Barack Obama Quotes

Liberty is impossible if 36 thousand families at the top of the economic pyramid get as much income as 12 million families at the bottom.

We have concentrated wealth and capital to such a degree that the vast majority of us don't have the discretionary dollars to make our economy go and grow.

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

Inequality of income is bad for everyone, not just the poor and the middle class.

The issue of wealth inequality is ... the great moral issue of our time.

Americans have historically been more willing than Europeans to tolerate high inequality levels if accompanied by strong economic growth and a healthy middle class.

No matter how wealthy a few plutocrats get, we can never drive a great national economy. Only a thriving middle class can do that.

Middle class families should not be forced to scrape by with less while oil companies get away with more.

The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century.

In a morally adjusted economy ... the rich should not get richer if the poor get poorer.

Unequal wealth distribution is a risk factor for inequality that must be attacked by policies.

It is unjust to let any starve, when we think it just to limit the wages of the poor, so as they can lay up nothing against the time of their impotency and want of work.

If, in a country, the wealth is concentrated in the hands of only the few, it cannot witness harmony and stability.

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 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.

There’s a mal-distribution in wealth in this country. Entitlements end up going to the rich anyway. Some of them should be attacked. The ones who rip us off, the ones who get bailed out.

Inequality is bad for everyone, not just the middle class and the poor.

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

No society is healthy when the gap between the rich and the poor is growing.

The United States has the highest poverty rate [and] the greatest … wealth inequality of any major developed economy in the world…. No other developed country is as addicted to poverty and inequality as we are, and yet somehow they prosper.

American economic greatness has never trickled down from the top.

In 1980, the top 10 percent earned 2.7 times as much as the bottom 10 percent.; in 2013, the top 10 percent took home 3.7 times as much. This is because for decades, the median wage growth has lagged behind the average wage growth.

No matter how we name and dissect inequality, we must keep explaining the larger downside of such concentrated extreme wealth.

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

Misguided economic and tax policies have hampered growth, allowing the rich to become richer while turning the middle class into the working poor.