Robert Reich Quotes

If you have extremes of haves and have-nots where the gap keeps growing, the have-nots group together and create social disorder, as they can't see a way out of their situation.

There are precedents for what happens when societies allow the divide between rich and poor to get so huge that it stops being funny and starts becoming a sick, blood-boiling joke. If you had a Tardis, you could go back to 1917 and ask the Russian royal family how it was all going.

Equality of opportunity as we have known it no longer exists… we are steering a steady course toward economic oligarchy, if we are not there already”

As income inequality increases, social mobility falls.

The Great Gatsby Curve

Rising inequality has changed family dynamics for all socioeconomic groups.

by and large the poor have the same impulses as the rich, with only less opportunity or skill to implement them

For we, the people, understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.

This country isn't working for working people. It's working only for people at the top. That's not the American dream. That's the American nightmare.

America is among the countries the advance countries with the least equality of opportunity, which means that the - while I prospects of young American, a more dependent on the income and education's parents (ph) than another - other countries. So this notion of equal opportunity is sort of American dream is, is now a myth.

Income inequality has become so prevalent in the U.S. that examples of its negative impact on the middle class are as common as Kanye West saying something cringeworthy in the media.

I have so much respect for the Queen and for Charles, and what the family represents. And yet there's still a conflict about whether we can abolish the class system while also having a Royal family.

In Mexico, wealth and poverty live next to each other and are cordial with each other - in my experience.

I think earlier I struggled in a rickshaw and now I am struggling in a Bentley.

Anger at the wealth gap is no longer about dukes in horse-drawn carriages; it's about vast, tax-dodging corporations. This will not be assuaged by seeing the royal family claiming to live like we do. If anything, that will make us angrier.

Even though Mr. Trump is a billionaire, he is still able to relate to average working men and women. The billionaire gets along with the bricklayer.

We are a country that has always been known for providing opportunities to people. We have lost a lot of that opportunity.

If you don't have money or you come from a background that doesn't have money, it's harder to achieve your ambition in life. It's not that you can't, but it becomes harder. Inequality is one of the worst things that can exist in our society, so I am interested in those kind of things.

We still have a great amount of work to do in social development, including resolving one of the biggest challenges we face in this area, namely, reducing the gap between high-income earners and people, citizens of our country, who are still living on very modest means indeed. But we cannot, of course, adopt the solution used 80 years ago and simply confiscate the riches of some to redistribute among others. We will use completely different means to resolve this problem, namely, we will ensure good economic growth.

There is no western, capitalistic country in which the conditions of the masses have not improved in an unprecedented way.

You know, you work hard but play by the rules, you can rise. You can do well. That's what we're taught. That's what we believe. That's what we think of as America. Problem is, there are just generations of people in this country who do not think that.

The life prospects of an American are more dependent on the income and education of his parents than in any of the other advanced industrial countries.

If the same family were always on the bottom, then you'd have big resentments. But if DuPonts go down and Pampered Chef up, [that's good]. That much churn makes people think the system is fairer. Buffett: We don't like churn now, but we liked it more 30-40 years ago.

70% of children born into poverty will never make it to the middle class. The uncomfortable truth is that there are now a number of other countries with as much or more opportunity than ours. In fact, more people in Canada go on to surpass the income of their parents than in the United States.

This kind of gaping inequality gives lie to the promise that’s at the very heart of America: that this is a place where you can make it if you try. We tell people - we tell our kids - that in this country, even if you’re born with nothing, work hard and you can get into the middle class. We tell them that your children will have a chance to do even better than you do. That’s why immigrants from around the world historically have flocked to our shores.