Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes

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

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

It is unacceptable that someone can work full time - and work hard - and not be able to lift themselves out of poverty.

The middle class has disappeared. We have a highway to poverty and no roads coming out.

There’s been an economic war going on in this country and the middle class and the poor have been losing..

I understand that people might be poor if they don't have any work, but I don't accept that someone is poor if they've worked really hard.

The inevitable consequence of poverty is dependence.

My people are poor and I am one of them.

The worst thing about poverty is not the actual living of it, but the shame of it.

My mother saved our home with a minimum wage job. But in the 1960s, a minimum wage job would support a family of three above the poverty line. Not today. Not even close. I understood right then that people can work hard, they can play by the rules, and they can still take a hard smack.

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.

Poverty of course is no disgrace, but it is damned annoying.

Poverty is on the increase - due to welfare cuts - and demand for food banks has rocketed.

Both chronic, long-term poverty and downward mobility from the middle class are in the same category of things that America likes not to think about.

I don't know if I can live on my income or not - the government won't let me try it.

For people who are at the bottom economically, the world is becoming a harder and harder place. And yet the incentives to become rich are so great because enormous amounts of wealth are being accumulated. And so those two things, that carrot and stick, are beating people along this trajectory of trying desperately to move up in the world.

In West Virginia, the most vulnerable people we have are people who get up every morning and go to work.

I was born on the other side of the tracks, in public housing in Brooklyn, New York. My dad never made more than $20,000 a year, and I grew up in a family that lost health insurance. So I was scarred at a young age with understanding what it was like to watch my parents lose access to the American dream.

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

Poverty is not a disgrace, but it's terribly inconvenient.

It is shameful that millions of Americans are suffering the economic injustice of working a full-time job and earning a wage that leaves them below the poverty line.

The bottom line is that five million low-income Americans working full time for minimum wage, deserve a raise.

Solidarity forever …. We stand outcast and starving from the wonders we have made.

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.

The middle class is the group in this country that has been taken for a ride.