a problem that primarily affected low-income Americans." - Hannah Findlen LeBlanc
"Who Becomes an Inventor in America? The Importance of Exposure to Innovation." - Alex Bell et al.
"Happiness Among Americans Dips to Five-Decade Low." - UChicago News
"The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance." - Robin Wall Kimmerer
"The Tenants Who Evicted Their Landlord." - Matthew Desmond
"The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America." - Richard Rothstein
"Do Affordable Housing Projects Harm Suburban Communities? Crime, Property Values, and Taxes in Mount Laurel, NJ." - Len Albright, Elizabeth Derickson, and Douglas Massey
"Inclusionary Housing in International Perspective." - Nico Calavita and Alan Mallach
"The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility I: Childhood Exposure Effects." - Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren
"All routes to the top are corrupt, the base campers say. But 'life is a corrupting process,' as Saul Alinsky writes. 'The most unethical of all means is the non-use of any.'"