50+ All Time Famous Income Inequality Quotes

Income inequality refers to the unequal distribution of income among individuals or households in a society. Factors such as education, discrimination, and government policies contribute to this disparity. High levels of income inequality can lead to social unrest, economic inefficiency, political instability, reduced social mobility, and health disparities. Addressing it requires a comprehensive approach, including policies to improve education, ensure fair wages, implement progressive taxation, enhance social safety nets, and foster inclusive economic growth. By tackling the root causes, societies can strive towards creating a more equitable and sustainable economic environment.

Income Inequality Quotes

1. “The difference between rich and poor is becoming more extreme, and as income inequality widens the wealth gap in major nations, education, health and social mobility are all threatened.”
— Helene D. Gayle

2. “The Princeton economist Alan Krueger has demonstrated that societies with higher levels of income inequality are societies with lower levels of social mobility.”
— George Packer

3. “The problems of the world, from immigration to populism to income inequality to sustainability to peacekeeping, require a well-functioning supranational body.”
— Richard Edelman

4. “The daily deluge of tales of lechery and trauma holds a hidden but crucial truism: sexual harassment routinely feeds on income inequality. After all, it’s much harder to exploit an equal.”
— Alissa Quart

5. “The triumph of economic liberalization has coincided with a sharp increase in income inequality.”
— Chrystia Freeland

6. “The story of Detroit’s bankruptcy was simple enough: Allow capitalism to grow the city, campaign against income inequality, tax the job creators until they flee, increase government spending in order to boost employment, promise generous pension plans to keep people voting for failure. Rinse, wash and repeat.”
— Ben Shapiro

7. “In the same way that Occupy Wall Street forever elevated that concept of income inequality, the Black Lives Matter protesters have elevated the idea of inequity in policing as it relates to minority communities.”
— Charles M. Blow

8. “Income inequality has made having kids, much like getting a quality college education, a rich person’s privilege.”
— Ana Kasparian

9. “I fall into the camp that income inequality is the biggest problem we face.”
— Gina Raimondo

10. “Half the U.S. population owns barely 2 percent of its wealth, putting the United States near Rwanda and Uganda and below such nations as pre-Arab Spring Tunisia and Egypt when measured by degrees of income inequality.”
— Eric Alterman

11. “Eye-popping tales of growing income inequality are hardly new. By now, nearly every American must be painfully aware of the widening pay gap between top executives and shop floor laborers; between ‘Master of the Universe’ financiers and pretty much everyone else.”
— Steven Rattner

12. “Everything in America is so stratified by class now. We have the 93rd level of income inequality in the world. You’re already seeing highway lanes that are for pay and ones that aren’t.”
— Adam McKay

13. “I worry about growing income inequality. But I worry even more that the discussion is too narrowly focused. I worry that our outrage at the top 1 percent is distracting us from the problem that we should really care about: how to create opportunities and ensure a reasonable standard of living for the bottom 20 percent.”
— Sendhil Mullainathan

14. “Income inequality has gotten worse under President Barack Obama.”
— Timothy Noah

15. “Income inequality is worse in towns run by Democrat mayors than in towns run by Republican mayors.”
— Rand Paul

16. “The devotion that young Chinese feel to the Internet is driven by deep factors ranging from youth unemployment and income inequality to political repression and the demographic imbalance between men and women.”
— Evan Osnos

17. “The biggest single challenge to America and our future is income inequality. We’ve got to fix it.”
— Kenneth Langone

18. “Poverty is a national issue and needs a federal response. After all, U.S. federal government policies helped produce massive income inequality by lopsided breaks for the super wealthy.”
— Donna Brazile

19. “Individual nations have offered their own contributions to income inequality – financial deregulation and upper-bracket tax cuts in the United States; insider privatization in Russia; rent-seeking in regulated industries in India and Mexico.”
— Chrystia Freeland

20. “Income inequality is one thing, but a permanent division into the haves and have-nots is an entirely different thing – and much less acceptable.”
— Chrystia Freeland

21. “For every challenge we face – unemployment, poverty, crime, income growth, income inequality, productivity, competitiveness – a great education is a major component of the solution.”
— Bruce Rauner

22. “There is greater income inequality in the United States than in any other industrialized country. Yes, the debt is a problem that must be dealt with. To me, however, the disappearing middle class is even worse – bad for our economy and really bad for our democracy.”
— Jan Schakowsky

23. “With many serious challenges facing our country – pressing issues like climate change, income inequality, and education – Trump has expressed neither the inclination nor the ability to take on these problems.”
— Tom Steyer

24. “There is, happily, a non-redistributive approach to address income inequality – one that doesn’t rely upon government. It’s to grow the pie. That is, create more decent jobs that pay more.”
— Andrew Yang

25. “For all the obsession in Washington and in college faculty lounges over income inequality, why isn’t there more outrage over government policies that exacerbate the problem? There are hundreds of programs that make the poor poorer and increase poverty in America.”
— Stephen Moore

26. “Income inequality has become so prevalent in the U.S. that examples of its negative impact on the middle class are as common as Kanye West saying something cringeworthy in the media.”
— Ana Kasparian

27. “You can be hostile to greed. You can be hostile to income inequality. You can be for raising raises… but you can’t be hostile to businesses because 98 percent of businesses are small business people.”
— Tim Ryan

28. “Democrats deserve credit for engaging with big issues such as climate change and income inequality and coming up with bold, imaginative solutions.”
— Max Boot

29. “Income inequality isn’t sexy.”
— Alexandra C. Pelosi

30. “I think that on the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders talks about income inequality and poverty alleviation, and those issues are so important.”
— Kerry Kennedy

31. “Numerous studies have shown income inequality growing since the late 1970s. Real earnings have fallen for many families, with globalization, the decline of unions and technological innovations eroding workers’ wages.”
— Annie Lowrey

32. “Socialism violates at least three of the Ten Commandments: It turns government into God, it legalizes thievery and it elevates covetousness. Discussions of income inequality, after all, aren’t about prosperity but about petty spite. Why should you care how much money I make, so long as you are happy?”
— Ben Shapiro

33. “The best solution to income inequality is providing a high-quality education for everybody. In our highly technological, globalized economy, people without education will not be able to improve their economic situation.”
— Ben Bernanke

34. “President Obama believes that income inequality is one of the most pressing matters facing the nation. If we are going to be a country that provides ladders of opportunity and believes in a thriving middle class, then we have to raise the minimum wage.”
— Tom Perez

35. “Income inequality and government corruption are both unfortunate realities in the United States.”
— Ana Kasparian

36. “Income inequality is troubling because, among other things, it means that many people in our society don’t have the opportunities to advance themselves.”
— Ben Bernanke

37. “Some liberals think that describing any role that education gaps play in creating income inequality is some sort of sellout – that, in essence, you’re telling the middle class, ‘Tough luck; you should have stayed in college.’”
— Timothy Noah

38. “I think Republicans need to take income inequality more seriously. Not because I favor equality of outcomes. I do not. I think the Right is correct to stress merit and earned rewards, not handouts and forced equality. But I think what Republicans are blind to is that power corrupts.”
— Jonathan Haidt

39. “The major economic policy challenges facing the nation today – pick your favorites among the usual suspects of low public and household savings, concerns about educational quality and achievement, high and rising income inequality, the large imbalances between our social insurance commitments and resources – are not about monetary policy.”
— Timothy Geithner

40. “The weak economy, widening income inequality, gridlock in Congress and a presidential election: Those were perhaps the dominant economic and political themes of 2012.”
— Steven Rattner

41. “Liberals talk about the ‘income inequality’ and the ‘unfairness’ and the disparity of the haves and the have-nots in New York City. Who has been running that city for all this time? Who has created the underclass in this country? It’s the Democrat Party.”
— Rush Limbaugh

42. “There is a huge number of people outside our borders who would love to come here. In fact, many of them come here, get well educated, and then are required to leave… This is a factor in income inequality.”
— Alan Greenspan

43. “In order to counteract income inequality, it’s essential to tackle poverty in an integrated way that has long-term impact. We need to give people the capacity to be resilient, to take on challenges and to learn the skills they need to work toward more prosperous futures.”
— Helene D. Gayle

44. “Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs did not start out wealthy, and actually added to income inequality, but we all benefit from their creative effort.”
— Foster Friess

45. “When the topic is growing income inequality, it’s hard to prettify an imbalance between the rich and everybody else, so instead, conservatives try to argue that it doesn’t exist.”
— Timothy Noah

46. “The truth is, Hillary Clinton’s ideas create more income inequality. Why? Because bigger government creates crony capitalism. When you have a 70,000 page tax code, you’ve got to be very wealthy, very powerful, very well connected to dig your way through that tax code.”
— Carly Fiorina

47. “You want to close the income inequality gap in part? Give us better educated kids out of high school. Give us kids that can challenge and succeed in the challenge with technology. You give us those kinds of kids, and watch the needle move.”
— Kenneth Langone

48. “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.”
— Chrystia Freeland

49. “As income inequality increases, the social and political sway of those at the very, very top grows, too. They are nearly all men, and men whose lived experience tells them that women, for whatever reason, just don’t have what it takes.”
— Chrystia Freeland

50. “If we wait until income inequality is much more severe, we will have a whole class of new superrich who will probably feel entitled to their wealth and will have the means to defend their interest. That’s already gone far enough. We shouldn’t let it become more extreme.”
— Robert J. Shiller

51. “Wishy-washy equivocations – and not just on abortion, but on immigration, on civil rights, on income inequality – weaken all of us.”
— Laura Moser

52. “We need to see the FLSA and the minimum wage as part of a larger struggle to cut poverty and to address the challenge of income inequality.”
— Tom Perez

53. “Fragility, violence, and conflict are complex. Fragility is influenced by a wide set of factors, many of which are deeply entrenched, such as high social and income inequality. The lines between criminal, inter-communal, and politically motivated violence are often blurred.”
— Peter Maurer

54. “It is true that globalization has fueled greater income inequality. But much of this increase should be welcomed, not condemned. There is nothing inherently bad about inequality. Whether it is bad depends on how it comes about and what it does.”
— Angus Deaton

55. “When I wrote ‘The Assistants,’ I knew very much that I wanted to write about income inequality and student loan debt and the gender wage gap, but I wanted to put it in a really slick, fun package. That book ended up being described as a socially conscious novel in chick-lit clothing.”
— Camille Perri

56. “It’s really difficult for mainstream – let’s say, cable outlets – to talk about things like income inequality, wealth inequality when the advertisers that are funding their shows are the same corporations that want to ensure that the same system continues.”
— Ana Kasparian

57. “If accessing the Internet becomes more difficult for low-income communities, academic and employment competition may be undermined, and could damage the prospects of upward mobility for low-income New Yorkers and further exacerbate income inequality.”
— Letitia James

58. “Economic mobility will fix income inequality.”
— Joe Sestak

59. “Study after study has shown that the availability of stable employment, reduced income inequality and post-imprisonment neighbourhood affluence are three of the most significant factors in reducing the frequency of violent offences.”
— Ash Sarkar

60. “The U.S. has some of the most significant income inequality in the developed world, yet people seem routinely to underestimate that fact.”
— Maria Konnikova