Ben Bernanke Quotes

Between stagnant wages and the cost of everything going up - particularly health care and college tuition - people have less money to save and less money to spend.

While some people are certainly seeing economic benefits, many others are unemployed, underemployed, without health insurance and struggling to make ends meet.

Inflation outstripped real wages for people who work for pay from others.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

Americans feel squeezed between prices that are rising and wages which are not.

The sad fact is that in communities such as mine, the minimum wage is the maximum wage.

The middle class today would be poor by the standards of the 1950s. Today, with two people working, they would still live paycheck to paycheck.

I remain deeply concerned about falling wages and the lack of good jobs for Americans. Too many of our citizens are either stuck in place or falling behind, and too often their needs are forgotten.

Rent and the cost of essentials like food and child care are rising so fast that wages are not keeping up.

Yes, there is a burden of financial insecurity. I don't think you find it in mood. Income is correlated with life satisfaction, so maybe you do find it in life satisfaction. You don't find it in mood, and I think it is very important.

In the richest country in the history of the world, this Obama economy has crushed the middle class. Family income has fallen by $4,000, but health insurance premiums are higher, food prices are higher, utility bills are higher, and gasoline prices have doubled. Today more Americans wake up in poverty than ever before.

I would say that workers in general, and white workers particularly, are correct that their economic wellbeing is deteriorating.

While prices of goods continue to rise, American worker's wages remain stagnant.

The way things are going, we are not too far from the day when it will take an hour's labor just to pay for the gasoline to get to the job.

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.

Median wages of production workers, who comprise 80 percent of the workforce, haven't risen in 30 years, adjusted for inflation.

Does anyone really believe it is possible to make even the most basic ends meet on $5.15 an hour?

If workers have less money in their pockets to put food on the table, they will be spending less money; your economy will suffer.

If you want to do something to destroy consumer spending, just eat away at the middle class because the other problem we have is the structural problem of middle class America.

It is clear that the economy has not gotten better for everyone.

Millions of people are falling out of the middle class into the ranks of the poor.

Whoever rises to deliver the inaugural Address of 2013 will speak to a nation in which the American Dream is under profound economic and cultural pressure. This is perhaps best measured by the state of the middle class.

It is shameful that millions of Americans are suffering the economic injustice of working a full-time job and earning a wage that leaves them below the poverty line.

There is nothing more demoralizing than a small but adequate income.

The cost of the high-cost economy remains too high.