Rick Perry Quotes

There is a legitimate concern about wealth distribution in the United States, but the answer is not to scapegoat any individual who makes over $200,000 per year and to try to sell the fraud that the government can equitably take the money of those who have earned it and give it to those who haven't.

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

When you say fiscal responsibility, it seems to me that you really mean rich people keeping their money.

Barack Obama's enemies are the people who make this country work. Barack Obama's enemies are those who succeed. Those are the people whose income he wants to redistribute. Those are the people whose income he wants to take, using the power and the force of the federal government to do it.

You are not going to lift everybody out of poverty through the kindness of wealthy people.

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

Conservatives believe the economy functions better if the rich have more money and everyone else has less. But they're wrong. It's just the opposite.

History has shown that a government's redistribution of shrinking wealth, in preference to a private sector's creation of new sources of it, can prove more destructive than even the most deadly enemy.

In fact, it works the other way: A government as big and bossy as this one is maintained on the backs of the middle class and those who hope to join it.

To Republicans, I humbly suggest that we make it possible for Democrats to give up their quest for redistribution of income and wealth by our acceptance of an appropriate role for government in financing those public goods and services necessary to secure a social safety net below which no American would be allowed to fall.

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.

The tax relief that this Congress has given now in terms of four tax cuts has overwhelmingly gone to the people at the very top of the income scale in America.

Just as we should never balance the budget on the backs of the poor, so it is an economic delusion to think you can balance it only on the wallets of the rich.

I think, with Obama and the progressives, you've seen a massive expansion of big government, and it's all based on a moral premise. The moral premise is that wealth is theft. And I don't just mean the wealth of America, I mean, your wealth, my wealth.

So when the only domestic social policy is tax cuts that mostly benefit the wealthiest Americans, we say, 'Where is faith being put into action here?'

'Egalitarians' who complain about inequality view the wealth of the wealthiest as bad in itself: it disfigures society. They would enact a wealth tax to extirpate the offending wealth.

We need to have the social investments by which to quote unquote distribute some of that wealth.

In our rush to soak the rich make sure we don't drown the middle class.

In a morally adjusted economy ... the rich should not get richer if the poor get poorer.

Here we have in New York Mr. Aster with an income of millions derived from real estate, … and we have along side of him a poor man receiving $1000 a year. What is the discrimination of the law in that case? It is altogether against the poor man—Everything that he consumes we tax, and yet we are afraid to tax the income of Mr. Astor. Is there any justice to it? Why, sir, the income tax is the only one that tends to equalize the burdens between rich and poor.

One way to reduce income inequality is to get rid of the rich. If Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Rupert Murdoch and their billionaire friends could be persuaded to emigrate from the United States, income inequality would decrease overnight.

We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well.

The people in Washington are getting rich with our money. Under President Barack Obama, the federal government swelled to record size, and it took more and more of our money to pay for it. Who benefitted? Not Missouri farmers or workers.

I try to deal with the poverty gap - to do policies for all of us rather than only for the wealthy.

What the Democrats do with income inequality is punish the people at the top of whatever bracket we're talking about. If it's income, they want to raise taxes. They want to impugn, punish, institute more regulations, just make it tougher and tougher and do what they can to take money from them.