John Sweeney Quotes

This erosion of the middle class is happening all over the place. The opening of a wider gap between rich and poor is always accompanied by such a process.

The chasm between rich and poor is becoming larger, and I think it's interesting terrain to talk about and expose.

What I worry about is the lack of understanding in society around the world that there is a divide in the world between those who have and those who do not.

While a handful of countries and a small number of people are leading ample life, dozens of countries and billions of people in Africa, Asia and Latin America are being left in absolute poverty.

Texas has arguably the most extreme separation between the well off and everyday people in the United States.

My own experience in the third world was that even if people started to make more money, the cost of living and housing increased often faster than the wages.

If you want to do something to destroy consumer spending, just eat away at the middle class because the other problem we have is the structural problem of middle class America.

Abolish plutocracy if you would abolish poverty. As millionaires increase, pauperism grows. The more millionaires, the more paupers

For the good of Spain, I should like there to be rather fewer rich people and rather fewer poor.

A rise of prices necessarily results in a diminution of the enjoyments of the laboring class until they can force the employers, through a long process of agitation, to make an increase in their wages.

American economic greatness has never trickled down from the top.

The South presents right now the Nation’s No. 1 economic problem.

The state grew fat, but the people grew lean.

The poor are little folks living on little lands who want what we already have.

As Washington prospers, workers suffer.

The hollowing out of the middle class is a problem common to all Western industrialized economies. Maybe we should work together to solve it.

The Obama economy is great for rich people. It's terrible for everybody else.

Today we hear that the gains from economic growth accrue to the highest-income earners while the standard of living of the poor and middle America stagnates and the gap between the richest and the poorest grows ever wider. That portrait of the country is wrong.

To improve the standard of living for working folks, we have to raise the minimum wage and empower workers to fight for their interests in an economic and political system that's stacked against them.

It is absolute poverty that you could end, but I think relative poverty is a whole other issue.

Poverty, therefore, was comparative. One measured it by a sliding scale. One was always poor, in terms of those who were richer.

Today in America, unions have a secure place in our industrial life. Only a handful of reactionaries harbor the ugly thought of breaking unions and depriving working men and women of the right to join the union of their choice. I have no use for those - regardless of their political party - who hold some vain and foolish dream of spinning the clock back to days when organized labor was huddled, almost as a hapless mass. Only a fool would try to deprive working men and women of the right to join the union of their choice.

I don't absolve the Democrats of their lack of commitment to deal with poverty. But nowadays we're witnessing the widening of the gap. There's something wrong when a handful of people have more than they'll ever need while millions of people have less than they always need.

In an era of global abundance, our world has the resources to reduce dramatically the massive divides that persist between rich and poor, if only those resources can be unleashed in the service of all peoples.

I think that growing up very poor in a very wealthy town gave me a sense of being an outsider, and I hated it when I was growing up.