Jerry A. Webman Quotes

I think we are smashing it as a government in terms of economic performance and infrastructure spend, but not everybody feels part of that success story.

No matter how wealthy a few plutocrats get, we can never drive a great national economy. Only a thriving middle class can do that.

I don't mind the rich getting richer, but the poor shouldn't be getting poorer, and there should be more people moving into the middle class.

If you go back to 1800, everybody was poor. I mean everybody. The Industrial Revolution kicked in, and a lot of countries benefited, but by no means everyone.

Because we believe that you got to build the economy from middle out and not from the top down.

The middle class is at the heart of our budget problem.

Americans have historically been more willing than Europeans to tolerate high inequality levels if accompanied by strong economic growth and a healthy middle class.

This growing inequality … is not only morally wrong, it’s bad economics, because when middle class families have less to spend, guess what. Businesses have fewer consumers.

A simple way to forecast the future is to look at what rich people have today; middle-income people will have something equivalent in 10 years, and poor people will have something equivalent in an additional decade.

In a good society, those in the middle and at the bottom ought to benefit significantly from economic growth. When the country prospers, everybody should prosper.

We have a choice: we can allow the growing disparity between rich and poor to continue unimpeded, or we can take action to budget responsibly and strengthen and expand the middle class. If we want this economy - and this country - to meet its full potential, the choice is simple.

The urbanising middle class of the 1960s and 1970s had schools, hospitals, roads, energy services, even cultural institutions - all created by the state, or under its aegis. When liberalisation came along, they were poised and ready for take-off.

If we focus our economy on improving human outcomes instead of just a topline GDP that is increasingly going to fewer and fewer people, we can see what Americans can do when they're free to unleash their true potential.

You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer.

We became enthralled with the view that wealth trickled down from the top and that if you poured money into rich people, sort of like an ingredient, prosperity and jobs would squirt out of them like donuts. And if you understand economies in the 19th-century way, that view is plausible, and I think a lot of people accepted it.

Much of what we consider the American way of life is rooted in the period of remarkably broad, shared economic growth, from around 1900 to about 1978.

We will be returning to historical levels of inequality. We'll view post-war America as a kind of strange interlude not to be repeated. It won't be the dreams that we all had that virtually all incomes go up in lockstep at three percent a year. It hurts to give that up.

The goal to strive for is a poor government but a rich people.

I believe a solid, really strong middle-class is the key to making the country in the best way.

I am hard-core middle class.

China is a country, still, of great contrast. While hundreds of millions of people are part of the middle class and yearn for things made in America - American brands, movies, music - there are other hundreds of millions of people throughout China who are living on the equivalent of one U.S. dollar a day.

Our economy grows from the middle out, not the top down.

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.

A thriving middle class is the source of growth in a technological, capitalist economy. Investing in the middle class is the most pro-business thing you can do.

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.