Robert Reich Quotes

Thomas Piketty assembles the facts to prove a central point about trickle-down economics: Doesn't work. Never did. He has cold, hard data showing how the rich keep getting richer and how the playing field is rigged against working families.

It is the unvarying law that the wealth of the community will be in the hands of the few ...

In India, the concentration of wealth is in a few hands.

The aggregation of large fortunes is not at all a thing to be regretted.

You've got the top 400 Americans owning more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans. Most folks do not think that is right.

There’s just too much money in the hands of too few.

If exclusive privileges were not granted, and if the financial system would not tend to concentrate wealth, there would be few great fortunes and no quick wealth. When the means of growing rich is divided between a greater number of citizens, wealth will also be more evenly distributed; extreme poverty and extreme wealth would be also rare.

The stock market is a playground for rich. The top 1 percent control 35 percent of stock wealth. As long as the stock market grows faster than the rest of the economy, the rich will keep getting richer

By 2015, the top 1 percent of families took home more than 20 percent of income. Wealth distribution was 10 times worse than that: the families in the top 1 percent owned as much as the families in the bottom 90 percent.

There's a wealth gap that is happening, and that is all over the world, you know? The rich are getting richer and holding a higher percentage of money or wealth that's out there.

Our family's fortune is growing faster than ever. We're a part of a small number of American families that own most of the country's wealth. But having so much in the hands of so few can't be good for America.

We're seeing a new 'Gilded Age,' where inheritance is a deciding factor in who becomes the wealthiest.

It is interesting to note that the 200 richest people have more assets than the 2 billion poorest.

I hear all this, you know, 'Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever.' No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own - nobody.

There’s a mal-distribution in wealth in this country. Entitlements end up going to the rich anyway. Some of them should be attacked. The ones who rip us off, the ones who get bailed out.

Today, half of the national income goes to the richest 10 percent. In 2007, the top 1 percent controlled 34.6 percent of the wealth—significantly more than the bottom 90 percent who control just 26.9 percent.

Too much of the GDP over the last generation has gone to too few of the people.

Tax breaks and other financial breaks that favor the wealthiest among us do not create greater prosperity for all; they simply siphon off more and more money to those who already have it, and more and more money away from those who do not.

No matter how we name and dissect inequality, we must keep explaining the larger downside of such concentrated extreme wealth.

Anger at the wealth gap is no longer about dukes in horse-drawn carriages; it's about vast, tax-dodging corporations. This will not be assuaged by seeing the royal family claiming to live like we do. If anything, that will make us angrier.

The U.S. has some of the most significant income inequality in the developed world, yet people seem routinely to underestimate that fact.

While capitalist countries have more inequality - they also have more wealth overall.

I don't really care much about what the top one per cent earn. The gap we ought to care about in wealth is between the middle and the bottom.

It says anybody can make it, because we're all on a level playing field. But we're not on a level playing field. That 's precisely the point, and that's what the rich don't want to look at. They don't want to recognize that they're not producing wealth at all. They're hoarding wealth. That's different.

In 1985, the top five percent of the households - the wealthiest five percent - had net worth of $8 trillion - which is a lot. Today, after serial bubble after serial bubble, the top five per cent have net worth of $40 trillion. The top five percent have gained more wealth than the whole human race had created prior to 1980.