Poverty Rate Quotes

The real minimum wage is zero.

The poverty rate among black married couples has been in single digits ever since 1994. You would never learn that from most of the media. Similarly you look at those blacks that have gone on to college or finished college, the incarceration rate is some tiny fraction of what it is among those blacks who have dropped out of high school. So it’s not being black; it’s a way of life. Unfortunately, the way of life is being celebrated not only in rap music, but among the intelligentsia, is a way of life that leads to a lot of very big problems for most people.

China adopted a capitalist system in the 1980s, and they went from a 60% poverty rate to 10%.

Blacks are about seven times more likely to live in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty than whites.

These Americans are among the working poor with full-time jobs earning $5.15 an hour. Millions fall into this boat, even more when you consider that the poverty line has not been adequately adjusted to reflect the true level of poverty in this country.

There are levels of poverty in South Africa that are totally unacceptable.

Society’s willingness to provide for the poor among them increases when the standard of living is advancing.

Putting women first would mean strengthening America's social safety net, because a higher proportion of single-mother families live in poverty here than in any other wealthy country.

We are not strangers to poverty in New Mexico.

Poverty is what we call the extremes at the bottom.

There may not be as many rich individuals, but there will be far less poor.

The fundamental fact in the lives of the poor in most parts of America is that the wages of common labor are far below the benefits of AFDC, Medicaid, food stamps, public housing, public defenders, leisure time and all the other goods and services of the welfare state.

Not only does the proportion of the poor increase with the growth of the city, but their condition becomes more wretched.

The collective shortfall of the 3.08 billion people (47 percent of world population) who, in 2005, lived below $2.50 per day was $507 billion per annum, which indeed comes to about two-thirds of the present US military budget. This gives us a rough sense of how much the eradication of poverty would cost.

The American economy cannot be considered healthy when most of its workers and consumers are not.

The dependency on the dole, formerly limited in pre-Clinton days to 14 million women and children on AFDC, will now grow to a clear majority of the U.S. population.

For too long, we've attached some mythic notion to government solutions, and yet, 40 years after we began the War on Poverty, poverty still abounds.

I live in New Orleans, because it's the strangest city in the United States. It has the highest murder rate in the country, the highest incarceration rate, and often we have to boil our drinking water, but there's nowhere else remotely like it.

Without Social Security benefits, more than 40 percent of Americans 65 years and older would live below the federal poverty line. Even more striking is that Social Security is the only source of retirement income for almost a quarter of elderly beneficiaries.

Half of the world lives on [about] $2 a day. If there is a hungry kid in the world, we shouldn't consider ourselves more evolved than homo habilis.

We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won

Three-quarters of the world's population doesn't have enough to eat!

We are having the single worst recovery the U.S. has had since the Great Depression. I don't care how you measure it. The East Coast knows it. The West Coast knows it. North, South, old, young, everyone knows it's the worst recovery since the Great Depression.

The gap between rich and poor under President Obama is getting bigger because fewer well-paying jobs are available. Corporations are being taxed to the hilt and are loathe to add more workers. Thus, salaries fall because there are more than enough applicants to fill any job vacancy.

Gates's net wealth is greater than the combined net worth of the poorest 40% of Americans (112,000,000 people).