Joseph Stiglitz Quotes

[The Democrats] will say that the Reagan administrtion has given benefits to the rich at the expense of the poor - a term that they define broadly to include middle-income people, women, minorities, the aged, the young, farmers, steelworkers, and others.

We must put an end to both economic freeloading and economic exploitation in America. There must be no place for parasites who draw their sustenance from society without giving anything in return.

This is a guy [Steven Lerner] who believes, for example, that Reaganomics or trickle-down economics means, "The rich got rich by stealing from the poor," or stealing from the middle class and making them poor via debt. He has worked with unions in Europe.

The kind of plan that Donald [Tramp] has put forth would be trickle-down economics all over again. In fact, it would be the most extreme version, the biggest tax cuts for the top percent of the people in this country than we've ever had.

I would prefer to use a very inclusive definition of the working class. I'd like to include all of those people who are, if they're not exploited by an immediate employer over them, they're exploited by the system and therefore have a cause to want to change the system. Having a very inclusive definition of the working class creates a great opportunity for organizing people.

Political Freedom without economic equality is a pretense, a fraud, a lie; and the workers want no lying.

Putting middle class families in jeopardy in order to protect the wealthiest among us isn't consistent with the values and priorities that most Americans share.

Because we believe that you got to build the economy from middle out and not from the top down.

If work were such a splendid thing the rich would have kept more of it for themselves.

Yet today our splendid theory of government is confronted by a great peril. We have become blind to evils that menace us. We are confronted with glutted markets and idle labor. It is a condition that makes it possible for a few men to become landlords of a proud city like this while God's poor are packed in the slums. Such a condition is not only a menace to Republican institutions, but a travesty upon the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Inequality is an inevitable product of capitalist activity, and expanding equality of opportunity only increases it—because some individuals and communities are simply better able than others to exploit the opportunities for development and advancement that capitalism affords.

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.

No man should be made poor so another man can be made rich.

People have no human rights, only the rights that they can gain on the labour market. Above all, wealth and power have to be protected.

We are giving away the country so a few very rich people can get richer.

The trickle-down theory of economics has it that it's good for rich people to get even richer because some of their wealth will trickle own, through their no doubt lavish spending, upon those who stand below them on the economic ladder. Notice that the metaphor is not that of a gushing waterfall but of a leaking tap: even the most optimistic endorsers of this concept do not picture very much real flow, as their language reveals" pg. 102.

There are too many people trying to take opportunity from people in the middle class.

Imagine what would happen if the government were to take the wealth of 200,000 of India's richest people and redistribute it amongst 2 million of India's poorest? We would hear a lot about socialist appropriation and the death of democracy. Why should taking from the rich be called appropriation and taking from the poor be called development?

When you have a policy of making sure that African Americans cannot build wealth, of plundering African American communities of wealth, giving opportunities to other people, it's only right that you might want to, you know, pay that back.

Capitalists control the machineries. They create difficulties to the workers. Consequently rationalism, which has to lead the way for peaceful life to all, has resulted in causing poverty and worries to the people because of dominating forces.

You can go back 150 years and literally find the same people saying the same thing in the same way. "If we have to pay you more, it will be bad for you." And that's because saying that is a much more polite way of saying, "I'm rich, you're poor, and I would prefer to keep it that way."

Whoever claims the right to redistribute the wealth produced by others is claiming the right to treat human beings as chattel.

If you stimulate the economy by means of a tax cut, the people that you tend to be benefiting are the better off.

Poverty is curable, but it’s just not done, because it's not profitable. And that is the kind of violence that's perpetuated on humanity.

There never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other.