Adam Davidson Quotes

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.

Yes, in socialism the rich will be poorer - but the poor will also be poorer. People will lose interest in really working hard and creating jobs.

The market economy is very good at wealth creation but not perfect at all about wealth distribution.

The Clinton administration cared a lot about the middle class and the poor. But it also cared a lot - too much, in retrospect - about the rich.

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.

It is hard to redistribute wealth of there is no productive class producing it.

Inequality, he argued, is necessary to generate the savings that growth requires.

No one should have more than five times the wealth of the poorest person.

Distribution of the wealth of the world is something for which no one sees a practical solution

The state does not possess trade or industry. Its wealth is the wealth of the people and the people’s wealth is not possible without the spread of these sciences amongst them so that they may know the ways for acquiring wealth.

I know the Rich will oppose this; but the Richest Men are not always most beneficial to the Commonwealth, Men of Projecting Brains do most good to their Neighbours, for tho' they often hurt themselves by their Projects, yet others reap the benefit of them, and so the Publick is not hurt but helped by them, and I presume none will deny but that this Town hath been more advantaged by some Men now in it of mean Estates, then ever they were by the Richest Men in it

This country is very good at creating wealth, but not very good at distributing it.

Too much of the GDP over the last generation has gone to too few of the people.

A lot of my book, 'The Price of Inequality,' is about why there has been an increase in rent-seeking.

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.

Globalization in the aggregate generates wealth, no question. But it gets concentrated.

But if the 1 percent and the 0.1 percent are respected and allowed to risk their wealth - and new rebels are allowed to rise up and challenge them - America will continue to be the land where the last regularly become the first by serving others.

It may at first appear strange, but I believe it is true, that I cannot by means of money raise a poor man and enable him to live much better than he did before, without proportionably depressing others in the same class.

Nobody should be hitting lotto for 36 million dollars when we got people starving in the streets. That is not idealistic, that's just real. That is just stupid. There's no way Michael Jackson, or whoever should have thousands, millions, billions of dollars and we got people broke with two-three jobs and still can't pay bills on time. There's no way! No way these people should have planes when people don't have houses, apartments, shacks, drawers, pants!!!

The immense accumulations of fixed capital which, to the great benefit of mankind, were built up during the half century before the war, could never have come about in a Society where wealth was divided equitably.

The rich are always going to say that, you know, just give us more money and we'll go out and spend more and then it will all trickle down to the rest of you. But that has not worked the last 10 years, and I hope the American public is catching on.

Half the U.S. population owns barely 2 percent of its wealth, putting the United States near Rwanda and Uganda and below such nations as pre-Arab Spring Tunisia and Egypt when measured by degrees of income inequality.

Spreading the wealth punishes success while setting America on course for a greater dependency on government.

When money is controlled by a few it gives that few an undue power and control over labor and the resources of the country. Labor will have its best return when the laborer can control its disposal.

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.