Robert Reich Quotes

Talking about income inequality, even if you're not on the Forbes 400 list, can make us feel uncomfortable. It feels less positive, less optimistic, to talk about how the pie is sliced than to think about how to make the pie bigger.

My mission will be to improve life across Massachusetts, including communities and geographies that are seeing a slower economic recovery. Lower and fairer taxes are an important part of creating jobs and accomplishing that goal.

All Democrats for the last 30 years have tried to stimulate the economy by giving 'tax cuts' to people who don't pay taxes.

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

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.

We will be returning to historical levels of inequality. We'll view post-war America as a kind of strange interlude not to be repeated. It won't be the dreams that we all had that virtually all incomes go up in lockstep at three percent a year. It hurts to give that up.

The goal to strive for is a poor government but a rich people.

That tax relief can spur the economy and thereby benefit all Americans is something that Washington Democrats used to understand. President Kennedy, for example, aggressively cut taxes after being elected to stimulate the economy as a means of helping all Americans.

Canada is in budgetary deficit now only because of the recession, only because of stimulus measures, and we will come out of it. We will go back into surplus position when the economy recovers. So there is no need in Canada to raise taxes.

When inequality gets too extreme, then it becomes useless for growth, and it can even become bad because it tends to lead to high perpetuation of inequality over time and low mobility.

It isn't enough just to scream at the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. We need our political system to start reflect this anger back into, 'How do we fix it? How do we get the economy going again?'

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.

Simply cutting the taxes for America's wealthiest families is clearly not creating the needed new jobs, and that strategy is unlikely to succeed in the future.

And taking more money out of the private economy and having the government perform as it has poorly done with the stimulus I don't think is the right way to go.

All those predictions about how much economic growth will be created by this, all of those new jobs, would be created by the things we wanted - the extension of unemployment insurance and middle class tax cuts. An estate tax for millionaires adds exactly zero jobs. A tax cut for billionaires - virtually none.

With the Clinton higher tax rates for the top two brackets, we had the longest and strongest economic expansion in U. S. history.

The middle class is the engine of this economy.

The middle class is at the heart of our budget problem.

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 a dreadful calamity to see the nation divided into two parties, one containing the bulk of the property owners and conservative people, the other the bulk of the wageworkers and the less prosperous people generally; each party insisting on demanding much that is wrong, and each party sullen and angered by real and fancied grievances..

It has become impossible to deny or obscure the great chasm . . . between an elite that seizes modernity’s choicest fruits while disdaining older truths and uprooted masses, who, on finding themselves cheated of the same fruits, recoil into cultural supremacism, populism and rancorous brutality.

Successful businesses create jobs; that is true. But the notion that if we cut taxes enough for the very rich and for already hugely profitable businesses, then all that money will trickle down to everyone else in the form of job creation is simply false.

Hillary Clinton would raise taxes on so-called rich people, corporations, capital gains, financial transactions, and inheritance. Has there ever been an example where America has taxed its way into prosperity? Never. Trump has an economic-recovery-and-prosperity plan. Clinton has an austerity-recession plan.

Worrying about the poor is one thing. To contend that equality is necessary for growth is an altogether different and more radical idea.

Kennedy had already, in 1962, lowered investment taxes on business. And after his tragic assassination, his broader tax proposals were passed into law in early 1964. And they worked. The U.S. economy grew by roughly 5 percent yearly for nearly eight years.