Economic Stratification Quotes

Capitalism is very undemocratic. Capitalism gives you power according to your wealth while democracy gives you power according to your existence.

It is hard to redistribute wealth of there is no productive class producing it.

Under the Enrichment Laws, consumers have to spend a fixed quota of dollars each month, depending on their strata. Hoarding is an anti-corpocratic crime.

As the cream abandons the milk from which it took its life, and rises to the top and rides there, so men, because they are richer than those around about them, separate themselves, and all mankind below them they regard as skim milk.

It's always been the case that you have the really rich, and the really poor. But hey, look, all the great empires have their periods where they rule the world, and then they crumble.

I watched the Republican debate. At one point, the candidates said there are no classes in America, a point then hotly debated by all six rich white guys that were there.

I hadn't found out yet that mankind consists of two very different races, the rich and the poor. It took me ... and plenty of other people . . . twenty years and the war to learn to stick to my class and ask the price of things before touching them, let alone setting my heart on them.

One function of the income gap is that the people at the top of the heap have a hard time even seeing those at the bottom. They practically need a telescope. The pharaohs of ancient Egypt probably didn't was a lot of time thinking about the people who build their pyramids, either.

There is far too little discussion in Washington about the collapse of the middle class , almost no discussion at all about the incredible income inequality and wealth inequality in this country, and the fact that we're moving toward an oligarch form of society.

The trickle-down theory of economics has it that it's good for rich people to get even richer because some of their wealth will trickle own, through their no doubt lavish spending, upon those who stand below them on the economic ladder. Notice that the metaphor is not that of a gushing waterfall but of a leaking tap: even the most optimistic endorsers of this concept do not picture very much real flow, as their language reveals" pg. 102.

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

The rich man in his castle / The poor man at his gate, / God made them high or lowly. / And ordered their estate.

It's the people who work hard and earn big that keep the machine tipping for everybody else. If everybody else was equal down the bottom rung of a ladder, nobody would be on the ladder at all because it would break and everybody would fall off backwards. So you need people at the top to help pull those people up from the bottom. You can't take that and swing to the right. You can't have everybody living in the same ordinary $60,000 house because you may as well live in Russia, Bulgaria or some other Eastern block Communist nation.

Increasingly, staying in the middle class - let alone aspiring to become middle class - is becoming a game of chance.

There is not enough wealth in the cities to redistribute it from those who are wealthy to those who are poor.

The Republicans called it “trickle down” when Hoover tried it. Now they call it “supply side”. But it’s the same shining city for those relative few who are lucky enough to live in its good neighborhoods. But for the people who are excluded—for the people who are locked out—all they can do is stare from a distance at that city’s glimmering towers.

It's important to realize that innovation and growth in itself are not sufficient to moderate inequality of wealth.

The 19th-century pure capitalist model of society was a pyramid, concentrations of enormous wealth in a small group at the top, a not very big middle-class in the middle, and an enormous percentage of the population in the bottom part of the pyramid.

The greatest trick the rich - and their cheerleaders on the right - ever pulled was convincing the world that class didn't exist. Out here in the real world, it is more real and more rigid than it has been for a century.

The top 10 per cent of the US population appropriated 91 per cent of income growth between 1989 and 2006, while the top 1 per cent took 59 per cent.

A winner-takes-all economy that offers only limited access to the middle class is a recipe for democratic malaise and dereliction.

In future we'll have a different type of rich and poor.

If we wait until income inequality is much more severe, we will have a whole class of new superrich who will probably feel entitled to their wealth and will have the means to defend their interest. That's already gone far enough. We shouldn't let it become more extreme.

Class is not a fixed designation in this country. We are an upwardly mobile society with a lot of movement between income groups.

In Caribbean there is no middle class: you're either rich or you're poor. And the ladder to success is not really a ladder, it's a chain; once you reach a certain level, you can't go back and you can only keep going forward.