Hal Varian Quotes

The competition of the poor takes away from the reward of the rich.

You’re twice as likely to realize the American Dream if you’re growing up in Canada rather than the U.S.

There's more poor people in this country than there are rich, and I stick up for the poor people.

We're running out of rich people in this country.

The middle class, in the white population, encompasses a wide swath.

The fact is that, except for those very few whose wealth is overwhelmingly or entirely inherited, the more affluent have usually worked harder than the less affluent.

The Clinton administration cared a lot about the middle class and the poor. But it also cared a lot - too much, in retrospect - about the rich.

What many economists fail to understand is that poor people are no less concerned about improving their lot and that of their children than rich people are.

I don't mind the rich getting richer, but the poor shouldn't be getting poorer, and there should be more people moving into the middle class.

Comfort came in with the middle classes.

Never forget that there are rich people in poor countries and poor people in rich countries.

Richer people tend to be happier than poor people, and people in poor countries tend to be less happy than people in rich countries.

The central issue of our time remains the fact that the rich are getting richer and the poor, poorer.

The upwardly mobile American is becoming a statistical oddity..

The only people who really worry about money are the very poor and the very rich.

The middle class creates us rich people, not the other way around.

The goal to strive for is a poor government but a rich people.

No matter how wealthy a few plutocrats get, we can never drive a great national economy. Only a thriving middle class can do that.

Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future.

Planning ahead is a measure of class. The rich and even the middle class plan for future generations, but the poor can plan ahead only a few weeks or days.

It would be nice if the poor were to get even half of the money that is spent in studying them.

We have this kind of revolving door, we don't have a permanent class of millionaires in America like a lot of other countries.

I worry about growing income inequality. But I worry even more that the discussion is too narrowly focused. I worry that our outrage at the top 1 percent is distracting us from the problem that we should really care about: how to create opportunities and ensure a reasonable standard of living for the bottom 20 percent.

It isn't the rich people's fault that poor people are poor. Poor people who get an education and work hard in this country will stop being poor. That should be the goal for all poor people everywhere.

One of the reasons inequality gets so deep in this country is that everyone wants to be rich. That's the American ideal. Poor people don't like talking about poverty because even though they might live in the projects surrounded by other poor people and have, like, ten dollars in the bank, they don't like to think of themselves as poor.