Hillary Clinton Quotes

Americans are falling out of the middle class, not into it. And they deserve relief. I absolute support extending the Bush tax cuts for those who work the hardest and invest the most in our economy - the real drivers of American growth, the middle class.

To get back to the kind of shared prosperity and upward mobility we once considered normal will require another era of fundamental reform, of both our economy and our democracy.

The progressives like to talk a lot about poverty - and you should. However, it's the guys in the middle who have really been hurt by the global economy. The people at the bottom have been holding on to their jobs quite well, actually.

I don't see basic income as a panacea, but we must have a new income distribution system. The old one has broken down irretrievably.

If the same family were always on the bottom, then you'd have big resentments. But if DuPonts go down and Pampered Chef up, [that's good]. That much churn makes people think the system is fairer. Buffett: We don't like churn now, but we liked it more 30-40 years ago.

I've been talking about income inequality in America for twenty years, and when I was president, people didn't pay much attention to it, probably because wages were going up. But I don't think I've given a single solitary speech since I left office that I hadn't talked about it. It's a problem around the world and within the United States. So these people have put that on the agenda.

I just think we've had years and years of allowing our jobs to be dissipated in America, and there's no reason for it.

President Bush says he has just one question for the American voters, 'Is the rich person you're working for better off now than they were four years ago?'

We're the highest taxed nation in the world. Our middle class is just reeling from the taxes. And you know, if you think about it, the middle class and the workers of this country, who really built the country, they haven't had a raise in 12 years. They're making less now actually - to be even worse about it, they're making less now than they did 12 years ago.

It does happen to be a historical fact that my husband served as president for eight years. And there's a lot that happened which helped the American people during those eight years. I want an economy that creates more jobs. And that's a lot of jobs. I want an economy that gets back to raising incomes for everybody.

There are two economic realities in America today. There's been a record six straight years of job growth, and new census numbers show incomes have increased at a record rate after years of stagnation. However, income inequality remains significant, and nearly half of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.

Middle class America is acutely aware of how bad this economy is, and it is going to demand changes. I don't think politicians can afford to be complacent.

Since 1978 for the bottom half of the wealth distribution male median wages have actually gone down. And I think that's a crucial reason. If you are a male worker, your median wage since 1979 has gone down.

Capitalism has improved the standard of living of the wage earners to an unprecedented extent. The average American family enjoys today amenities of which, only a hundred years ago, not even the richest nabobs dreamed.

Given the fact that poverty is growing, more and more Americans are losing health insurance, health care costs are going up, the middle class is shrinking, the gap between the rich and the poor is growing wider. That speaks to the weakness of the opposition. People do not like George W. Bush. But I think it's fair to say that they are not flocking to the Democratic Party, or see the Democrats as a real alternative.

To a certain extent I don't see any real need for socialism in the United States immediately, but things change and it may be that there will come a need for partial changes in our economy.

I was guaranteed a hundred thousand dollars a year for five years, which was big money in the early 60's. You think, acquiring that should cool you out, but for me it wasn't true.

We can talk about corporations all day long but my goal is to help the middle class, somebody who makes too much to be on government assistance but still lives paycheck to paycheck.

I'd be the first to agree that capitalism bestows its blessings unevenly. But that wouldn't persuade me to think it was a good idea to do away with those blessings in their entirety. That said, there is lots of work to be done to make capitalism work better, and to broaden its blessings far more widely not only in America, but all over the globe.

Maybe he [Bernie Sanders] still thinks about the Democratic Party as the party of the New Deal.

I don't see evidence of America being a poorer country than it was 20 years ago. I've seen impoverished devastation. I've seen places where things had been good and now they were very bad.

I think what you've got are millions of people who are in trouble today. They really are. They're confused. They're working longer hours for lower wages. They're seeing productivity going up but their kids are worse off economically than they are. They're looking at a campaign finance system in politics and they see corruption, big money buying elections. Nobody in Congress is listening to them.

You ask, "Could we have an honest discussion about earnings insurance?" I think we could, if people understood that the alternative was to build up a backlash against global capital, against free trade, against technological change.

Now people are worried not about the prospects of buying new things, but about how to pay for the things they bought yesterday, a year ago or years before. It is, as Americans like to say, "a wholly different kind of ball-game".

If you listen to the news, read the news, you'd think we were still in a recession. Well, we're not in a recession. We've had growth; people need to know that. They need to be more upbeat, more positive.