George Wiley Quotes

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.

Let's take care of the necessities first: give people jobs, and find a way to get us out of poverty.

Eradicate poverty. This is all that matters in my country. When I am out training I think about this a lot; when I am running it is going over in my mind. As a country we cannot move forward until we eradicate poverty.

We cannot afford to leave the poor behind.

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.

President Obama believes that income inequality is one of the most pressing matters facing the nation. If we are going to be a country that provides ladders of opportunity and believes in a thriving middle class, then we have to raise the minimum wage.

Our main task is not to see that people of great wealth add to it, but that those without much money have a greater chance to earn some.

You need massive recruitment to tell the poorest of the poor what is possible.

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

For the first time in America's history, poverty is on the run.

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.

Let’s make the poor richer.

If the economy is growing fast, there is call for a distributing income from the rich to the poor to to put in place social safety nets.

Franklin Roosevelt said the test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance to those who have much; it is whether we provide enough to those who have too little. This reconciliation package fails that test as well.

People everywhere in the world are hungry for economic opportunity. And it's about a lot more than being able to make money.

Our goals for this nation must be nothing less than to double the size of our economy and bring prosperity and jobs, ownership and equality of opportunity to all Americans, especially those living in our nation's pockets of poverty.

Our number one priority is to spend every peso possible to include those who are currently excluded.

We certainly want those at the top to do well, but if you base your entire presidency and your entire economic platform on helping them do even better, you're missing what makes the economy tick. Because not everyone has been as fortunate as Mitt Romney, you cannot base your whole approach on a life experience as rarified as his.

Poverty must be reduced not only for reasons of moral and justice, but also of security.

The real solution is to improve the incomes of the poor and provide their children with decent education.

I myself am from a very poor background; I experienced firsthand poverty in this country, and that is not unrelated to my desire, from the moment I became president, to make a priority of poverty reduction in this country.

I worry about growing income inequality. But I worry even more that the discussion is too narrowly focused. I worry that our outrage at the top 1 percent is distracting us from the problem that we should really care about: how to create opportunities and ensure a reasonable standard of living for the bottom 20 percent.

I would like to solemnly reaffirm, that poverty is not a fatality.

We want an economic team, Paul Krugman and Robert Kuttner, Joseph Steiglitz's people and others, who say, you know what? We're sophisticated economists but we're concerned about poor and working people.

Global poverty is falling faster today than at any time in human history.