Joseph Stiglitz Quotes

American economic greatness has never trickled down from the top.

We've had trickle down economics in the country for ten years now, and most of us aren't even damp yet.

Trickle-down economics - it didn't work. The whole idea was supply-side economics: give rich people a lot of money; they'll spend it, it'll go into the economy. Here's what we found out - rich people, really good at keeping all the money. That's how they got rich. If you want it in the economy, give it to the poor people. You know what they're really good at? Spending all their money.

Donald Trump really believes that the more you help wealthy people, the better off we'll be and that everything will work out from there.

In a system of free trade and free markets poor countries - and poor people - are not poor because others are rich. Indeed, if others became less rich the poor would in all probability become still poorer.

The "trickle-down" theory: the principle that the poor, who must subsist on table scraps dropped by the rich, can best be served by giving the rich bigger meals.

The rich are always going to say that, you know, just give us more money and we'll go out and spend more and then it will all trickle down to the rest of you. But that has not worked the last 10 years, and I hope the American public is catching on.

Our society is intertwined with the economy that we've built, which is a fantastically complex system. I hope that my writing about it might do some good, but that's not why I do it.

You know and I know and economists know that trickle-down economics doesn't work.

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

The globalization of the economy has lifted more people out of poverty than anything else in the history of the world.

Trickle down economics says that the best way to feed the birds is to give oats to the horse.

It reflects a reversion to the old idea that the tree can be fertilized at the top instead of at the bottom — the old trickle-down theory.

This country is very good at creating wealth, but not very good at distributing it.

I am all in favor of growing the American economy and engaging in trade with the world, but not at the expense of American workers. The North American Free Trade Agreement is a perfect example of this. Ask the textile workers of North Carolina how NAFTA worked out for them - if you can find any.

Globalization in the aggregate generates wealth, no question. But it gets concentrated.

You alleviate poverty by trickle-down economics.

The first theory is that if we make the rich richer, somehow they will let a part of their prosperity trickle down to the rest of us. The second theory was the theory that if we make the average of mankind comfortable and secure, their prosperity will rise upward through the ranks.

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.

Since the 1980s, we have given the rich a bigger slice of our pie in the belief that they would create more wealth, making the pie bigger than otherwise possible in the long run. The rich got the bigger slice of the pie all right, but they have actually reduced the pace at which the pie is growing.

I'm running for president, because as I go around this nation, I talk to a lot of people. And what I hear is people's concern that the economy we have is a rigged economy.

If a group of people - leaders - can convince a group of folk who barely have a pot to piss in that the rich shouldn't be taxed-- THAT is leadership!

When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.

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.