A Quote by Barack Obama

I promised to bring change to Washington. The underlying reason for the economic mess we're in has been building for years. It's a fundamental imbalance in which the top 1 percent now gets almost a quarter of all national income. We haven't seen income and wealth this concentrated since the late nineteen twenties, and we all know what happened then - the Great Depression. We'll never really get out of the gravitational pull of the Great Recession until we fix this basic problem.

Barack Obama

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Barack Obama
American - President
Born: August 4, 1961

This is a very important issue that the corporate media chooses not to talk about a whole lot, that we have an economic system which is rigged, which means that at the same time as the middle class of this country is disappearing, almost all of the new income and wealth in America is going to the top 1 percent. You have the top one-tenth of 1 percent owning almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent - 58 percent of all new income is going to the top 1 percent.

Bernie Sanders

Over the period from 1988 to 2005, the income share of the top five percent has grown by about 3.5 percent of global household income, and the shares of all the other groups have diminished. The greatest relative reduction was in the bottom quarter, which lost about one third of its share of global household income, declining from 1.155 to 0.775 percent, and now is even more marginalized.

Thomas Pogge

The bottom quarter of the human population has only three-quarters of one percent of global household income, about one thirty-second of the average income in the world, whereas the people in the top five percent have nine times the average income. So the ratio between the averages in the top five percent and the bottom quarter is somewhere around 300 to one - a huge inequality that also gives you a sense of how easily poverty could be avoided.

Thomas Pogge

For the three decades after WWII, incomes grew at about 3 percent a year for people up and down the income ladder, but since then most income growth has occurred among the top quintile. And among that group, most of the income growth has occurred among the top 5 percent. The pattern repeats itself all the way up. Most of the growth among the top 5 percent has been among the top 1 percent, and most of the growth among that group has been among the top one-tenth of one percent.

Robert H. Frank

Income tax in particular in the United States is concentrated on the top half of the income distribution, and very heavily skewed towards the top 10 or even top 1 percent.

Judy Woodruff

The American people understand that it is grotesquely unfair - we are a society that prides itself on fairness, that prides itself on equal opportunity, and people are looking out and seeing, since the Great Recession of 2008, 99 percent of all new income going to the top 1 percent.

Bernie Sanders

Is it just a coincidence that as the portion of our income spent on food has declined, spending on health care has soared? In 1960 Americans spent 17.5 percent of their income on food and 5.2 percent of national income on health care. Since then, those numbers have flipped: Spending on food has fallen to 9.9 percent, while spending on heath care has climbed to 16 percent of national income. I have to think that by spending a little more on healthier food we could reduce the amount we have to spend on heath care.

Michael Pollan

It makes no difference to a widow with her savings in a 5 percent passbook account whether she pays 100 percent income tax on her interest income during a period of zero inflation or pays no income tax during years of 5 percent inflation. Either way, she is 'taxed' in a manner that leaves her no real income whatsoever. Any money she spends comes right out of capital. She would find outrageous a 100 percent income tax but doesn't seem to notice that 5 percent inflation is the economic equivalent.

Warren Buffett

Recently released government economic statistics covering 2010, the first year of real recovery from the financial collapse of 2008, found that fully 93 percent of additional income gains coming out of the recession went straight into the wallets and purses of the top 1 percent.

Eric Alterman

In the tradition of national income accounting, economic policymakers have typically focused on variables such as income, wealth, and consumption.

Ben Bernanke

The key to financial freedom and great wealth is a person's ability or skill to convert earned income into passive income and/or portfolio income.

Robert Kiyosaki

What democratic socialism is about is saying that it is immoral and wrong that the top one-tenth of 1 percent in this country own almost 90 percent - almost - own almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. That it is wrong, today, in a rigged economy, that 57 percent of all new income is going to the top 1 percent. That when you look around the world, you see every other major country providing health care to all people as a right, except the United States.

Bernie Sanders

The collective income of all these people - the bottom half - is less than three percent of global household income, and so there is a grotesque maldistribution of income and wealth.

Thomas Pogge

Spending by government currently amounts to about 45 percent of national income. By that test, government owns 45 percent of the means of production that produce the national income. The U.S. is now 45 percent socialist.

Milton Friedman

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.

James P. Hoffa

If you look at what happened, I came in the middle of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. And unlike Franklin Delano Roosevelt who waited, well, didn't take office until about three years into the Great Depression, it was happening just as I was elected.

Barack Obama

A Quote by Barack Obama

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