"Your financial education is what's so, so, so important because... there's a lot of things that profit from people being financially poor."
"The value that Americans have been putting in our productivity has been rising for decades, right, and our wages have not been keeping pace."
"Prices are greatly exceeding wages, at some point...you're pricing out regular people, couples, families from being able to afford a home."
"Inflation is so high, and that especially hurts the lower income demographics."
"No one should be working for 10 years only to end up worse off than when they started."
"Our modern market economics, the economic system we have today, is culturally unsustainable because it perpetuates inequality by its very design."
"Why should these politicians be living in luxury while I cannot even put one meal a day on the table for my family?"
"When the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the middle class gets smaller."
"I'm not saying that you have to pay these workers a luxurious CEO salary, but how do you keep going to work if you don't even make enough to stay alive?"
"I'm in favor of banning the lottery because in practice all it does is it supplements state taxes by taxing poor people who don't understand probability."
"According to Marieke Brandt, 'the economic and political marginalization of the Sa’dah region, the uneven distribution of economic resources and political participation, and the religious discrimination against its Zaydi population provided fertile soil in which the Houthi movement could take root and blossom.'"
"The money is ending up in the wrong hands, but this is what happens when you gut the middle class."
"We're not paying the lights, but they're paying for first-class flights. Make it make sense."
"If you allow a small number of people to control the means of producing all the goods and services we all need to survive, they're going to use that control to make this system work for them and they're not going to worry about the rest of us."
"Capitalists are always trying to save on labor costs...but if all capitalists are reducing the number of workers they pay or reducing the pay they give to their workers, the working people have less and less money."
"Every year, billionaires turn up at Davos to discuss philanthropic solutions to the world's problems, but many of these solutions actually help them to increase their wealth."
"I mean, I hear people talk in the language of participation and justice and equality and transparency, but then almost no one raises the real issue of tax avoidance, right, and of the rich just not paying their fair share."
"Billionaire wealth has increased by 95%... They pledged to give away half; instead, their wealth has almost doubled."
"The American dream is anyone can make it. The problem with a myth like that is, one, it ain't true; not anyone can make it, and two, it suggests that if you aren't a billionaire, it's somehow your fault."
"Our economic systems are set up like that: to make a minority rich and a majority poor."
"I'm a big fan of structural reparations not based on race but rather based on targeting neighborhoods that need it the most."
"Being ‘poor’ isn’t ‘free.’ Being poor is expensive."
"The hard times are coming, politics becomes less democratic by the day, freedom is being suffocated, and as money is freedom, people having less money means they're permanently enslaved to the society that is controlled by people like Musk and Zuckerberg."
"Home prices are rising faster than 80 percent of wages in the United States."
"Maybe companies need to start paying people proportionally to things like inflation, rising costs of housing, and rising taxes."
"Racialized poverty, the way our prison-industrial complex and the justice system and the way our economy works all swirl together to reinforce the very specific economic deprivation of Black people."
"Poor countries are not poor because it is pre-ordained or because there is some failure of governance... poor countries are poor because of historical circumstances that are being lived out in the present."
"Decades of focusing on labor as a cost to be managed and not an asset to be invested in have weakened our domestic supply chains, undermined wages and union density for workers, and also contributed to companies' challenges finding skilled talent."
"Economic inequality is inextricably tied to the damage inflicted on our common home, the Earth."
"Premier Li Keqiang stated that we have 600 million people with a monthly income below 1,000 yuan. They still need to buy houses, but how long do they need to save for that?"
"This is turning America into much more of a renter nation because now you have these huge institutions buying up homes and making homeownership way less affordable."
"Having some of the least affordable housing in the world is akin to intergenerational theft."
"You take all the money in the world, distribute it to everybody, eventually it will come back to the rich."
"If white capitalism isn't helping white poor people, what the hell makes you think that black capitalism is going to somehow help black poor people?"
"Income inequality... today six people in the world own as much wealth as 50% of the world's population."
"Ask yourself why, for decades, you have been asked to give more and more, and when a moment of crisis comes, we're getting the smallest portion of the resource."
"The ultra-wealthy have hoarded an ungodly amount of money offshore where it's being kept illegally from taxation from the people."
"It's insanity that when I go to an ATM...they charge me two dollars or three dollars and fifty cents to take out...if you're not as wealthy you take out thirty dollars and they charge three dollars, they're taking a ten percent service charge. That's literally robbery."
"People may benefit from their good fortune, from their luck in the genetic lottery, but only on terms that work to the advantage of the least well-off."
"Think about people who are debating whether or not they can afford to have the internet in the first place."
"The rich are getting richer while everybody else is getting screwed as our government sits around with a let's wait and see."
"Freedom, much like wealth, does not trickle down."
"You have to look at who are gonna be the big winners... it's Amazon, Google, Facebook. And how much did Amazon pay in federal taxes last year? Zero."
"The only way is, in some way, we must see how economic disparity is lowered."
"The rich get richer and the everyday person gets crucified. That's what's happened already."
"Do you not think that economic inequality creates in a human being a sense of injustice, of unfairness?"
"If there are people like shareholders who get a lot of goods and services they didn't help produce, then there must be elsewhere in that system people who produce what they do not get."
"The United States has the weirdest and most unfair property tax system that I know of... it taxes the kind of property that middle and lower income people have... it exempts... stocks and bonds and cash."
"It's absolutely foolish to make the presumption that you can identify someone's moral worth with their economic standing."
"Record profits at the expense of the majority illustrate a systemic failure to distribute wealth equitably, underlining the need for a reevaluation of our economic model."
"Corporate fascism is like you not getting benefits, you being a more productive worker as a consequence of technological improvements and yet not seeing any of the profits that you generate for the company that you work for."
"To me, the liberty of a few hundred thousand people in this country to make obscene amounts of money off the exploitation of their workers is worth infinitely less than the liberty of every American to be able to have a say in the workplaces that they're a part of."
"In a time as everybody knows when the middle class of this country is struggling, when people are working longer hours for lower wages, when half of our people live paycheck to paycheck, there is a growing movement on the part of workers to try to organize and form unions."
"The wealthiest 2% of adults own more than 50% of the assets. In the US, the richest own more than 90% of the population combined."
"The bottom 90% of American workers saw their annual wages increase by 28.2% from 1979 to 2020, while wages for the top 1% increased by 179.3%."
"The best path toward wealth in this country is income mobility, not inherited wealth."
"These kids are dying for less than a dollar a day while you pocket billions in profit every year."
"No one ever makes a billion dollars. You take a billion dollars."
"The elites, the economic elites who are represented by these two parties, do not wish to share the well-being and opportunity that they are hoarding."
"The bigger picture is the lasting economic deprivation caused by segregation, the historical exclusion from home ownership, the lost opportunities, the bad schools, and this country’s ongoing insistence on treating a problem of injustice as if it were simply a problem of criminality."
"We cannot, as a country, do it. This student debt is key to understanding the whole inequality thing."
"It's a system that pays people too little money to enable them to afford modest housing."
"Researchers at Duke University and Harvard Business School did a really large statistically sound sample... and they asked these people about the distribution of wealth in the United States."
"The poorest in the world pay for crises even when they've not benefited from the booms."
"The bottom fifty percent of Americans get absolutely crushed by this type of manipulation."
"The wealth disparity, especially over the last two years, has largely been created by the Federal Reserve."
"The existence of billionaires is a policy failure akin to the existence of a single homeless person."
"Social mobility is basically the ability for poor people to work hard, build up wealth, and improve their own quality of life."
"All the wealth is accruing to those individuals who were rich to begin with and the people that get screwed in the long run are the poor and middle class."
"America is incredibly rich, insanely rich... but in dollars, we're rich. And yet, half of all Americans couldn't deal with a $500 emergency because that money has been siphoned to the top 1%. That's not okay."
"Right now, we are in the midst of a very vicious class war."
"The top one percent owns more wealth than the bottom 92 percent."
"What do you call a system that takes the richest country in the world and turns half of its residents poor or low income? You call that a failed system."
"A rising tide does lift all boats, but if you don't have a boat, you're not lifted; you're drowning."
"Corporate profits and workers' income have been decoupled since around 1980."
"Ladies, the world has never been set up for single women... The economies have been set up for two people."
"We've created a system that's so rigged for the old wealthy people who actually seem to be running our country."
"We have socialism for the rich but rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor."
"As long as our economy and political systems prioritize profit without considering who is profiting, who is being shut out, we will perpetuate this inequality."
"Wages haven't increased to that level over the same period of time so people are still drowning in these high prices."
"It's privatizing the gains and socializing the losses."
"There is massive theft going on in this country. It's a big capital center stealing from all of these working families in this country."
"The idea that somehow if we give things to the rich in particular... that somehow making the rich richer or letting the rich be rich will quote trickle-down and improve the lives of the poor I think that's not true either."
"Our civilization is being sacrificed for the opportunity of a very small number of people to continue making enormous amounts of money."
"The pay gap will take over a hundred years to close."
"The wealthiest nation on earth can't pay their workers a fair wage."
"The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. And if you in the middle class have to pick, which one we're going to decide?"
"There's a finite amount of money in this country; for any one person to have so much more than they need, there must—mathematically—be thousands of people with less."
"Many opportunities, like education, are barred from those of poor origins because they simply lack the wealth to enter them."
"I definitely think it's going to go down to a two-class system. Middle class continues to shrink."
"It's not acceptable to me that half of our people live paycheck to paycheck and millions of people trying to get by on 9, 10, 11 bucks an hour."
"It's really exhausting because all his buddies in the private Equity industry don't have to pay their fair share."
"Essentially what you're having happen is the same thing that happens when big institutions or the one percent hold on to money indefinitely."
"The stock market is not the economy... we have a scheme that takes printed money and transfers it ultimately to the wealthiest people in America."
"The billionaires are going to retain their privilege as long as they can."
"Wall Street got bailed out and Main Street didn't."
"Price of gas will go up 40 percent. We'll even the playing field with Jeff Bezos."
"This is the largest amount of global inequality that we've seen since World War II."
"There's definitely an economic disparity in neighborhoods with good infrastructure."
"There is not a middle ground between the insatiable greed of uber capitalism and a fair deal for the working class."
"It's just amazing to me how America finds a way to throw a middle finger to the poor on every level."
"No one is kept poor because opportunity has been taken away from him because other people have monopolized the wealth and have put a fence around it."
"They exploit the public's disorientation, suspend democracy, push through radical free-market policies that enrich the 1% at the expense of the poor and middle class."
"The Affordable Care Act continues to lower healthcare costs for American families."
"The success of a company does not trickle down."
"The credit system in this country is an industry designed to prey on poor and desperate people."
"The billionaires are getting their way. Mom and Pop shops were destroyed during the pandemic while Walmart Costco Amazon all those other big box stores were allowed to be open."
"The inherent vice of capitalism is an unequal sharing of blessings."
"This is what it's like to be rich I guess. This is what they mean when they say the rich get richer."
"The financial philosophy in a nutshell is pay labor less, leave the economic surplus for the owners of wealth."
"This is clearly neo feudalism that you know they want us they want to put us back on uh on our little surf plots."
"The rich are getting richer because it's really capital it's socialism for the rich only the rich get bailed out."
"There is such an aggregation of wealth at the top disproportionately among these technology companies that they are able to put us in a feudal peasant relationship."
"Inflation taxed everyone but the rich... there has to be more accountability... the hypocrisy is off the charts."
"Income disparities: blacks earn only half of what their white counterparts do."
"For once in American society, we actually got the divide correct: the 99 versus the 1."
"That is just legalized fraud and the fact that this tiny minority of rich people can get away with it I think is a disgrace."
"It's regular capitalism - rich get richer, poor get poorer."
"Mental health is such an important thing to talk about especially in the music scene because it's really not spoken about that much here it's sort of a taboo subject in the music industry."
"Nobody earns a billion dollars, they steal it from their workers."
"There is nothing less fair than that though our tax code does come close. Under our current system, an American who works for a salary pays twice the tax rate as somebody living off inherited wealth."
"So the rich get richer but the poor and middle class are getting poorer, it's tragic what's happening today."
"How are we going to rebuild equity in the Working Poor in this country?"
"Neoliberalism is liberalism for the rich and fuck everybody else."
"These apartments aren't really just homes at all, just piggy banks for the super rich."
"People are not truly free when they cannot afford a decent place in which to live."
"If we can't address the vast disparities in wealth and power, it's over."
"The top one percent paid 27 of the taxes but that's still lower than their overall wealth."
"No one should have to work two jobs just to make it. That is not right in America."
"I can tell you this: they make a lot of money and pay their freelancers peanuts."
"Capitalism needs an underclass, it always always always has."
"The more capitalism succeeds in taking the demos out of democracy, the taller the twin peaks and the greater the waste of human resources and humanity's wealth."
"Being a landlord is not a job. These people buy up all the properties and hold them hostage. They are part of the problem."
"The average person has nothing under capitalism."
"Artificial intelligence will increase economic divisions by worsening the disparity that already exists in society."
"Trump is a symptom of a larger problem which is called neoliberalism, which is why we live in the richest country the world ever made and sixty-three percent of the country can't afford a thousand dollar emergency." - Jimmy
"So, while they give the five trillion to the richest people and they screw everybody else, wouldn't it help them to give everybody health care and a UBI? It wouldn't hurt."
"Unions raise workers' wages, increase home ownership, retirement savings, access to critical benefits like sick leave and child care, and reduce inequality."
"We truly can't address the climate crisis separately from economic inequality and racism."
"Bernie Sanders got a lot of his power talking about the 99% and the 1% and corporate greed."
"People are tired of being screwed over by a terrible healthcare system, having a minimum wage so low they can't survive, and enduring nearly constant mass shootings."
"It helped his family it didn't actually solve the issue that made his family poor in the first place."
"It's a little bit like the Occupy Wall Street, which was so remarkable in America because it wasn't about sexism and racism and all the other issues that are important. It was about the 1% versus the 99%, which puts the economics right up front."
"What's essentially happening is that the losses are being allocated to the public and the final stage of that is again the currency getting debased which is sort of the ultimate default."
"Capitalism just is never going to work that well for most people."
"The drivers of economic inequality are complex."
"The top 10 percent of wealthiest people control more than half of all the wealth."
"Increased inequality hurts the levels and sustainability of growth."
"Do we want to continue to live in a world where a company like Amazon can make billions of dollars in profits and pay exactly zero in federal taxes?"
"Bitcoin's price has become completely unobtainable for about 90% of the world's population."
"Occupy Wall Street popularized the term 'the 1%' – the notion of a nebulous ruling elite that holds a wildly disproportionate concentration of wealth and power."
"We need to address the economic inequalities that this virus has exposed and worsened."
"It's time for our nation to deal with systemic racism, to deal with the growing economic inequity that exists in our nation."
"Property from poor people, it's it really is. If we want to revolt against anything, it's against the corporations, against the bank."
"It's wrong for a teacher or a nurse to pay a higher tax rate than somebody raking in $50 million."
"There's no amount of money that solves homelessness truly, there's no amount of money that solves inequality truly and also is it right to actually just take from whoever you want to take."
"Many of us are only one really bad year, one medical issue, one lost job from complete financial ruin. Absolutely none of us are one really good year away from becoming billionaires."
"The rich have all the assets, and everybody else is basically leasing from them."
"What a great country we live in that the most famous socialist in the country is a millionaire with three houses."
"We live under a classic dictatorship of a particular ruling class—those with the most money, property, and capital control practically every facet of our lives."
"But will small farmers see any of the profits?"
"There's no reason that the school teacher, the bus driver, the workers should be paying more taxes than the billionaires."
"That is not an economy that's working for the American people, that's the economy working for the 1%."
"But at the same time, no, you know, people don't want to give kids a break on their student loans, but they'll give a trillion dollars to billionaires for their businesses to work well. Right."
"Moving a little too fast... widening inequality... that is something that is happening."
"Monetary policy has a lot to do with the growing wealth gap in developed countries."
"GDP is at record highs while their life expectancy is going down."
"You don't get to decide whether the rest of us can't afford to buy a home."
"But the economy’s gone but it’s leaving the little guy behind and that’s the difference."
"Wealth inequality gap increased dramatically."
"Printing money hurts the bottom and helps the top. It's the cantillon effect. The rich get richer."
"More people are worth millions, what the [ __ ]?"
"They allowed themselves to be seduced by the promises of free goods and services, by the promises of a reduction of income inequality."
"Every single recession that happens, the poor become poorer."
"There is a conspiracy to keep you poor and to benefit Rich Elites."
"If you're upset that your neighbor is getting $600 a week from unemployment, you should really be mad at your employer for not paying you more."
"There's a class war going on... People on top have the money, they have the power."
"What good is being the wealthiest country in the world if people can't even afford to live?"
"I think those numbers are different relative to what you put in but that's the dynamic we want to create, a culture where you're looked to askance a little bit if you're making over a million dollars a year."
"It's about a division of power because if capital is stronger, more powerful than labor then they can dictate the rules of the game."
"We are living in a world where very large corporations are being treated generously."
"Clearly, this is unacceptable. This trend of the rich getting richer and everybody else getting poorer is not what America is about."
"People who have been working hard... should not be living at the poverty level."
"I'm saying that black America you are on a plantation we are still slaves and you still have the shackles on and it is economic genocide."
"It's always the honest working taxpayers who get totally screwed."
"I want to see a world where people don't have to die because they can't afford to go to a doctor or because they're sick and then couldn't afford to pay their bills and went bankrupt."
"There is no such thing as a poor country poor countries are not underdeveloped they're overexploited."
"If you are pushing the cost of living crisis onto people poorer than yourself...that is fundamentally immoral."
"We shouldn't have an economic system that lets someone become a billionaire while their employees are reliant on food stamps."
"We allow our richest people to be way richer."
"Big government disproportionately harms low-income people the most."
"Part of the debate is going to be about the richer part of the world paying the poorer part of the world."
"It's going to sacrifice the poor and the middle class in the process."
"The true terrorists of our world wear five thousand dollar suits."
"Poverty is not a lack of character, it's a lack of cash."
"A rising tide lifts all boats, but here Barbie was clearly the Juggernaut."
"The economic downturn has not fallen evenly on all Americans."
"If anybody needs to be carrying more of the load right now, it is the wealthiest and corporations."
"Inflation is a regressive tax that most hurts the least affluent. Misdirection doesn't help the country."
"The aim of the corporate state is not to feed, clothe, or house the masses, but to shift all economic, social, and political power, as well as wealth, into the hands of a tiny corporate elite."