Katarina Witt Quotes

What keeps me up at night is poverty and unemployment.

In prosperous times, the marginal workers get by. But in tough times, they get the shaft.

The periods of unemployment accompanying depression in the business cycle ... present a challenge to all our claims to progress, humanity, and civilization.

American Dream Is Under Assault. People that haven't been able to find a job in months and this growing sense in this country that this is the new normal, well we can't accept that.

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.

The year the bus drivers went on strike in Pittsburgh, I was twenty-three and living on the edge of the city in a neighborhood that was on the verge of becoming a ghetto. I had just been fired from a good job as a cartographer in a design studio where I had worked for about four months.

Obama won the presidency on the strength of his message and the skills of the messenger. Now the talk of hope and change feels out of tune when so many Americans are out of work, over-mortgaged, and worried that life will be even tougher for their children.

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

Every day I've got to hear about unemployment and people starving.

The public is upset. If they haven't lost their job, they know somebody that has. If they haven't lost their house, they know somebody that has. What do you do? When something's wrong, it's government's job to fix it, it must be government that's responsible for causing it.

Every day, families in the United States face the stark choice between a roof over their heads and food on the table. Buying health insurance, owning a home, and saving up for college are just too far out of their reach.

I didn't feel the Depression at all. I always had a pocketful of money.

You know, my Grandpop Finnegan used to have an expression: he used to say, 'Joey, the guy in Olyphant's out of work, it's an economic slowdown. When your brother-in-law's out of work, it's a recession. When you're out of work, it's a depression.'

Each time a high-wage job is lost, a family is turned upside down. And that affects the communities where they live.

Economies are risky. Some industries rise, and others implode, like housing. Some places get richer, and others drop, like Atlantic City. Some people get new jobs that pay better, many lose their jobs or their wages.

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

The thing I've learned most about poverty is how expensive it is to be poor. It's super easy to pay rent every month if you earn enough to pay rent and have a decent job. It's super hard to pay rent if you need a coupon from the state and then need to go find an apartment that will accept that coupon and only that coupon.

The President also talked at length about how well the American economy is doing. Apparently, he got his information on this topic from his millionaire supporters. For the average working family, these are trying economic times.

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

Everybody in America started to define themselves by all these things they had around them. And all of a sudden it came tumbling down. So the old American dream has died, and that is a good thing.

Unemployment is sky-rocketing; deflation is in our future for the first time since the Great Depression. I don't care whose fault it is, it's the truth.

Mother had to support herself at age 18 because it was during the depression and when my grandfather lost the farm and there was no place for her; she worked as an assistant to a maid.

When I was a deacon, the ominous signs of the Great Depression began to appear. Tens of thousands lost their jobs. Money was scarce. Families had to do without. Some young people did not ask their mothers, 'What's for dinner?' because they knew all too well that their cupboards held very little.

Poverty makes slaves of free men.

I think the problem is that we Nigerians have yet to accept that we are now poorer than we used to be.