Richard D. Wolff Quotes

Unless you’re at the very top, you need a more equitable economy.

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.

The production of wealth is the result of agreement between labor and capital, between employer and employed. Its distribution, therefore, will follow the law of its creation, or great injustice will be done.

You have to let the market reward effort and skill. But a system in which inequality of incomes constantly increases over time is worrisome.

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

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

Tax breaks and other financial breaks that favor the wealthiest among us do not create greater prosperity for all; they simply siphon off more and more money to those who already have it, and more and more money away from those who do not.

Pay equity matters because those dollars add up over time.

I would say I'm a fiscal conservative and a social liberal, if that contradiction can make sense, because in Bolivia, we have a great problem, which is the inequity of income distribution. The rich aren't that rich, but the poor are very poor.

I believe we stand strongly against having the tax code used to make the income disparity in America any worse than it already.

Hillary Clinton, income inequality, it's richest damn woman next to the Kennedy family, and you're trying to tell me she cares about income inequality?

Hillary Clinton is making income inequality a central theme in her campaign. Yeah, for example, today she pointed out that her husband makes $300 million a year. She has to get by on $200 million a year, and that's not fair.

I knew that it is out of the question to have honest, economical government while a few are inordinately rich and the great mass of men are poor. In fact, it is to be doubted if anything really worthwhile can be done until there is a fairer distribution of wealth.

I believe in raising the minimum wage and equal pay for work.

The total amount of money that Wall Street handed out in bonuses last year was double the total income of ALL full-time minimum wage workers. That's obscene.

We have to make the economy fairer. That starts with raising the national minimum wage and also guarantee, finally, equal pay for women's work.

In talking about equality and asking vehemently for its realization, nobody advocates a curtailment of his own present income.

Socialists will often talk as if some form of superbly equalized destitution were preferable to "maldistributed" plenty. A national income that is rapidly growing in absolute terms for practically everyone will be deplored because it is making the rich richer.

Now 'pay equity' has everything to do with pay and nothing to do with equity. It’s based on the vague notion of 'equal pay for work of equal value,' which is not the same as equal pay for the same job.

I believe that people of my income group should pay more, and I explained why, but that won't necessarily lift overall wage levels.

What we need to do is raise the minimum wage. We also need to hold onto equal pay. Women work for 76 cents on the dollar for the same work that men do. That's not right in America.

Unequal distribution of income is an excessively uneconomic method of getting the necessary saving done.

To say that 'wealth in America is so unfairly distributed in America,' as Ronald Dworkin does, is grossly misleading when most wealth in the United States is not distributed at all. People create it, earn it, save it, and spend it.

The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else,and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.

... the top 10 percent of incomes pay 70 percent of the income taxes and cast about 25 percent of the vote.