Katie Porter Quotes

The surface of American life looks smooth, prosperous, peaceful. But underneath, fault-line shifts in family and work life have led us into what some have called 'advanced insecurity.'

Globalization is stirring widespread economic anxiety, and middle class incomes have stagnated while a class of super-rich has emerged.

I always felt that I had anxiety of survival in terms of livelihood even when I was making plenty of money.

My parents, products of the Great Depression, were successful people, but lived in a state of constant fear that my sister and I, and they, would sink into the kind of economic insecurity that their generation knew so well.

Inflation eats away at ties that bind us together as a people.

I have had many anxieties for our commonwealth, principally occasioned by the depreciation of our money.

My parents were constantly afraid they would lose their jobs. The idea that we were always a paycheck away from disaster was drilled into me.

Uncertainty is killing this economy.

What's dangerous is the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few individuals.

Concentrating wealth in the hands of the few and deregulating financial institutions and practices lead to speculative bubbles that eventually burst - and that brings the whole country down.

Individual effort is almost relatively impossible to cope with the big problem of poverty as we see it.

I decided to go into politics because of our Soviet-style government.

I am not averse to politics, but that does not mean that I am going to join politics.

Bankruptcy exposes the economic vulnerability and insecurity of middle class women.

Unfair servicing practices can worsen a family's already difficult economic situation, and the injury echoes from the family to the community and ultimately throughout the economy.

If you destroy the middle class for the sake of the economic institutions, you guarantee instability and danger.

There is something wrong when we had more bankruptcies last year than college graduates.

The United States economy is like a poker game where the chips have become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and where the other fellows can stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit runs out the game will stop.

It is ironic that people of modest means sometimes become conservative out of a scarcity fear bred by the very capitalist system they support.

There are people with no high school education who are poor. but there are also university graduates on food bank lines. There are people who are poor because they have made bad choices, gotten addicted to drugs, burned bridges with friends and family — and then there are people who have never taken a drug in their lives, who have huge social networks, and who still can’t make ends meet.

I'm as prone to 'declinism' as the next over-mortgaged middle-aged guy.

Millennials - who will soon be a full one-third of American adults - may be especially ready to become engaged in politics with a candidate who wants to give them a government that will leave them alone and get its finances in order so that they don't inherit an economic collapse.

I can't stop people from writing imaginative stories about me entering politics.

To be 'squeezed' is to be bound by a very American psychological and socio-economic predicament. Being squeezed involves one's finances, one's social status, and one's self-image.

For every criticism of the U.S. economy, whenever people go into a panic, they look around and say, 'That's the cleanest shirt I have. So I'm putting it on.'