Joseph Stiglitz Quotes

Trickle down economics is a fraud. Giving tax breaks to the rich and large corporations does not create jobs. It simply makes the rich richer, enlarges the deficit and increases income and wealth inequality. We need economic policies which benefit working families, not the billionaire class.

Once you realize that trickle-down economics does not work, you will see the excessive tax cuts for the rick as what they are -- a simple upward redistribution of income, rather than a way to make all of us richer, as we were told.

Conservatives believe the economy functions better if the rich have more money and everyone else has less. But they're wrong. It's just the opposite.

You know and I know and economists know that trickle-down economics doesn't work.

American economic greatness has never trickled down from the top.

You alleviate poverty by trickle-down economics.

Trickle-down did not work. It got us into the mess we were in, in 2008 and 2009. Slashing taxes on the wealthy hasn’t worked. And a lot of really smart, wealthy people know that. And they are saying, hey, we need to do more to make the contributions we should be making to rebuild the middle class.

When you think of policies that are going to address inequality of wealth, you have to be very thoughtful about what economists call "incidence of taxes." If most of the savings is being done by capitalists, and you tax the return on capital, then they will have less to invest. That would mean, over the long run, that the rate of interest would go up. That would therefore undo some of the intent to lower the income of capitalists.

We plutocrats need to get this trickle-down economics thing behind us: this idea that the better we do, the better everyone else will do. It's not true. How could it be? I earn 1,000 times the median wage, but I do not buy 1,000 times as much stuff, do I?

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.

If we're not going to tax the rich anymore, we're going to create class warfare.

Sometime, while I wasn't paying attention, trickle-down economics got respectable.

Bush already gave obscene tax breaks to people like me and Warren Buffet, and we are saying it's not fair.

There is a legitimate concern about wealth distribution in the United States, but the answer is not to scapegoat any individual who makes over $200,000 per year and to try to sell the fraud that the government can equitably take the money of those who have earned it and give it to those who haven't.

'Inequality' has become the political theme/slogan of our time in both Europe and the U.S., yet political leaders do not even bother to consider that their own policies, which put the entire burden on central bankers to print money and drive up stock, bond and other asset prices, are actually exacerbating income and wealth disparity.

I just think that - when a country needs more income and we do, we're only taking in 15 percent of GDP, I mean, that - that - when a country needs more income, they should get it from the people that have it.

I don't believe in trickle-down economics. I don't think that people who have the most are inclined to share it, generally.

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.

If the lowest tax rate is the most desirable thing to have, then most people would be living in Mississippi..

Trickle down economics says that the best way to feed the birds is to give oats to the horse.

People at the top spend less money than those at the bottom, so when you have redistribution toward the top, aggregate demand goes down. Unless you intervene, you're going to have a weak economy unless something else happens.

Tax cuts for the rich defund the critical public programs on which American families depend.

Trump has been criticized by mainstream Republicans for not really being one of them. But he is definitely one of them when it comes to the central palliative for any ill befalling the country: a tax cut for the rich.

President Reagan preached 'trickle down economics' but naively did not reckon on the fact that the wealthy would only care about getting more for themselves instead of caring about helping those with less.

Trickle-down economics does not work, and tax reform should not be defined as partisan tax cuts for the wealthy and huge corporations.