Sri Mulyani Indrawati Quotes

Inequality is an inevitable product of capitalist activity, and expanding equality of opportunity only increases it—because some individuals and communities are simply better able than others to exploit the opportunities for development and advancement that capitalism affords.

To be concerned about inequality is not engaging in class warfare.

In a world of increasing inequality, the legitimacy of institutions that give precedence to the property rights of 'the Haves' over the human rights of 'the Have Nots' is inevitably called into serious question.

Capitalism and democracy are the opposite of each other. Capitalism is a system that guarantees that a few are going to do very well, and everybody else is going to serve the few. Democracy means everybody has a seat at the table. Everybody.

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.

The messenger matters. When people of modest means complain about inequality, it usually gets written off as class warfare, but when billionaires complain, the problem is redefined.

You need just the right amount of protection for the rich under democracy: too little and the elite will not agree to democracy; too much and the poor will go ahead and have the revolution...

I think if the people of this country can be reached with the truth, their judgment will be in favor of the many, as against the privileged few.

Economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege

Your levellers wish to level down as far as themselves; but they cannot bear levelling up to themselves.

The rights of the minority must be protected and the rich are always fewer in number than the poor.

There are no great lords who possess everything and a herd of people who have nothing

The elite interests must not crowd out the interests of the citizens.

The middle class is at the heart of our budget problem.

Oligarchic societies may be able to achieve high rates of growth for a period of time, but continuing inequities in distribution lead to political instability and populism.

This society cannot go forward, the way we have been going forward, where the gap between the rich and the poor keeps growing.

The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.

The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return

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

If the upper classes, through their political representatives, pass legislation that diminishes the income of the middle class and reduces services to the poor and further enrich the affluent, this is not class warfare. But if the middle class and the poor, and their representatives, complain that this is unfair, that is class warfare. So say some of our politicians who oppose class warfare.

Inequality is bad for everyone, not just the middle class and the poor.

It is outrageous and a great inequality that those who already enjoy the greatest advantages from society and who therefore have the greatest interest in its maintenance should also be relieved of taxation while it is drawn instead from the more useful section of the nation …. The more well-established members can, through a relatively smaller portion of their income, support the state far more substantially than can the common man from his … dearly earned wage.

The greatest issue before the people—the question of special privilege and unequal distribution of wealth.

After thirty years of a collapsing middle class,” he writes, “after thirty years of an economy designed to stack the deck in favor of the big guys; after thirty years of a political and constitutional system increasingly rigged to work for economic elites — after all this, the people revolted.

I have always felt intuitively that somehow such wealth cannot be the privy of any one person or any one family.