Ruth Porat Quotes

But he like my mother, had certainly come to know that those who work the most do not make the most money. It was the fault of the rich, it seemed, but just how he did not know.

The aggregation of large fortunes is not at all a thing to be regretted.

You've got the top 400 Americans owning more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans. Most folks do not think that is right.

There’s just too much money in the hands of too few.

The dirty truth is that the rich are the great cause of poverty.

If we wait until income inequality is much more severe, we will have a whole class of new superrich who will probably feel entitled to their wealth and will have the means to defend their interest. That's already gone far enough. We shouldn't let it become more extreme.

Income inequality has gotten worse under President Barack Obama.

The economy is not governed with the bottom half in mind.

You can't very well live in a castle while your kin is on the poor side of town and barely have enough food. Some want you to get to the top and rely on you making it for them, too.

That fallacy flies in the face of studies that show, every day, in every way, things are getting a little worse for America's minorities relative to the progress made by those in the top percentiles of assets and income.

Abolish plutocracy if you would abolish poverty. As millionaires increase, pauperism grows. The more millionaires, the more paupers

Welfare for the wealthy simply can no longer be afforded.

God help the rich, the poor can look after themselves

It is wrong to say God made rich and poor; He made only male and female

The top 1 percent in the state increased its share of the income from 10 to 22 percent. The bottom 80 percent of the state is declining. That’s just a fairness fact.

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.

It would be well for those interested to reflect whether there now exists, or ever has existed, a wealthy and civilized community in which one portion did not live on the labor of another.... Remember that labor is the only source of wealth, and how small a portion of it, in all old and civilized countries, even the best governed, is left to those by whose labor wealth is created.

Talking about income inequality, even if you're not on the Forbes 400 list, can make us feel uncomfortable. It feels less positive, less optimistic, to talk about how the pie is sliced than to think about how to make the pie bigger.

We oppose a system that generates huge wealth through astonishing innovation but is fatally unable to distribute fairly and provide universal access to its spoils.

Until we fix the deep-rooted problems of economic inequality, we cannot expect young people to experience the best childhood and adolescence.

Wealth is used to entrench inequality, not to trickle down and solve it.

The patience and forbearance of the poor are among the strongest bulwarks of the rich.

In my view, there is no justice when the 15 wealthiest people in this country in the last two years, saw their wealth increase by $170 billion. That is more wealth acquired in a two year period than is owned by the bottom 130 million Americans.

The haggardness of poverty is everywhere seen contrasted with the sleekness of wealth, the exhorted labour of some compensating for the idleness of others, wretched hovels by the side of stately colonnades, the rags of indigence blended with the ensigns of opulence; in a word, the most useless profusion in the midst of the most urgent wants.

The interesting thing about class warfare is that it's only class warfare if it's up, not down. If you talk about welfare cheats or something, that's not class warfare because it's down; you have to talk about rich people before it's class warfare.