Robert B. Reich > Quotes

“When Republicans recently charged the President with promoting 'class warfare,' he answered it was 'just math.' But it's more than math. It's a matter of morality.

Republicans have posed the deepest moral question of any society: whether we're all in it together. Their answer is we're not.

President Obama should proclaim, loudly and clearly, we are.”
― Robert B. Reich

“A funny thing happened to the First Amendment on its way to the public forum. According to the Supreme Court, money is now speech and corporations are now people. But when real people without money assemble to express their dissatisfaction with the political consequences of this, they’re treated as public nuisances and evicted.”
― Robert Reich

“It turns out that what money buys has rapidly diminishing emotional returns ... As long as we're not destitute, happiness depends less on getting what we want than appreciating what we already have.”
― Robert B. Reich

“The idea of a “free market” separate and distinct from government has functioned as a useful cover for those who do not want the market mechanism fully exposed. They have had the most influence over it and would rather keep it that way. The mythology is useful precisely because it hides their power.”
― Robert B. Reich, Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few

“They call themselves conservatives but that’s not it, either. They don’t want to conserve what we now have. They’d rather take the country backwards – before the 1960s and 1970s, and the Environmental Protection Act, Medicare, and Medicaid; before the New Deal, and its provision for Social Security, unemployment insurance, the forty-hour workweek, and official recognition of trade unions; even before the Progressive Era, and the first national income tax, antitrust laws, and Federal Reserve. They’re not conservatives. They’re regressives. And the America they seek is the one we had in the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century.”
― Robert Reich

“A smaller government reflecting the needs of the middle class and poor is superior to a big government reflecting the needs of the privileged and powerful.”
― Robert Reich

“The problem was not that Americans spent beyond their means but that their means had not kept up with what the larger economy could and should have been able to provide them. the American economy had been growing briskly, and America's middle class naturally expected to share in that growth. But it didn't. A larger and larger portion of the economy's winnings had gone to people at the top.”
― Robert B. Reich, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future

“Today the great divide is not between left and right. It’s between democracy and oligarchy.”
― Robert B. Reich, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It

“The simultaneous rise of both the working poor and non-working rich offers further evidence that earnings no longer correlate with effort.”
― Robert B. Reich, Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few

“Powerlessness can be a self-fulfilling prophesy. There is much that is wrong with America. But it will only be made right only if we force change to occur.”
― Robert Reich

“It’s no mere coincidence that over the last century the top earners’ share of the nation’s total income peaked in 1928 and 2007—the two years just preceding the biggest downturns.”
― Robert B. Reich, Beyond Outrage

“Indentured servitude is banned, but what about students seeking to sell shares of their future earnings in exchange for money up front to pay for their college tuitions?”
― Robert B. Reich

“Angry voters are more willing to support candidates who vilify their opponents and find easy scapegoats. Talking heads have become shouting heads. Many Americans have grown cynical about our collective ability to solve our problems. And that cynicism has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as nothing gets solved.”
― Robert B. Reich, Beyond Outrage (Expanded Edition): What has gone wrong with our economy and our democracy, and how to fix it

“The tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003—and extended for two years in 2010—in 2011 saved the richest 1.4 million taxpayers (the top 1 percent) more money than the rest of America’s 140.89 million taxpayers received in total income.”
― Robert B. Reich, Beyond Outrage

“Be patient. Changes that alter the structure of power and widen opportunity require years of hard work, as those who toiled for the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, or have been working for the rights of the disabled and gays, would tell you. It took thirty years of continuous fulmination for women to get the right to vote; fifty years of agitation before employers were required to bargain with unionized workers. Those who benefit from the prevailing allocation of power and wealth don’t give up their privileged positions without a fight, and they usually have more resources at their disposal than the insurgents. Take satisfaction from small victories, but don’t be discouraged or fall into cynicism. And don’t allow yourself to burn out. I”
― Robert B. Reich, Beyond Outrage: What has gone wrong with our economy and our democracy, and how to fix them

“It is no great feat for an economy to create a large number of very-low-wage jobs. Slavery, after all, was a full employment system.”
― Robert B. Reich

“Yet the notion that you’re paid what you’re “worth” is by now so deeply ingrained in the public consciousness that many who earn very little assume it’s their own fault.”
― Robert B. Reich, Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few

“For three decades almost all the gains from economic growth have gone to the top. In the 1960s and 1970s, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans got 9–10 percent of our total income. By 2007, just before the Great Recession, that share had more than doubled, to 23.5 percent. Over the same period the wealthiest one-tenth of 1 percent tripled its share. We haven’t experienced this degree of concentrated wealth since the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century.”
― Robert B. Reich, Beyond Outrage (Expanded Edition): What has gone wrong with our economy and our democracy, and how to fix it

“we still haven’t learned the essential lesson of the two big economic crashes of the last seventy-five years: when the economy becomes too lopsided—disproportionately benefiting corporate owners and top executives vis-à-vis average workers—it tips over.”
― Robert B. Reich, Beyond Outrage (Expanded Edition): What has gone wrong with our economy and our democracy, and how to fix it

“Trump is the best thing ever to have happened to the new American oligarchy. In addition to his tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks, he stokes divisiveness in ways that keeps the bottom 90 percent from seeing how the oligarchy has taken over the reins of government, twisted government to its benefit, and siphoned off the economy’s benefits. His deal with the oligarchy has been simple: He’ll stoke division and tribalism so most Americans won’t see CEOs getting exorbitant pay while they’re slicing the pay of average workers, won’t pay attention to the giant tax cut that went to big corporations and the wealthy, and won’t notice a boardroom culture that tolerates financial conflicts of interest, insider trading, and the outright bribery of public officials through unlimited campaign donations.”
― Robert B. Reich, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It

“It is still possible to find people who believe that government policy did not end the Great Depression and undergird the Great Prosperity, just as it is possible to uncover people who do not believe in evolution.”
― Robert B. Reich, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future

“There can be no “free market” without government. The “free market” does not exist in the wilds beyond the reach of civilization. Competition in the wild is a contest for survival in which the largest and strongest typically win. Civilization, by contrast, is defined by rules; rules create markets, and governments generate the rules.”
― Robert B. Reich, Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few

“Political victories that undermine trust in politics shouldn’t be considered victories; they’re net losses for society. Record corporate profits achieved by eroding the public’s trust in business aren’t successes; they’re derelictions of duty. Lobbying and campaign donations that result in laws and regulations favoring the lobbyists and donors aren’t triumphs if they weaken public confidence in our democracy; they, too, are abject failures of leadership.”
― Robert B Reich, The Common Good

“Government doesn’t “intrude” on the “free market.” It creates the market. The rules are neither neutral nor universal, and they are not permanent. Different societies at different times have adopted different versions. The rules partly mirror a society’s evolving norms and values but also reflect who in society has the most power to make or influence them.”
― Robert B. Reich, Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few

“The concentration of wealth in America has created an education system in which the super-rich can buy admission to college for their children, a political system in which they can buy Congress and the presidency, a health-care system in which they can buy care that others can’t, and a justice system in which they can buy their way out of jail.”
― Robert B. Reich, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It

“The problem is that the choice we make in the market don't fully reflect our values as citizens. We might make different choices if we understood the social consequences of our purchases or investments and if we knew all other consumers and investors would join us in forbearing from certain great deals whose social consequence were abhorrent to us.”
― Robert B. Reich

“Keynes declared capitalism the best system ever devised to achieve a civilized economic society. But he recognized in it two major faults—“its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.”
― Robert B. Reich, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future

“Few ideas have more profoundly poisoned the minds of more people than the notion of a “free market” existing somewhere in the universe, into which government “intrudes.”
― Robert B. Reich, Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few

“A market—any market—requires that government make and enforce the rules of the game. In most modern democracies, such rules emanate from legislatures, administrative agencies, and courts. Government doesn’t “intrude” on the “free market.” It creates the market.”
― Robert B. Reich, Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few

“Education is a public good that builds the capacity of a nation to wisely govern itself, and promotes equal opportunity.”
― Robert B Reich, The Common Good