Michael Lind Quotes

The best social programs we've had in this country are those that have united the middle class and the poor.

In order to invest in our future, we must ensure that we appropriately protect programs that provide skills, services, and education for middle-class Americans rather than providing tax breaks for large corporations.

I have no doubt but that the misery of the lower classes will be found to abate whenever the Government assumes a freer aspect and the laws favor a subdivision of Property.

But it is also clear that left entirely untouched by public policy, the capitalist system will produce more inequality than is socially healthy or than is necessary for maximum efficiency.

Government has a role as well in what is referred to as redistributive justice.

I believe America thrives when the middle class thrives.

Upward mobility across classes peaked in the U.S. in the late 19th century. Most of the gains of the 20th century were achieved en masse; it wasn't so much a phenomenon of great numbers of people rising from one class to the next as it was standards of living rising sharply for all classes. You didn't have to be exceptional to rise.

The middle class creates us rich people, not the other way around.

Spreading the wealth punishes success while setting America on course for a greater dependency on government.

Look, there is a sort of old view about class which is a very simplistic view that we have got the working class, the middle class and the upper class, I think it is more complicated than that.

Big government doesn't help the middle class, it buries it.

I think the success of democracy is not really police security; it's the presence of a broad middle class. The stronger the middle class of a people is, the less you have to worry about one group coming in and exploiting the democratic process for its own ends.

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 government's War on Poverty has transformed poverty from a short-term misfortune into a career choice.

Higher taxes still does not create prosperity for all. And, more government still does not grow jobs.

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.

But I don't think the Democratic Party is at eye level with the middle class.

There was never a war on poverty. Maybe there was a skirmish on poverty.

One of the things I get amused by is when my opponent talks about the middle class.

It is because of capitalism that we can pay for services to poor people that we don't even know.

The best political community is formed by citizens of the middle class.

The great middle class basically pays the bills of our society through the taxes.

A New Dealer regrets poverty and deplores the fact that it is necessary for society to slough off its misfits as an individual sheds his impurities and his diseases. But New Dealers believe that human want and human distress should be prevented or at least ameliorated.

Keep up the middle class; lop off aristocracy on the one hand, and a rabble at the other; let the middle class ... have the power.

This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America.