Suzanne Mettler Quotes

Income inequality is troubling because, among other things, it means that many people in our society don't have the opportunities to advance themselves.

People naturally long for a bit of the wealth that is whorling all around them, and if the work and education available to them won't get them closer to the comforts that they see others enjoying, the temptation to take shortcuts can be fierce.

If you are poor today, you will always be poor. Only the rich now acquire riches.

There never can be equality of rewards or possessions so long as the human plan contains varied talents and differing degrees of industry and thrift, but ours ought to be a country free from the great blotches of distressed poverty.

What good is a high GDP if some, or even many, Americans are left behind?

There's no future in being poor.

Think about it: Every educated person is not rich, but almost every education person has a job and a way out of poverty. So education is a fundamental solution to poverty.

We cannot afford to leave the poor behind.

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.

Economic issues are a subset of social justice. Social justice is unimaginable without economic justice. Isn't that obvious?

You cannot sift out the poor from the community. The poor are indispensable to the rich.

What many economists fail to understand is that poor people are no less concerned about improving their lot and that of their children than rich people are.

I do care about not 99 percent or 95 percent. I care about the very rich and the very poor. I care about 100 percent of America.

I don't mind the rich getting richer, but the poor shouldn't be getting poorer, and there should be more people moving into the middle class.

The biggest single challenge to America and our future is income inequality. We've got to fix it.

It isn't the rich people's fault that poor people are poor. Poor people who get an education and work hard in this country will stop being poor. That should be the goal for all poor people everywhere.

And the 90% they are not is what I do for a living.

In America today, a young person needs more education after high school just to have a chance to make it in the middle class. Not a guarantee, just a chance to make it.

The middle class has just fallen further and further behind the rich.

The association of poverty with progress is the enigma of our times.

Poverty divide not only nations but societies within nations.

The middle class of this country, our historic backbone and our best hope for a strong society in the future, is losing its place at the table.

There are people with no high school education who are poor. but there are also university graduates on food bank lines. There are people who are poor because they have made bad choices, gotten addicted to drugs, burned bridges with friends and family — and then there are people who have never taken a drug in their lives, who have huge social networks, and who still can’t make ends meet.

… perceptions of poverty have gone up because there’s been rising inequality.

There is greater income inequality in the United States than in any other industrialized country. Yes, the debt is a problem that must be dealt with. To me, however, the disappearing middle class is even worse - bad for our economy and really bad for our democracy.