income stagnation Quotes

Needless to say, the anointed much prefer to quote family and household statistics on income, claiming “economic stagnation,” the “disappearance of the middle class,” and miscellaneous other rhetorical catastrophes. “For all but the top 20 percent,” an op-ed column in the New York Times said, “income has stagnated.” Moreover, this alleged fact was “widely acknowledged” by “politicians, economists and sociologists.” That so many such people echoed the same refrain—without bothering to check readily available census data to the contrary—says more about them than about income. Moreover, not all such use of household or family income data can be attributed to statistical naivete.

People at the very top of the income scale also benefited from globalization and automation. But the income of working- and middle-class people in the developed world has stagnated.

Since the end of the 1970s, something has gone profoundly wrong in America. Inequality has soared. Educational progress slowed. Incarceration rates quintupled. Family breakdown accelerated. Median household income stagnated.

The trajectory of this country [USA] is not positive and particularly for the disadvantaged, as we see what's happening. The gains in productivity have dropped, the gains in income for the middle class and the least advantaged have slowed, at best.

Inequality saps the economy by draining the buying power of Americans whose incomes have stagnated, forcing them to rely on debt to fund education, housing, and health care.

There's 6 million people living in poverty today, more than when Barack Obama got elected. 6.5 million people are working part-time, most of whom want to work full-time. We've created rules and taxes on top of every aspiration of people, and the net result is we're not growing fast, income is not growing.

I think people think their incomes have been flat lining for a long period of time. They feel that the next generation's opportunities are not going to be improvement. So and I also think that social media then allows insurgent movements to gain scale at speed.

Middle-income wage earners have essentially had no pay increases since 2000.

In fact, for the majority of the population, wages and incomes have stagnated and conditions have gotten worse. So they are asking, "what did I do wrong?" And the answer that the talk show host is giving them is convincing, in it's internal logic. It's saying, "what's wrong is the rich liberals own everything, run everything, they don't care about you; therefore, distrust them" and so on.

Workers' disillusionment is deepened by the knowledge that, as their average wages grow slowly or stagnate, the very wealthy are growing significantly wealthier.

We're now in one of those periods when the reality of intense pressure on the middle class diverges from long-held assumptions of how the American bargain should work

We're living through an era of higher income inequality than the country has experienced since before the Great Depression. Meanwhile, most people are running in place, and those in the bottom quintile of the economy are being swept backward year in and year out. A worker with a high school education today is likely to earn less in real terms than did their parents and grandparents in the early 1970s. Not coincidentally, while overall life expectancy is increasing in America, for those with low levels of education it's actually declining.

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

When Americans are faced with the prospect that they can never earn their way to wealth, they have two choices: to rebel against the system, or to settle into depressed complacency.

We've created rules and taxes on top of every aspiration of people, and the net result is we're not growing fast, income is not growing.

I feel very strongly that we need to change the way we do trade because it has been one of the major factors that lead to decline of middle class incomes.

The average household income has really stagnated since 1971.

Since 1978 for the bottom half of the wealth distribution male median wages have actually gone down. And I think that's a crucial reason. If you are a male worker, your median wage since 1979 has gone down.

The basic thing that made Trump popular is that he blamed others for the problems that we have in the United States. We have a problem. Let's face it. The typical income, median income, of a full-time male worker - and the workers who have a full-time job are the lucky ones - is at the same level it was 42 years ago. At the bottom, real wages in the United States are at the same level they were 60 years ago.

There are two economic realities in America in 2016. There's been a record six straight years of job growth, and new census numbers show incomes have increased at a record rate after years of stagnation. However, income inequality remains significant, and nearly half of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.

Without productivity gains, any growth in GDP is exactly offset by population growth, and the average income stays the same.

You may or may not agree with Obama's policy prescriptions, but they are, by and large, serious attempts to deal with the biggest issues we face: a failing health care system, oil dependency, income stagnation, and climate change.

We're the highest taxed nation in the world. Our middle class is just reeling from the taxes. And you know, if you think about it, the middle class and the workers of this country, who really built the country, they haven't had a raise in 12 years. They're making less now actually - to be even worse about it, they're making less now than they did 12 years ago.

Global inequality is such an abstract concept, simply because there is no global government. Telling people in rich countries who have had no increase in real incomes, stagnant median wages and so on, that on the other hand global inequality is going down because people who are much poorer than them are getting richer - it's something that maybe they would like in an abstract sense, because everyone is happy there are fewer poor Chinese, but you may not be as happy if these Chinese are taking your job.

With stagnant hourly wages, the only way for working families to get ahead is by working more hours, ... certainly not the path to improving living standards that we'd expect in an economy posting strong productivity gains.