Henry Billings Brown Quotes

If we're not going to tax the rich anymore, we're going to create class warfare.

Not surprisingly, some of the super-rich declined to join the Patriotic Millionaires when the Agenda Project reached out to them. At least two airily dismissed the Bush tax cuts for millionaires and above - which will cost well over $700 billion over the coming decade - as small potatoes.

Our moneyed man … have rallied under the banner of the millionaire, the banker, and the land monopolist, there railroad king, and the false politicians, to effect their purpose.

The most powerful forces in economics are not numbers or facts. They are prejudices and preferences. No amount of evidence will ever change the degree to which many of the rich and powerful prefer themselves to be richer and more powerful and others poorer and weaker.

The laws are stacked for the wealthy.

The rich don’t want the poor to get ahead of them.

The rich are the scum of the earth in every country.

Not only have [rich] people like me not been asked to sacrifice, but they have had money [tax cuts] thrown at them.

Taxes on acquired wealth would be the fairest solution. But such taxes have met an invincible resistance among the possessors, who are the most powerful. … The selfishness of possessing classes is not reducible. We have to adopt to it.

If anyone’s declared class warfare, it’s the people who inhabit the top rungs of big corporations and Wall Street … They have declared it on average workers.

The top 1 percent may complain about the kind of government we have in America, but in truth they like it just fine: too gridlocked to redistribute, too divided to do anything but lower taxes.

One big part of the reason we have so much inequality is that the top 1 percent wants it that way.

If class warfare isn’t the richest of the rich fighting tooth and nail against unions and any tax increases while record numbers of people lose their homes, what is?

If the upper classes, through their political representatives, pass legislation that diminishes the income of the middle class and reduces services to the poor and further enrich the affluent, this is not class warfare. But if the middle class and the poor, and their representatives, complain that this is unfair, that is class warfare. So say some of our politicians who oppose class warfare.

The very rich are moving away from everyone else …. We should be taxing capital gains just like ordinary income.

I have paid over $10 billion in taxes. But the government should collect even more from people like me.

There once was this powerful, both capital and political, class who cared about supporting and affirming a solid middle class in this country.

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

Hear me people: We have now to deal with another race - small and feeble when our fathers first met them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possession is a disease with them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break but the poor may not. They take their tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule.

Capitalism is the legitimate racket of the ruling class.

Democrats single out glaring examples of tax preferences or spending priorities that favor the wealthy and Republicans cry 'class warfare!'

All the political angst and moral melodrama about getting 'the rich' to pay 'their fair share' is part of a big charade. This is not about economics, it is about politics.

You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.

Friends, I'm angry about what's happening in politics today! Why is it wrong to ask the wealthiest people and most profitable corporations to pay their fair share?

If my career continues along its current arc, people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always manage to betray the poor, even when they don't mean to.