Best Income Inequality Quotes

"If in this country today, the lowest class, the poorest people, were capable of affording everything they needed to achieve a base subsistence existence, an existence that was happy, free of great financial stress, then I wouldn't really have a problem with income inequality."

"Nobody gets paid according to their productivity. This is a made-up ascription that you are making to post-hoc justify the exorbitant wages of the one percent."

"We have record levels of income inequality, and there isn't a push to fundamentally restructure the unfairness of our existing economic system."

"We're not talking about heading in some bold new direction when we talk about fixing income inequality; we're talking about returning to what has been the standard for pretty much all of human history."

"What matters most isn't actually income inequality; it's inequality in our ability to access necessary and helpful services to life."

"The most powerful predictor of the murder rate is the size of the gap in income and wealth between the rich and the poor."

"We're seeing this type of labor strife...because...there's been a massive increase in income and wealth inequality."

"The live streaming industry exhibits the Pareto principle where 20% of people take away 80% of the profits."

"Global income inequality started doing something interesting for the first time since the start of the Industrial Revolution; it started going backwards."

"The biggest wage gains are going to the people at the bottom end of the spectrum."

"Reducing income inequality would boost economic growth."

"A country's economy grows faster when its income inequality decreases."

"Income inequality has been reducing GDP growth."

"According to the USDA, 'In 2019, households in the lowest income quintile spent an average of $4,400 on food, representing 36.0% of income, while households in the highest income quintile spent an average of $13,987 on food, representing 8.0% of income.'"

"What do workers have to show for it? Worker pay rose 13.7% over that 40 plus year time frame, while pay for corporate CEOs increased over a 1,000%."

"Income inequality is a threat to democracy because it allows the super rich to have more say in the government than anyone else."

"Income inequality, particularly on this level, is objectively ruining the world."

"Most American men earn less today than most American men did in 1979."

"Growing income inequality is actually a pretty good predictor of an impending financial collapse."

"Black boys raised in America, even in the wealthiest families and living in some of the most well-to-do neighborhoods, still earn less in adulthood than white boys with similar backgrounds."

"If people don't make enough money to see a future of themselves being successful, they're not motivated to push towards that happening."

"Cultural diversity doesn't create crime, income inequality is the one that's the overwhelming factor."

"This degree of difference just feels wrong. There’s something about such a stark degree of income inequality in such close proximity that conjures up concerns of exploitation."

"Income inequality is surging, particularly between people at the very top and everybody else."

"Union membership has varied inversely with income inequality since the 1930s."

"The greater the income inequality where they live, the less likely they are to be generous and giving."

"The biggest indicator and the biggest correlating point you can find for revolts and riots in most countries throughout history has been income inequality."

"Prosperity should be the goal, not income equality."

"Income inequality...leads to levels of desperation."

"Spikes in income inequality and financial crises are correlated... that correlation does kind of make you worry."

"I don't think banning stock buybacks would do much at all; you'd just see more paid out as dividends, which would still have almost all the exact same inequality problems."

"Historic gaps in income inequality... it's just the tale as old as time."

"A smaller spread on income, basically lower income inequality, means lower death rate. The bigger the spread, the bigger the wealth inequality."

"I think focusing on non-college educated people and trying to narrow the gap there might be an effective way of addressing income inequality."

"The worst is over, but does that include low-income workers? The most marginalized among us."

"The system is still not working for those voters. We know that income inequality is worse than ever."

"The top 1% saw their income increase a staggering 275%, while everyone else, 99%, saw their incomes increase between 65 and 18%."

"Income disparities: blacks earn only half of what their white counterparts do."

"We want to create a culture where you're looked at askance a little bit if you're making over a million dollars a year."

"CEO salaries have raised what? A thousand percent!"

"In our country, there was always the belief that regardless of your income, you have the opportunity to move up the economic ladder."

"It's capitalism where income doesn't start at zero."

"Higher household income creates a kind of feedback loop that positively impacts economic growth."

"Support among the top 10% of income earners doubled a policy’s chances of being adopted."

"Neoliberalism has accomplished absolutely nothing but the redistribution of income from the majority of people to the richest people."

"It was great to have so many big names in this tournament as well."

"In a free market economy, the ditch-digger is poor because he's only making about $1,000 a month, while a doctor is easily making twenty thousand dollars a month."

"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."

"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."

"We're doing all of that without raising taxes at all on anybody making less than four hundred thousand dollars a year."

"For every dollar a white man makes, a black woman makes around 67-68 cents."

"Why the hell is the guy or girl that's not in the truck making more money than the guy or girl that's in the truck? So you gotta be smarter."

"Income inequality is something that bugs me too."

"No one should work full time and live in poverty." - White House Press Secretary

"Europe is drowning in welfare spending; income inequality isn't solved by making everyone equally poor."

"This is the wealthiest country in the history of the world... CEOs do not deserve to make 300 times more than their employees."

"We're here to talk about why in the United States of America we have more income and wealth inequality today than at any time since the 1920s."

"Just because you make more money than somebody else doesn't mean that you're a better saver or a better investor."

"Lower income communities, communities of color are absolutely getting decimated based on a rigged system."

"The richest 1% make twice as much as the rest of the world."

"Two things can be true at once, and the comparison was only being made to highlight the fact that she is underpaid."

"The bottom ninety percent of the income spectrum are collectively losing pace versus the top ten percent."

"In the context of incredible wealth, poverty and income inequality go hand-in-hand."

"The UAW workers are the reason the big three are making record profits but the big three CEOs are now making 360 times more than their average worker." - Democratic Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib

"Income inequality, wealth inequality is toxic, it really is hurting our society."

"Prices are going up by 8% and incomes are only going up by 3%. People who are already struggling are now screwed, and everyone knows it."

"The top 1% pays 40% of federal taxes while making 15-20% of the nation's income."

"No human being needs to spend $24 million a year like that."

"Income will not beget you wealth. We have the highest income inequality today. You cannot undo that by making more money than your father."

"Why should I have the same income as someone I work four times as hard as?"

"Justice means we will not allow an economy in which 46% of all new income goes to the top 1%."

"Income inequality is the reason people aren't able to maximize their positive freedom."

"I would tax earnings from labor at a higher rate than earnings from capital gains and dividends than interest."

"The highest paid people have skills that are in demand. The lowest paid workers do not."

"People need to be able to live. It's getting ridiculous. People can take a pay cut, these CEOs can take a little pay cut."

"The purchasing power of the bottom 90% in the US has not increased since the 1970s, while the top 10% have seen significant gains."

"Talk to me when the CEO pay gets cut, because that's when [ __ ] is actually devastating, okay? If the CEO pay keeps going up, that means the company's doing well. So why the [ __ ] are the workers not being paid fairly? You know what I mean?"

"The problem is that no one is getting paid enough, unless you are in the top one percent of folks in this country, you are not getting paid enough."

"Only about 1 in 50 Americans from the bottom two-thirds of the education distribution have lifetime earnings equal to the median American from the top tenth or twentieth."

"Income inequality independent of absolute levels of income is the thing that drives the socio-economic gradient."

"So income inequality at the end of the day is substantially lower in Ireland than it is in the U.S."

"We know how we could reduce income inequality."

"The most troubling trend in this country is going in the opposite direction which is the income inequality, and there Goliath is winning."

"The idea of education is what is fixing the income inequality that's created by the market."

"We have created a society where in 2010 a recovery year you've probably heard that 93 percent of the increased income in the country went to the top one percent."

"Our problem is not income. The biggest lie ever told is that the black community is poor."

"If you think about how much money some of the actors make—Kevin Hart, The Rock, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tom Cruise—they make so much money that it's not even comparable to any other job. If you're like a nurse, a doctor, or something else. So, life is never fair."

"In 2018, Dollar General's CEO received more than 10 million dollars in total compensation, nearly 800 times the median pay for workers at the company."

"People who are making 100 times more money than you, they're not working 100 times harder than you."

"When you have that kind of income and wealth distribution, it's a bad thing for society."

"The gap in incomes between Britain and America is twice the size of the gap between Britain and Romania."

"It's not just the fact that incomes haven't gone up spectacularly, it's the fact that they just haven't gone up to keep pace with housing."

"The 10 wealthiest people got nearly a half a trillion dollars richer in 2023."

"Income inequality and cost of living...people are seeing stuff like crypto as the only real gamble."

"If you can't tackle that and if your horizon is relatively short-term as a politician, perhaps you might come to the conclusion that since I can't actually fix the incomes, is there any way that I can make them happier, better off?"

"Please explain to me how a company that pays less than one percent of their representatives a livable income is the most moral form of compensation on the planet."

"America also has the highest rate of child poverty of any developed country and the highest percentage of workers earning significantly less than the national median income."

"It's not that the train people are earning too much, it's that everybody else is earning too little."

"If hard work paid, the daily laborers would be rich."

"We live in a time where income inequality is the highest it's been in roughly a 100 years."

"His ideas form the central thesis of the Occupy movement, both in his critique of growing income inequality and modern capitalism."

"The upper 20 percentile doing just fine, actually making more money."

"It is outrageous to have people working on a full-time basis and a full-time job getting part-time income."

"The increase in income inequality in the U.S. has been absolutely vast over the course of the last two or three decades."

"The labor share of income was falling, and that we can postulate is one of the reasons for an increasing amount of inequality in OECD countries."

"Borders are responsible for the biggest discrimination that's going on. Like 60% of your income is dependent on the fact of where you were born."

"Low-income renters in this city are exploited, and they're exploited often because there's a lot of money in that exploitation."

"Since sort of nineteen eighty, we've seen a large change in the income distribution, the very top of the income distribution is pulled away from the middle."

"You're never gonna have a functioning society where a poor guy is paying the same percentage on his income as a rich person."

"SAT scores, on average across the US, are like directly proportional to annual household income."

"We're at a historic income inequality and while this is not the solution to close that gap, it's part of it to help them earn some significant extra money."

"I think people should not have equal wages. I think everybody who worked very hard should earn more."

"We need to look into income distribution and sometimes we have good GDP numbers but the majority of people don't see the returns from GDP growth in their pockets."

"Inflation is the most regressive tax for lower-income earners."

"Reducing income inequality is a key priority now."