Thomas Sowell Quotes

There's 6 million people living in poverty today, more than when Barack Obama got elected. 6.5 million people are working part-time, most of whom want to work full-time. We've created rules and taxes on top of every aspiration of people, and the net result is we're not growing fast, income is not growing.

The statistics might have a Eurosceptic cast, but they are not exactly a fun read. Few of us want to wade through ONS graphs or European Commission tables.

Globalization is stirring widespread economic anxiety, and middle class incomes have stagnated while a class of super-rich has emerged.

People tend to think that numbers are quite objective, but numbers in economics are not like this. Some economists say they're like sausages: you don't know what they really are until you cut into them.

We've created rules and taxes on top of every aspiration of people, and the net result is we're not growing fast, income is not growing.

There are many types of economic data, but the type considered by Rob Engle and myself is know as time series.

Certainly, last year we did an episode about the census and sampling versus a direct statistic. You just said the word 'census,' and people fall asleep.

The middle class has just fallen further and further behind the rich.

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

The average middle-income homeowner is the big winner in inflation. His labor income keeps up with prices, his home appreciates in real terms, and his home mortgage payment does not increase at all .... The wealthy have no safe and profitable store of value in times of inflation.

Sometimes the statistics themselves, the means by which we perceive the economic universe, are unreliable.

Medical statistics will be our standard of measurement: we will weigh life for life and see where the dead lie thicker, among the workers or among the privileged

As long as the middle class … were convinced that they could make do and possibly prosper, the grudges they felt toward the wealthy were minimal. Sure, they felt a bit envious toward Mr. Megabucks in the gated community, but he was entitled to all his perks as long as the middle class felt OK. Those in the middle (i.e., by definition the majority) are not OK anymore. They feel themselves inexorably sliding down the slope of income inequality and are becoming increasingly angry at the people who assert that a quarter of a million dollars a year ($250,000) is not a lot of money. They are especially irked that some of the people who think this way are running the government.

Inequality of income is bad for everyone, not just the poor and the middle class.

Middle-income wage earners have essentially had no pay increases since 2000.

The truth is the middle class is not only stagnant but it is my fear that, without sustained and focused action, it is at risk of disappearing.

A lot of our sources for income-inequality measures come from household surveys in which people report how much they earned in the last year, how much income they have, and so on. Those are not as well funded as they should be. We need to have those numbers.

The average household income has really stagnated since 1971.

[The Democrats] will say that the Reagan administrtion has given benefits to the rich at the expense of the poor - a term that they define broadly to include middle-income people, women, minorities, the aged, the young, farmers, steelworkers, and others.

65% of people say that cheating on your income tax is worse than cheating on your spouse. The other 35% were women.

The middle has not enough class that I think about the middle class.

The basic thing that made Trump popular is that he blamed others for the problems that we have in the United States. We have a problem. Let's face it. The typical income, median income, of a full-time male worker - and the workers who have a full-time job are the lucky ones - is at the same level it was 42 years ago. At the bottom, real wages in the United States are at the same level they were 60 years ago.

I feel very strongly that we need to change the way we do trade because it has been one of the major factors that lead to decline of middle class incomes.

We understand that most of the middle class doesn't know what to do, doesn't feel like they have economic progress, and [Hillary Clinton] goes, "OK, I realize that's my top agenda item. That's the thing I need to do."

Real median household incomes in the U.S. were basically the same in 1989 as in 2014. But we are also seeing similar challenges in the U.K. in the stagnation of real wages.