George Osborne Quotes

The hollowing out of the middle class is a problem common to all Western industrialized economies. Maybe we should work together to solve it.

If I could distil the relevance of Bruce Springsteen's music to Australia it would be this: don't let what has happened to the American economy happen here. Don't let Australia become a down-under version of New Jersey, where the people and the communities whose skills are no longer in demand get thrown on the scrap heap of life.

I don't think any of us ran for the United States Senate to preside over the lowering of the American standard of living.

Economic diseases are highly communicable. It follows, therefore, that the economic health of every country is a proper matter of concern to all its neighbors, near and distant. Only through a dynamic and a soundly expanding world economy can the living standards of individual nations be advanced to levels which will permit a full realization of our hopes for the future.

Don't belittle the hurt that has been caused by the job-destroying machine that is the European Union.

Whole communities have been devastated as good-paying jobs continue to leave the U.S.

It's not that other countries steal jobs from you guys. It's your strategy. Distribute the money and things in a proper way.

My parents didn't have the opportunities they would have liked, but they didn't complain about that because they thought they were part of a society where the next generation would have those opportunities.

I want people to see the fact that we've lost millions of manufacturing jobs to outsourcing and globalization. Sometimes images can convey that better.

In the interests of competitiveness in a globalizing world economy, governments of all complexions introduced labour-market reforms that promoted flexibility but accentuated the precariat's insecurities.

There is a trend worth worrying about, which is the disappearance of manufacturing jobs from the workforce. Shortly after World War II, about one-quarter of employed Americans held manufacturing jobs. Now less than one-tenth do. From the perspective of individual businesses, this change is natural and desirable—rising productivity by definition means fewer people making more things. But it is troublesome for society as a whole, since factory jobs have historically buoyed the middle class and given rise to future industries and jobs, virtuous-cycle style.

[It] is exactly what politicians want. They want you to feel and behave like children while they pretend to be the all-knowing benevolent father. While they rile you up about how immigrants are stealing your jobs, they distract you from enlightening facts, including the assessment of some experts that the influx of Latino immigrant workers of the past 25 years has had less effect on employment patterns than factories that moved abroad, the decline of labor unions and the recurring recessions. So while we’re told to focus on building a massive wall to keep out immigrants, the real causes of job loss and economic instability continue unabated.

France and Germany have to send a strong signal to the Commission that we need to negotiate a pragmatic and sensible outcome that protects jobs on both sides of the Channel because, for every job lost in the U.K., there will be jobs lost in Europe as well if Brexit goes wrong.

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.

I think Brexit is disappointing from an economic perspective.

An important factor influencing intergenerational mobility and trends in inequality over time is economic opportunity.

Poverty is not just about income: it's about aspiration. It's not just about giving people a couple of extra pounds a week, welcome though that is.

I don't know of a single economist who disagrees that when you raise the minimum wage, you kill jobs for the poor.

Globalization and deindustrialization affected workers of all colors but hit African Americans particularly hard.

The effect of Bill Clinton's NAFTA and Hillary Clinton's Colombian Free Trade Agreement has been devastating to Michigan and most of the rest of the country, and accounts for the appeal of Donald Trump.

Inequality saps the economy by draining the buying power of Americans whose incomes have stagnated, forcing them to rely on debt to fund education, housing, and health care.

A lot of the factories that had been the bedrock of many small cities were being shut down, which led me to investigate what I'm calling the 'de-industrial revolution.'

Some people, such as the unemployed coal miners and steelworkers of the Rust Belt, have been left behind by growing prosperity.

Our children and grandchildren are not going to have the same standard of living unless we educate that workforce.

If China sets the rules for much of the world's economy, America will feel the consequences in our pocketbooks as well as in our security.