Carly Fiorina Quotes

Big government doesn't help the middle class, it buries it.

The truth is, Hillary Clinton's ideas create more income inequality. Why? Because bigger government creates crony capitalism. When you have a 70,000 page tax code, you've got to be very wealthy, very powerful, very well connected to dig your way through that tax code.

I think, with Obama and the progressives, you've seen a massive expansion of big government, and it's all based on a moral premise. The moral premise is that wealth is theft. And I don't just mean the wealth of America, I mean, your wealth, my wealth.

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

... the problem isn't that we have inequality. Some inequality is intrinsic to any high-functioning capitalist economy. The problem is that inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France, before the revolution. And so I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people. It won't last.

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

I think the defining issue of our time is: Does the economic, social, and political system work for the middle class?

The rich don’t need to rely on government … -- they can buy … things for themselves. In the process, they become more distant from ordinary people, losing whatever empathy they may have once had. They also worry about strong government: one that could use its powers to … take some of their wealth, and invest it for the common good.

The Democrats want to help people who have been disadvantaged by the economy these last decades. The Republicans want to weaken and roll back various aspects of what the Democrats have tried to do.

When there is no middle class, and the poor greatly exceed in number, troubles arise, and the state soon comes to an end.

Government doesn't have to be the enemy, but too much government has produced a new kind of inequality in America: opportunity inequality.

Big government helps the people who have made it. It doesn't help the people who are trying to make it; it crushes the people who are trying to make it.

Spreading the wealth punishes success while setting America on course for a greater dependency on government.

Real Democrats don't abandon the middle class.

The two great aims of industrialism - replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth into the hands of a small plutocracy - seem close to fulfillment.

It was easy for the Democrats to attack the wealthy fat cats of Wall Street, the elite, and the privileged people - to portray them as a profiteer of the system, which to some extent, they are. Not because they wanted to, but because Mr. Bernanke enabled them to be profiteers.

It's an irony that growing inequality could mean more money for philanthropy. In the U.S., quite a few of the ultra-rich have taken to heart the 19th century industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie's comment that it's a disgrace to die wealthy.

The rich don't exploit the poor. They just out-compete them.

One of biggest lies in politics is the lie that Republicans are the party of big business. Big business does great with big government. Big business is very happy to climb in bed with big government. Republicans are and should be the party of small business and of entrepreneurs.

In fact, it works the other way: A government as big and bossy as this one is maintained on the backs of the middle class and those who hope to join it.

Once the tentacles of redistributionism wrap themselves tightly around every part of the economy - and around our psyches - they can never be unwound.

If people continue to feel like Democrats are looking after poor folks and Republicans are looking after rich folks and nobody is looking after me, then we don't get a lot of stuff done. And the trend lines evidence the fact that folks have gotten squeezed. And obviously, 2007, 2008 really ripped open for people how vulnerable they were.

Democrats want to use government power to make people's lives go better; Republicans respond that people know more than politicians do. We think that both might be able to agree that nudging can maintain free markets, and liberty, while also inclining people in good directions.

They cannot divide us by saying that you're middle class or you're lower class.

Big-government economics breeds crony capitalism. It's corrupt, anything but neutral, and a barrier to broad participation in prosperity.