Top 93 Quotes & Sayings by Annie Lowrey - Page 2

As a general point, the United States has an extreme budget commitment to prisons, guns, warplanes, armored vehicles, detention facilities, courts, jails, drones, and patrols - to law and order, meted out discriminately.

Along with the rise of inequality, the slowdown in productivity growth, and the shrinking of the middle class, the spiraling cost of living has become a central facet of American economic life.

Urbanization, falling poverty rates, and growing global trade have changed the diets and expanded the waistlines of the world's poor, with processed food and sweetened drinks becoming household staples.

In the longer term, immigrants contribute more to the government's coffers than they receive in social spending. Moreover, these programs are not just welfare or a handout, but also an investment, helping ensure that families are healthy, educated, and able to work and support themselves over the course of generations.

Aided by the Great Society and the New Deal, the middle class grew, everywhere from Winnetka to Orlando to Humboldt.

Millions of Millennials and Gen Zers were never exposed to the threats of the Soviet Union; they did not live through the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev; they do not remember the Mariel boatlift or the SALT treaties or the Cuban missile crisis.

The country should not have to wonder whether politicians' stock trades were corrupt. It should not have to think about politicians' portfolios at all.

Police forces across America need root-to-stem changes - to their internal cultures, training and hiring practices, insurance, and governing regulations.

In Opportunity Zones, as they are called, investors will receive huge tax breaks for building office parks, warehouses, housing, grocery stores, and the like, helping to ease poverty and end blight in distressed communities.

Black women are three times as likely to die giving birth or shortly after birth as white women. Black women in the United States die having a child at roughly the same rate as women in Mongolia.

Depriving immigrant families of health care, healthy food, insurance, and antipoverty supports does not just hurt them. In the long term, it hurts everyone.

Taxes do have a clear record of curbing the consumption of, and thus the public-health impact of, tobacco and alcohol.

The risk that people pose to wolfdogs is far greater, statistically, than the risk that wolfdogs pose to people. Many are bred in miserable, inhumane conditions, and kept in equally miserable, inhumane conditions.

Home-health and personal-care work is one of the country's fastest-growing occupational sectors. But it is one marked by low pay and meager benefits, a problem that might become more urgent as the U.S.'s population continues to age.

Americans are no less susceptible to disease, joblessness, and family changes than their peers in rich nations, but they are made more fragile by these crises. The country has a thinner safety net, fewer public goods, and less social insurance than other countries.

It is a country that professes to care for babies. But in the United States, the infant death rate is twice as high as in similarly wealthy countries. Premature birth and low birth weight are common ailments, with lifelong and even intergenerational effects.

Wolves are afraid of humans, whereas dogs are not. Wolves hunt game, whereas dogs scavenge human leftovers or eat what their human companions put out for dinner. Wolves are not great at following human commands, whereas dogs are brilliant at it.

Wolves want to be wolves. Servals want to be servals. Bears want to be bears. And it is impossible to be a wolf or a serval or a bear when living in a cage.

Older people still see socialism and communism as dangerous, authoritarian political systems, whereas younger people are more likely to see them as economic systems, and to care far less one way or another.

The cost-of-living crisis extends beyond housing. Health-care costs are exorbitant, too: Americans pay roughly twice as much for insurance and medical services as do citizens of other wealthy countries, but they don't have better outcomes.

In some ways, modern life has made us unkind. That unkindness has profound personal effects. And if we can build a kinder society, that would make life better for everyone.

Fighting recessions and building public infrastructure, including care, health, and educational infrastructure - this should not be the work of citizens. When it is, let's acknowledge that's a tragedy.

Long before 2020, many Americans were in the position of patching their own safety net and acting as their own city hall.

Immigrant families pay taxes. They work. They start businesses. They spend money in their communities. They join native-born families in being economically productive, both paying money to the government and receiving benefits from the government.

During a coronavirus-induced downturn, families will be at greater risk for food insecurity, eviction, and job loss; kids will go hungry; food pantries and social-service organizations will come under more strain.

Americans have become more atomized by education, income, and political leanings. That polarization has meant sharply increased antipathy toward people with different beliefs.

The rise of populist movements and the shrinking of the middle class - with all the economic pain and political turbulence that comes with that - seems to have increased the appetite of both parties for dramatic proposals.

Lower-income immigrant families might receive more in benefits than they pay in taxes. But that mathematical equilibrium is temporary, and an artifact of the way the tax-and-transfer system is structured to help lower-income families and to support families with kids.

Arguably, it might prompt consumers to think about their consumption, with paper straws and reusable grocery bags and shared urban bicycles acting as a gateway to more meaningful changes.

Indeed, the share of teachers in a union has fallen to less than half, driven in part by older, unionized teachers retiring, the rise of certain districts' reliance on charters and other private education options, and legal changes that have curtailed the ability of unions to bargain on behalf of workers.

Products marketed as being earth-friendly are often not that earth-friendly.

Economic anxiety might not have won Donald Trump the White House, but much of his strongest support came from more sclerotic rural and industrial areas.

Many economists and industry experts agree that the United States faces unfair competition and artificially low prices that have damaged the domestic steel industry. But they don't agree that a tariff is the right approach for addressing the problem.