Tony Benn Quotes

By the end of the 1970s Britain was in a mess.

The problem of Italy is not really a question of age. Japan has an older population, and it is now in full economic recovery. The problem is that Italy is old in the structure of the society.

A culture that generates more backwardness with every generation.

Detroit's financial challenges - the decline of the American auto industry, the impact of the global economic recession, declining population, and an erosion of the municipal tax base - are key to understanding what led this great city to an inability to provide basic city services or to carry out the normal functions of a municipality.

I think we're going to have some difficulty in front of us. I have absolutely no doubt the next three, four years Europe are going to be at best stagnation. We are preparing for tough times.

When you take a look at the problems our country is facing, debt is No. 1. The math is downright scary and the credit markets aren't going to keep on giving us cheap rates.

I do think there is this danger that our society has made its peace with decline. I'd like to jolt them out of their complacency a little bit.

There's no light at the end of the tunnel in the Republican message, no promise of better things to come. There's only the present stagnation, followed by a slow decline.

If you look at the data, the inner city that was the riot zone lost 55,000 jobs in the ten years from 1992 to 2002, instead of gaining a surplus of 50,000.

The facts of our present industrial system are of so, complicated a nature that they have not only defied the attention of economists for the last fifty years, but they have deceived practical men who have given to them not only the time economists have given, but their whole lives.

Are we going to fix our infrastructure? It is aging.

Civilizations die from suicide, not murder

The worst kind of decline is a slow decline—slow enough not to notice that you are in decline.

The nation which is satisfied is lost. The nation which is not progressive is retrograding.

… failing factories

Growing up in Buffalo, I saw shuttered factories that once housed thousands of steel manufacturing jobs. I remember the hollowing-out of the middle class in our community. I witnessed hope turn to hardship as a once-thriving city reckoned with a fast-changing world.

It's true that globalization, with all its fantastic improvements in the world and the technological progress linked to it, has increased inequality at country level, especially inside countries. And there are people that were left behind - people, sectors, regions - that has created a sense of frustration in the rust belts of the world.

They were two and a half decades in which Brazil had no capacity to invest in infrastructure. Just to give you an idea, in 1989, we had in Brazil about 50,000 project-engineering businesses. When I took office, there were just 8,000. Universities were no longer turning out engineers.

All you got to do is look around. This country's getting worse and worse and more and more immoral, and we're rotting from within.

Under Reagan's policies, inflation and nominal GNP growth shriveled much faster than predicted, throwing off government revenue estimates and resulting in budget deficits.

I'm from Gary, Indiana, and everybody's damn near at the poverty level. It's a rough city to grow up in, and it's a modern-day ghost town.

Flint is a big, industrial city. But when I was growing up, they had the recession, lead in the water, and all this other stuff. The city was really depleted.

Back in the 1980s parts of our country were devastated by de-industrialisation. This wave of globalisation and the first fruits of technological innovation destroyed industrial jobs or exported them to low-wage economies. The loss of work had a devastating impact.

The longer workers are unemployed, the greater the likelihood that their skills will erode and workers will lose attachment to the labor force, permanently damaging the economy's dynamism and potential output.

The 1980s were tough for most of Britain, but nowhere more so than Tottenham.