Income Redistribution Quotes

For example, Shawn Cole, a professor at Harvard Business School, finds that Indian state-owned banks increase their lending to the politically important but relatively poor constituency of farmers by about 5 to 10 percentage points in election years.51 The effect is most pronounced in districts with close elections. The consequences of the lending are greater loan defaults and no measurable increase in agricultural output, which suggest that it really serves as a costly form of income redistribution. ~ Raghuram G. Rajan

Are we interested in treating the symptoms of poverty and economic stagnation through income redistribution and class warfare, or do we want to go at the root causes of poverty and economic stagnation by promoting pro-growth policies that promote prosperity? ~ Paul Ryan

If the Liberal Left can create the common perception that success and failure are simple matters of 'fortune' or 'luck,' then it is easy to promote and justify their various income redistribution schemes. ~ Neal Boortz

Played out over time, the differences in growth and middle-class prosperity between countries that have decreased incentives (through increased income redistribution) and those that have not are startling. Look at the differences between Europe and the U.S.; East and West Germany; and Communist China versus Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China today. There are enormous and compounding costs to dulling incentives for entrepreneurial risk-taking with few, if any, exceptions. ~ Edward Conard

Government income redistribution programs produce the same result as theft. In fact, that's what a thief does; he redistributes income. The difference between government and thievery is mostly a matter of legality. ~ Walter E. Williams

The evolution of government from its medieval, Mafia-like character to that embodying modern legal institutions and instruments is a major part of the history of freedom. It is a part that tends to be obscured or ignored because of the myopic vision of many economists, who persist in modeling government as nothing more than a gigantic form of theft and income redistribution. ~ Douglass North

Socialism is not a meritocracy. By definition it places increasingly confining restraints on those that succeed the most. ~ A.E. Samaan

With the socialization of the health care system through institutions such as Medicaid and Medicare and the regulation of the insurance industry (by restricting an insurer's right of refusal: to exclude any individual risk as uninsurable, and discriminate freely, according to actuarial methods, between different group risks) a monstrous machinery of wealth and income redistribution at the expense of responsible individuals and low-risk groups in favor of irresponsible actors and high-risk groups has been put in motion. ~ Hans-Hermann Hoppe

We've become a culture where earning money doesn't entitle you to it, but wanting it does. That is the essence of redistribution. ~ Ken Blackwell

If you believe in democracy, make arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible. ~ Aldous Huxley

Every American should have above average income, and my Administration is going to see they get it. ~ William J. Clinton

Freedom ultimately is dignity. And dignity, not income, is the opposite of poverty. ~ Jacqueline Novogratz

Fitz sat in a green leather armchair. To Ethel's surprise, Albert Solman was there, too, in a black suit and a stiff-collared shirt. A lawyer by training, Solman was what Edwardian gentlemen called a man of business. He managed Fitz's money, checking his income from coal royalties and rents, paying the bills, and issuing cash for staff wages. He also dealt with leases and other contracts, and occasionally brought lawsuits against people who tried to cheat Fitz. Ethel had met him before and did not like him. She thought he was a know-all. Perhaps all lawyers were; she did not know: he was the only one she had ever met. ~ Ken Follett

I am indeed rich, since my income is superior to my expenses, and my expense is equal to my wishes. ~ Edward Gibbon

We checked our bags and got on line with some of our fellow passengers. Judging from the looks of them, it was clear that they were members of a different income bracket from the people I preferred to surround myself with. But since I also wasn't from the income bracket I preferred, I held off on voicing my initial feelings of despair. ~ Chelsea Handler

Today, its expensive prescription medications burdening seniors on fixed incomes with thousands of dollars in yearly out-of-pocket costs. ~ Jim Gerlach

At 50$ per barrel of oil we shall lose about three trillion rubles of budget income ~ Anton Siluanov

Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon lent their support to such interventionist measures as Medicare and the Environmental Protection Agency. Eisenhower pushed for the greatest public works project in the history of the United States - the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, which linked the nation together with four-lane (and occasionally six-lane) interstate highways covering forty thousand miles. The GOP also backed large expansion of federally supported higher education. And to many Republicans at the time, a marginal income tax rate of more than 70 percent on top incomes was not repugnant. ~ Robert B. Reich

I think it's terrible the way people don't share things in this country. I think it's a heartless government that will let one baby be born owning a big piece of the country, the way I was born, and let another baby be born without owning anything. The least a government could do, it seems to me, is to divide things up fairly among the babies. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

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

While tax refunds amount to substantial income for many Americans, current IRS rules do not allow taxpayers to directly deposit their refund into more than one account. ~ Jim Cooper

At the nation's top 130 colleges and universities, only 9 percent of first-year students are from the bottom half of the nation's household income distribution, while 91 percent are from families in the top half of the income range. ~ Nicole Baker Fulgham

Whenever a government produces a method of extorting income for a "public service" it will endeavor to make that service into such a large bureaucracy that not only will it become an excuse for ever larger funding, but that it will be made so large and all encompassing, so as to be beyond removal from within that society. In the case of the American Justice system, the eventuality is that all citizens will be criminalized for the benefit of the system and not for the society for which it purports to protect. ~ D.B.Hall From The Book Tirade Of Dave

When your outgo exceeds your income, the upshot may be your downfall. ~ Paul Harvey

At cheaper and nearer seats of Learning parents with slender incomes may place their sons in a course of education putting them on a level with the sons of the Richest. ~ James Madison

I think that we've had an economy that's been out of balance for too long. So the general principle of raising taxes on higher income Americans, like myself, and providing relief to those who haven't benefited as much from this new global economy, I think is a sound one. ~ Barack Obama

Public education is a great instrument of social change. Through it, if we so desire, we can make our country more nearly a democracy without classes. To do so will require the efforts of us all-teachers, administrators, taxpayers and statesmen. Education is a social process, perhaps the most important process in determining the future of our country; it should command a far larger portion of our national income than it does today. ~ James Bryant Conant

[Young people] can't do much with [student debt] other than try to figure out how to pay it down. They can't take jobs they want. They can't get the credit they would like to start a business. So we're going to refinance it, we're going move people into income-contingent repayment plans, we're going to have a date certain when their obligations end, and I'm not going to let the government harass kids. ~ Hillary Clinton

Progressive taxation of income and profits means that precisely those parts of the income which people would have saved and invested are taxed away ~ Ludwig Von Mises

Recipients of transfers tend to become less self-reliant and more dependent on government payments. When people can get support without exercising their own abilities to discover and respond to opportunities for earning income, those abilities atrophy. People forget - or never learn in the first place - how to help themselves, and eventually some of them simply accept their helplessness. ~ Robert Higgs

Many kids, particularly in lower-income families, would actually benefit from more structured activities. Plenty of children, especially teenagers, thrive on a busy schedule. But just as other trappings of modern childhood, from homework to technology, are subject to the law of diminishing returns, there is a danger of overscheduling the young. ~ Carl Honore

The market might have learned a simple lesson: Don't make loans to people who can't repay them. Instead it learned a complicated one: You can keep on making these loans, just don't keep them on your books. Make the loans, then sell them off to the fixed income departments of big Wall Street investment banks, which will in turn package them into bonds and sell them to investors. ~ Michael Lewis

If you look at the balance sheet, the US is heavily in debt. If you look at the income account - the amount of interest the US pays abroad - it is almost exactly equal to the amount of interest that it receives from abroad. American assets held abroad are earning a higher rate of return than foreign assets held here. ~ Milton Friedman

But words mattered, more so in Newark than many other places. In a world where income and possessions were limited, words represented dignity, pride, self-worth. ~ Jeff Hobbs

There are people who enjoy the life in England but don't pay a penny in tax, whereas my footballers pay more than half their income in tax. ~ Gordon Taylor

America is a land of taxation that was founded to avoid taxation. ~ Laurence J. Peter

There are 11 states in the United States that in the last 50 years instituted an income tax. So I looked at each of those 11 states over the last 50 years, and I took their current economic metrics and their metrics for the five years before they put in the progressive income tax. Every single state that introduced a progressive income tax has declined as an overall share of the U.S. economy. ~ Arthur Laffer

You don't lock into a ten-year family budget. You take it a year at a time - maybe even six months at a time. And then if the income really comes in the way you hope it does, then you can make some of those expenditures that you've been waiting to make. We think that same principle should apply to the national family we call America. ~ Dick Gephardt

They say that democracy cannot be adopted; it has to be adapted to the African way of thinking. What does that mean? That the all-powerful and corrupt political leaders should stay in power? That Teodoro Obiang, the President of Equatorial Guinea, should appropriate all the country's money for himself, a country with income per capita of more than 20,000 euros thanks to oil but where people suffer hunger and poverty? Or that women should not have any rights? ~ Fernando Ballano Gonzalo

There are several ways to apportion the family income, all of them unsatisfactory. ~ Robert Benchley

So what do you do?' she asked. 'I sneak around at night, well, usually at night, and gather coins out of fountains', I said slowly, watching her face for judgement. She burst into laughter. 'Like spare change? You collect people's wishes? And you spend them on yourself?' 'They're not wishes' I said. 'They lose their symbolism once they hit corporate water. At that time they either become extra income for people who don't need it, or they can help me get along in the world. ~ Caris O'Malley

It [knowledge] is clearly related to information, which we can now measure; and an economist especially is tempted to regard knowledge as a kind of capital structure, corresponding to information as an income flow. Knowledge, that is to say, is some kind of improbable structure or stock made up essentially of patterns that is, improbable arrangements, and the more improbable the arrangements, we might suppose, the more knowledge there is. ~ Kenneth E. Boulding

The gap between median black family income and median white family income hasn't changed in twenty years," he told me. "That is not a society moving toward equality. It's a society that's reproducing inequality by race."56 ~ Christopher L. Hayes

Class is more than income - it has to do with knowing where you stand in a web of social relationships. ~ Neal Stephenson

Nearly all educational expenditure should be considered a capital outlay, whether it provides a future return in the form of enhanced taxable income or in terms of an enhanced quality of life. ~ William Vickrey

With the help of folks like you and me, Heifer International tackles the problem of hunger one family at a time with gifts of renewable resources - farm animals that are ongoing sources of food and income. ~ Susan Sarandon

My roots were pretty far removed from high income. It's interesting to be back there at the level of income I have now, at this stage in my life. ~ Morgan Freeman

If every American automatically has health coverage, the age at which Medicare kicks in becomes a less fraught issue. We could gradually raise the age of Medicare eligibility a bit, according to income, and save money. ~ Joe Klein

Our income are like our shoes; if too small, they gall and pinch us; but if too large, they cause us to stumble and trip. ~ Charles Caleb Colton