Barack Obama Quotes

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.

When you're in the depths of a recession, that isn't the time when people want to challenge the system, they're too busy trying to survive. It's when they're told we're coming out of a recession, growth is returning, and they're not seeing the benefits of it, or they're not seeing them quick enough.

For we, the people, understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.

America has tolerated inequality because people think they can get ahead. If you have immobility on top of inequality, then people are not going to be happy campers. If you're stuck on the bottom and there just isn't much churning in society and you're stuck there through your adulthood, that's not a nice life to look forward to.

I can think of no honorable answer. Why must some of us deliberate between brands of toothpaste, while others deliberate between damp dirt and bone dust to quiet the fire of an empty stomach lining? There is nothing about the United States I can really explain to this child of another world.

American economic greatness has never trickled down from the top.

We cannot continue to have the upper class wealty getting richer and richer, the middle class shrinking and 43 million living in poverty.

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

As Washington prospers, workers suffer.

Talking about income inequality, even if you're not on the Forbes 400 list, can make us feel uncomfortable. It feels less positive, less optimistic, to talk about how the pie is sliced than to think about how to make the pie bigger.

It's astounding to me that in a country where there is an ever-growing divide between rich and poor, that people won't accept the need for regulation on banks and salaries and so on.

The average household income has really stagnated since 1971.

Given the relativity concept, poverty cannot be eliminated. Indeed, an economic upturn with a broad improvement in household income does not guarantee a decrease in the size of the poor population, especially when the income growth of households below the poverty line is less promising than the overall.

The rich did well under Obama's policies; it was the working class that got creamed. This was because the economy just wouldn't grow as it usually does.

After the 1970s, we accomplished economic development rapidly. But the side effect of that was high stress levels or the gap between the rich and poor. And these issues call on me to focus on the welfare and quality of life of the citizens.

I think it's been unfortunate, but it's happened, that since the Great Recession, the gains have all gone to the top. And we need to reverse that.

The rich get richer and the poor get the picture. I think this Occupy Wall Street thing is great.

A lot of the things that we think of as being racial differences are really class differences in America.

I think the media and the candidates have got to talk about why the middle class is in decline and why we have massive levels of income and wealth inequality.

The life prospects of an American are more dependent on the income and education of his parents than in any of the other advanced industrial countries.

One function of the income gap is that the people at the top of the heap have a hard time even seeing those at the bottom. They practically need a telescope. The pharaohs of ancient Egypt probably didn't was a lot of time thinking about the people who build their pyramids, either.

The economic expansion that began in 2001, while it has been great for corporate profits, has yet to produce any significant gains for ordinary working Americans. And now it looks as if it never will.

Economic growth without social progress lets the great majority of the people remain in poverty, while a privileged few reap the benefits of rising abundance.

As the economy gets better, everything else gets worse.

In Egypt the neoliberal programs have meant statistical growth, like right before the Arab Spring, Egypt was a kind of poster child for the World Bank and the IMF [International Monetary Fund:] the marvelous economic management and great reform. The only problem was for most of the population it was a kind of like a blow in the solar plexus: wages going down, benefits being eliminated, subsidized food gone and meanwhile, high concentration of wealth and a huge amount of corruption.