Robert E. Rubin Quotes

I suggest to you that increasing the size of America's economic pie - which can be achieved only if everybody has a seat at the table - is the most important challenge facing our country today.

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

We must ensure the economy really works for all, to address unconscionable wealth and income disparities that allow access to opportunity for some over others.

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

Unless you’re at the very top, you need a more equitable economy.

In a good society, those in the middle and at the bottom ought to benefit significantly from economic growth. When the country prospers, everybody should prosper.

I try to deal with the poverty gap - to do policies for all of us rather than only for the wealthy.

We don't need to solve the problem of the rich-poor gap. We need to solve the problem of common prosperity.

The only way to have a better world and end poverty is by closing the gap between the top and the bottom.

Pope Francis emphatically does not buy the argument that poverty can be alleviated by the 'trickle down' effects of wealth creation. He is deaf to arguments that the global economy has brought a billion people out of poverty. He is convinced, in short, that the best and only way to expel poverty is fairer distribution of the world's goods.

Economic growth doesn't mean anything if it leaves people out.

But I don't think the Democratic Party is at eye level with the middle class.

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

Some policies may promote growth in ways that will increase poverty; others may promote growth in ways that will reduce it. Some growth strategies may be good for the environment; others may not be.

Remove poverty from politics.

The best social programs we've had in this country are those that have united the middle class and the poor.

There is nothing in Socialism a little age or a little money will not cure.

A strong economy is perfectly consistent with concern for equity and economic justice.

The distribution of wealth is just as important as its creation.

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.

If exclusive privileges were not granted, and if the financial system would not tend to concentrate wealth, there would be few great fortunes and no quick wealth. When the means of growing rich is divided between a greater number of citizens, wealth will also be more evenly distributed; extreme poverty and extreme wealth would be also rare.

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

Political power is now widely diffused; and whatever may be the evils of democracy, this good has come of it, that it has forced men to open their eyes to the misery of the masses, and to inquire more zealously as to the possibility of a better distribution of wealth.

We have an economy that's really geared toward rewarding the investor class. What are we doing to make sure that people who want to have a middle-class life are able to keep up?

I don't just talk about jewelry and cars and houses and belittling those that don't have that. I'm a democrat. I speak for the democrats. I speak for the soil.