Charles E. Schumer Quotes

Millions of people are falling out of the middle class into the ranks of the poor.

The hollowing out of the middle class is a problem common to all Western industrialized economies. Maybe we should work together to solve it.

Income inequality has become so prevalent in the U.S. that examples of its negative impact on the middle class are as common as Kanye West saying something cringeworthy in the media.

Right now, America's middle class is struggling to meet their basic needs.

Middle income families with children are Australia’s new poor

At the same time, it's people that are employed - many folks - but they're still not earning enough to get into the middle class.

The middle class has just fallen further and further behind the rich.

We cannot continue to have the upper class wealty getting richer and richer, the middle class shrinking and 43 million living in poverty.

I agree that income disparity is the great issue of our time. It is even broader and more difficult than the civil rights issues of the 1960s. The '99 percent' is not just a slogan. The disparity in income has left the middle class with lowered, not rising, income, and the poor unable to reach the middle class.

Barack Obama destroyed the middle class. Whatever you want to say about his rhetoric, the rich got richer, but the poor got poorer, and the middle class got wiped out. That's really what Trump appealed to and inspired in the forgotten man.

The middle income families in America have been crushed over the last four years.

The middle class in America is at a tipping point. It will not last another generation if we don't boldly change course now.

I would say that many of the characters in my stories do not live in true poverty - they are not out on the street; they are not wondering if there will be anything to eat in the next week. They are people who are at the lower echelons of the economic strata.

A strong economy depends on a strong middle class, but George Bush has put the middle class in a hole, and John McCain has a plan to keep digging that hole with George Bush's shovel.

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.

I would say that workers in general, and white workers particularly, are correct that their economic wellbeing is deteriorating.

There's no such thing as median income; there's a curve, and it really matters what side of the curve you're on. There's no such thing as the middle class. It's absolutely vanishing.

He is now rising from affluence to poverty.

There is nothing worse than being ashamed of parsimony or poverty.

In Latin America, you don't do things for the money because there is no money.

I was born on the west side of Chicago, and there was quite a bit of poverty. My family and I didn't have exactly the best or the most optimal financial situation in my youth, but we turned out well. My mom always made sure that we got a proper education and that we dedicated ourselves to our work.

If you want to do something to destroy consumer spending, just eat away at the middle class because the other problem we have is the structural problem of middle class America.

This erosion of the middle class is happening all over the place. The opening of a wider gap between rich and poor is always accompanied by such a process.

Frankly that's what makes such a big difference between President Obama on one hand and Mitt Romney on the other. Gov. Romney has not walked in those shoes of the ordinary Americans and frankly I don't think he has the capacity to quite understand the struggle that the 98 percent of Americans go through every single day.

People who work full-time in America should not have to live in poverty - simple as that. Too many jobs don't pay enough to get by, let alone get ahead. Too many people are finding the rungs on the ladder of opportunity further and further apart.