Janet Yellen Quotes

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.

We have a choice: we can allow the growing disparity between rich and poor to continue unimpeded, or we can take action to budget responsibly and strengthen and expand the middle class. If we want this economy - and this country - to meet its full potential, the choice is simple.

We certainly want those at the top to do well, but if you base your entire presidency and your entire economic platform on helping them do even better, you're missing what makes the economy tick. Because not everyone has been as fortunate as Mitt Romney, you cannot base your whole approach on a life experience as rarified as his.

Americans have historically been more willing than Europeans to tolerate high inequality levels if accompanied by strong economic growth and a healthy middle class.

Unless you’re at the very top, you need a more equitable economy.

In a good society, those in the middle and at the bottom ought to benefit significantly from economic growth. When the country prospers, everybody should prosper.

The untold secret driving the obstruction to Obama's economic equality agenda is this: The opposition isn't really battling Big Government. The opposition is protecting an economic system that's putting more and more of the earned income out of reach for those aspiring to better themselves.

Average working people need more fresh starts. Big corporations, banks, and Donald Trump need fewer.

Income inequity has to be addressed.

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

Most of the time in America, we're surrounded by oppressive inequality such that the wealthiest 1 percent collectively own substantially more than the bottom 90 percent. One escape from that is America's wild places.

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

Do not mistake a crowd of big wage-earners for the leisure class.

Income inequality is troubling because, among other things, it means that many people in our society don't have the opportunities to advance themselves.

When inequality gets too extreme, then it becomes useless for growth, and it can even become bad because it tends to lead to high perpetuation of inequality over time and low mobility.

Economic issues are a subset of social justice. Social justice is unimaginable without economic justice. Isn't that obvious?

Yes, free markets tend to produce unequal incomes. We should not be ashamed of that. On the contrary, our system is the envy of the world and should be a source of pride.

We have concentrated wealth and capital to such a degree that the vast majority of us don't have the discretionary dollars to make our economy go and grow.

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.

The biggest single challenge to America and our future is income inequality. We've got to fix it.

The middle class has just fallen further and further behind the rich.

The idea that America is the best place in the world to start out poor, so long as you are willing to work hard, no longer seems to be true. One way of proving that is to ask how accurately your family's income when you were growing up predicted what your own would be. If the American dream were alive, your family's income would not predict your own that well…. Well, on that measure, America is now less the land of opportunity than France, than Germany, than Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark. The only other rich economy that the U.S. outscores in this respect is — you guessed it — the UK. Abolish the estate tax and America will be a serious contender for the bottom of the opportunity league.

All over the globe the U.S. is fighting to protect and develop at least a minority who consume what the U.S. majority can afford.

Because there can be no real individual freedom in the presence of economic insecurity, liberalism carries a heavy responsibility in fighting continuously to expand our economy.

Ninety percent of the racial debate is really about economics.