Growing Divide Quotes

Inequality is a good thing. You can’t have a capitalistic system without it. But we have excessive inequality now. Virtually all the benefits are going to a small group of people.

The reversion of American society to a nation of the superrich and the rest... is straining the country in ways that go way beyond economics.

The top 1 percent in the state increased its share of the income from 10 to 22 percent. The bottom 80 percent of the state is declining. That’s just a fairness fact.

The wealth disparity between the lowest and the highest continues to expand, and that's inappropriate.

By 2015, the top 1 percent of families took home more than 20 percent of income. Wealth distribution was 10 times worse than that: the families in the top 1 percent owned as much as the families in the bottom 90 percent.

Unimaginable riches for the few, disaster for the many - that's the new American way.

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.

... our economy is gradually becoming a zero-sum game between financial wealth holders and the rest of America.

The extent of and continuing increase in inequality in the United States greatly concern me.

Since 2009, 95 percent of all gains in the economy went to the top 1 percent. That didn’t leave very much for the rest of us.

Globalization is stirring widespread economic anxiety, and middle class incomes have stagnated while a class of super-rich has emerged.

One fundamental issue which Trump did take advantage of was the increasing disparities of income in the United States. So many people saw the rich getting richer and it not being spread around. It's affecting European politics, too, now.

Today, half of the national income goes to the richest 10 percent. In 2007, the top 1 percent controlled 34.6 percent of the wealth—significantly more than the bottom 90 percent who control just 26.9 percent.

Talking about income inequality, even if you're not on the Forbes 400 list, can make us feel uncomfortable. It feels less positive, less optimistic, to talk about how the pie is sliced than to think about how to make the pie bigger.

Income inequality has gotten worse under President Barack Obama.

The aggregation of large fortunes is not at all a thing to be regretted.

Anyone who has followed the U.S. economy in recent years can tell you while corporate America and their wealthy executives have recovered from the last recession, middle-class families have not. About 95 percent of income gains between 2009 and 2012 went to the top one percent.

The concentration of U.S. income and wealth in the hands of the very rich is a new development in my lifetime.

And with each day that passed, the gulf broadened and my isolation became more accentuated. In such a situation, the discovery that my experience was not unique, that it had also been that of other Spanish intellectuals, became very important for me.

The stock market is a playground for rich. The top 1 percent control 35 percent of stock wealth. As long as the stock market grows faster than the rest of the economy, the rich will keep getting richer

After adjusting for inflation, the average income of the top 5% of households grew by 38% from 1989 to 2013. By comparison, the average real income of the other 95% of households grew less than 10%.