Thomas Sowell Quotes

The best football players in the world still earn very little money compared to people who really earn money.

The idea that America is the best place in the world to start out poor, so long as you are willing to work hard, no longer seems to be true. One way of proving that is to ask how accurately your family's income when you were growing up predicted what your own would be. If the American dream were alive, your family's income would not predict your own that well…. Well, on that measure, America is now less the land of opportunity than France, than Germany, than Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark. The only other rich economy that the U.S. outscores in this respect is — you guessed it — the UK. Abolish the estate tax and America will be a serious contender for the bottom of the opportunity league.

Speculative income should not be favored over earned income.

Today, half of the national income goes to the richest 10 percent. In 2007, the top 1 percent controlled 34.6 percent of the wealth—significantly more than the bottom 90 percent who control just 26.9 percent.

Inequality of income is bad for everyone, not just the poor and the middle class.

Liberty is impossible if 36 thousand families at the top of the economic pyramid get as much income as 12 million families at the bottom.

This 90/10 rule holds true in almost anything financial. Take the game of golf, for example. Ten percent of the professional golfers make 90 percent of the money.

I've been in the Premier League for 10 years, more, and the money I've been paid is phenomenal compared to your average, everyday working man.

Contrast 1968, when the CEO of General Motors took home, in pay and benefits, about sixty-six times the amount paid to a typical GM worker. Today the CEO of Wal-Mart earns nine hundred times the wages of his average employee. Indeed, the wealth of the Wal-Mart founder's family in 2005 was estimated at about the same ($90 billion) as that of the bottom 40% of the US population: 120 million people.

The inequality of income and fortunes is essential in capitalism.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the richest 5 percent of people receive one-third of total global income, as much as the poorest 80 percent.

One of the most important of all the causes of great inequality of income is the inheritance of a great fortune by a small minority.

That whole 99% thing, they are all in the 1% of the world. Every one of them pays a cellphone bill that is the yearly income for a family in much of the rest of the world.

The distribution of wealth is even more unequal than that of income. ...The wealthiest 5% of American households held 54% of all wealth reported in the 1989 survey. Their share rose to 61% in 2010 and reached 63% in 2013. By contrast, the rest of those in the top half of the wealth distribution —families that in 2013 had a net worth between $81,000 and $1.9 million —held 43% of wealth in 1989 and only 36% in 2013.

In talking about equality and asking vehemently for its realization, nobody advocates a curtailment of his own present income.

I agree with people who say we want more income equality; we want more consumer protection; and we want sounder banks. I agree with all that.

The distribution of wealth is not determined by nature. It is determined by policy.

Wherever there is excessive wealth, there is also in the train of it excessive poverty.

We have never seen the isolation of the rich to the degree that we see it now. They're global. They travel all over the world. They're not in any way - it seems to me - committed to any one place. So it's easy for them to say, "We don't see this. We don't see poverty. We don't think it's that bad. We think wealth is really being distributed in ways that are fair."

They have two aspects. One is that they're unpredictable, and that often rich and more affluent households are slow to spend the funds. The other thing about tax cuts is that they're redistributive. So they tend, naturally, to benefit those who pay tax.

It is all too easy for the liberal media to stir up the irrational hatreds of millions of people, who see themselves as less fortunate than others, by repeatedly talking about eh billions of dollars in 'windfall profits' earned by major corporations, by featuring periodic stories on the opulent living of wealthy individuals, or by pointing an accusing finger at 'loopholes' used by 'the rich.'

As riches increase and accumulate in few hands . . . the tendency of things will be to depart from the republican standard.

Poverty persists, essentially, because the people at the bottom - the bottom quarter and also the bottom half - see the gains from the rising global average income wiped out by severe declines in their relative share.

Let me give you really bad news, and I'm sure people will demonize me for saying this: the rich are always gonna be with us. They will always be with us. There are rich people in Cuba. There are rich people in Venezuela. You pick the policies, and the rich are gonna figure it out. They're always gonna be rich.

Once poverty is gone, we'll need to build museums to display its horrors to future generations. They'll wonder why poverty continued so long in human society - how a few people could live in luxury while billions dwelt in misery, deprivation and despair.