Earners Quotes & Sayings

Capitalism has improved the standard of living of the wage earners to an unprecedented extent. The average American family enjoys today amenities of which, only a hundred years ago, not even the richest nabobs dreamed. — Ludwig Von Mises

Women often come up not knowing how to make decisions. We get wishy-washy. We become great wage earners - breadwinners - but we don't know how to control empires. — Jackee Harry

The larger Europe grows, the more diverse must be the forms of co-operation it requires. Instead of a centralised bureaucracy, the model should be a market - not only a market of individuals and companies, but also a market in which the players are governments.
Thus governments would compete with each other for foreign investments, top management and high earners through lower taxes and less regulation.
Such a market would impose a fiscal discipline on governments because they would not want to drive away expertise and business.
It would also help to establish which fiscal and regulatory policies produced the best overall economic results.
No wonder socialists don't like it. — Margaret Thatcher

Of course for professional traders on the stock exchange, money had always been imaginary - just as notional, just as easy come and easy go, as the points in a video game. Wage earners like Willing's mother thought money was real. Because the work was real, and the time was real, it seemed inconceivable that what the work and the time had converted into would be gossamer. — Lionel Shriver

Do not mistake a crowd of big wage-earners for the leisure class. — Clive Bell

Minimum wage increases. The Nobel Prize economist Milton Friedman has observed that the minimum wage is "one of the most ... anti-black laws on the statute books" because it destroys entry level jobs for second paycheck earners, teens, and other unskilled workers. — David Horowitz

If the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day, there would be enough for everybody and no unemployment
assuming a certain very moderate amount of sensible organization. This idea shocks the well-to-do, because they are convinced that the poor would not know how to use so much leisure. In America men often work long hours even when they are well off; such men, naturally, are indignant at the idea of leisure for wage-earners, except as the grim punishment of unemployment; in fact, they dislike leisure even for their sons. — Bertrand Russell

President Obama has repeatedly urged Congress to let the Bush tax cuts expire for those earning more than $250,000 a year. Increasing rates on top earners is an obvious way to raise revenue from those who can afford it most. — Christina Romer

When you reduce taxes on higher earners it's vital to be reducing them on lower earning people as well so the nation shares in the approach. — William Hague

We still have a great amount of work to do in social development, including resolving one of the biggest challenges we face in this area, namely, reducing the gap between high-income earners and people, citizens of our country, who are still living on very modest means indeed. But we cannot, of course, adopt the solution used 80 years ago and simply confiscate the riches of some to redistribute among others. We will use completely different means to resolve this problem, namely, we will ensure good economic growth. — Vladimir Putin

The corporate right and the political right declared class warfare on working people a quarter of a century ago and they've won ... Take the paradox of Rush Limbaugh, ensconced in a Palm Beach mansion massaging the resentments across the country of white-knuckled wage earners, who are barely making ends meet in no small part because of the corporate and ideological forces for whom Rush has been a hero. — Bill Moyers

Vacations for wage earners have proved both popular with workers and profitable for employers. Unfortunately, the majority of large employers have not yet followed the example set by a number of progressive corporations. I don't know of a single company that has abandoned vacations for wage earners after having tried the experiment. But I do know many that are delighted with the fruits they have gathered. Under some of the plans vacations with pay must be earned by good behavior, punctuality, etc ... The best results have come where the treatment has been regarded as most liberal. — B.C. Forbes

It's one thing to maintain that upper-income earners should pay higher tax rates because they are better able to shoulder the burden for essential government services. But it's constitutional blasphemy to claim that the tax code should be used as a weapon against the wealthy and that the state should be the tyrannical arbiter of how income is distributed. — David Limbaugh

Manhattan is increasingly less available to average-income earners. — Janine Di Giovanni

When the mass of families in a State are without property, then those who were once citizens become virtually slaves. The more the State steps in to enforce conditions of security and sufficiency; the more it regulates wages, provides compulsory insurance, doctoring, education, and in general takes over the lives of the wage-earners, for the benefit of the companies and men employing the wage-earners, the more is this condition of semi-slavery accentuated. — Hilaire Belloc

Research has shown that middle-income wage earners would benefit most from a large reduction in corporate tax rates. The corporate tax is not a rich-man's tax. Corporations don't even pay it. They just pass the tax on in terms of lower wages and benefits, higher consumer prices, and less stockholder value. — Lawrence Kudlow

The Eugenic Society ... is perpetually bewailing the fact that wage-earners breed faster than middle-class people. — Bertrand Russell

Suppose I told you about the income from body parts? Organs, bones, DNA, whatever's in demand. That's one of the big earners for this place. — Margaret Atwood

In economic panics throughout history, the wiping out of the savings accounts of lower earners and the middle class has often led to social revolution, sometimes violent upheavals. — Nick Clooney

For decades now, the Democrats have had a good gig buying the votes of government workers with outrageous salaries, benefits and work rules - and then sticking productive earners with the bill. But, now, we're out of money. — Ann Coulter

The corruption of freedom is in proportion to the moral deterioration of the people. For a people who have lost their sense of self-respect have no need for freedom. And the income tax, by transferring the property of earners to the State, has disintegrated the moral fiber of Americans to such a degree that they do not even recognize the fact. — Frank Chodorov

Regarding the Economy & Taxation: America's most successful achievers do pay a higher share of the total tax burden. The top one percent income earners paid 18 percent of the total tax burden in 1981, and paid 25 percent in 1991. The bottom 50 percent of income earners paid only 8 percent of the total tax burden, and paid only 5 percent in 1991. History shows that tax cuts have always resulted in improved economic growth producing more tax revenue in the treasury. — Rush Limbaugh

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

In the present state of human society, however, We deem it advisable that the wage-contract should, when possible, be modified somewhat by a contract of partnership, as is already being tried in various ways to the no small gain both of the wage-earners and of the employers. In this way wage-earners are made sharers in some sort in the ownership, or the management, or the profits. — Pope Pius XI

In countries where income from labor is most equally distributed, such as the Scandinavian countries between 1970 and 1990, the top 10 percent of earners receive about 20 percent of total wages and the bottom 50 percent about 35 percent. — Thomas Piketty

We will never have real safety and security for wage earners unless we provide for safety and security for the wage payers and wage savers. — William J.H. Boetcker

And all babies were God's blessing, even those who said bugger quite a lot, and whose presence meant that half the potential wage earners in our family couldn't actually go and get a decent job. — Jojo Moyes

For the very top earners, vision and inspiration are essential. You need those to become the next Steve Jobs, but perhaps not to be the highest paid dentist in Beverly Hills. — Tyler Cowen

The latest Congressional Budget Office figures show that the top 1 percent of income earners in the United States paid 39 percent of federal income taxes while earning 18 percent of pretax income and the top 5 percent of income earners paid 61 percent of federal income taxes while earning 31 percent of pretax income. Indeed, the top 40 percent of income earners paid 99.4 percent of federal income taxes. The bottom 40 percent of income earners paid no federal income tax and received 3.8 percent from the tax system. And the middle 20 percent of income earners pay only 4.4 percent of federal income taxes.3 — Mark R. Levin

Because Social Security is specifically designed to boost the retirement income of low earners with a progressive benefit formula, the program has played an enormous and necessary role in keeping Latinas out of poverty. — Grace Napolitano

The tax laws are written by men with considerable net worth, and with little understanding of what wage-earners must do to make ends meet. — Martin L. Gross

During the war, the holders of power in all countries found it necessary to bribe the populations into cooperation by unusual concessions. Wage-earners were allowed a living wage, Hindus were told they were men and brothers, women were given the vote, and young people were allowed to enjoy those innocent pleasures of which the old, in the name of morality, always wish to rob them. The war being won, the victors set to work to deprive their tools of advantages temporarily conceded. — Bertrand Russell

Deep caring about each other's fate does seem to be on the decline, but I do not believe that New Age narcissism is much to blame. The external causes of our moral indifference are a fragmented mass society that leaves us isolated and afraid, an economic system that puts the rights of capital before the rights of people, and a political process that makes citizens into ciphers.

These are the forces that allow, even encourage, unbridled competition, social irresponsibility, and the survival of the financially fittest. The executives who brought down the major corporations by taking indecent sums off the top while wage earners of modest means lost their retirement accounts were clearly more influenced by capitalist amorality than by some New Age guru. — Parker J. Palmer

Many women are heads of households. Many are the primary wage earners for their families. — Marsha Blackburn

In 1928, the top 10 percent of earners captured 46 percent of national income. That was the highest share that the top tenth captured for nearly eighty years, until 2007, when we returned to the wealth distribution of the country on the eve of the Great Depression. The top 1 percent did even better. Between 1979 and 2007, nearly 88 percent of the entire economy's income gains went to the top 1 percent.49 One — Christopher L. Hayes

The centerpiece of Obamanomics - raising taxes on high earners and investors and lowering them on the middle class - is attacked by free-marketers for penalizing economic success and possibly further stalling economic growth. — Nina Easton

The kind of people I myself represent in parliament; salary earners, shopkeepers, skilled artisans, professional men and women, farmers and so on, these are, in a political and economic sense, the middle class. They are for the most part unorganised and unselfconscious. — Robert Menzies

Each man should have all he earns, whether by brain or body; and the director, the great industrial leader, is one of the greatest of earners, and should have a proportional reward; but no man should live on the earnings of another, and there should not be too gross inequality between service and reward. — Theodore Roosevelt

According to the federal government's own figures, the top 1 percent of U.S. wage earners were responsible for 68 percent of all federal tax receipts in 2011. Not just federal income tax, mind you, all federal taxes. — Mary Katharine Ham

They know that as long as they keep us undereducated, or with an inferior education, it's impossible for us to compete with them for job openings. And as long as we can't compete with them and get a decent job, we're trapped. We are low-wage earners. We have to live in a run-down neighborhood, which means our children go to inferior schools. They get inferior education. And when they grow up, they fall right into the same cycle again. This is the American way. This is the American democracy that she tries to sell to the whole world as being that which will solve the problems of other people too. — Malcolm X

The very fact that women now form about one-fifth of the employes in manufacture and commerce in this country has opened a vast field of industrial legislation directly affecting women as wage-earners. — Florence Kelley

In antiquity slaves were, in all honesty called slaves. In the middle ages, they took the name of serfs. Nowadays they are called wage earners. — Mikhail Bakunin

The free enterprise concept inherent in the economic model of capitalism should mean common people, or lower and middle class wage-earners, have greater potential to rise up and gain financial independence. In reality, however, free enterprise all too often leads to an almost total lack of government regulation that in turn allows the global elite to run amuck in Gordon Gecko-style financial coups. — James Morcan

I will never support any tax increase on middle-income earners, ever ... If you're not going to eliminate loopholes and exemptions, then I wouldn't support lowering rates. — Adam Hasner

If we are the greatest nation the sun ever shone upon, it would seem to be mainly because we have been able to goad our wage-earners to this pitch of frenzy. — Upton Sinclair

The combination of higher income taxation and wealth taxation would thereby raise at least 2 percentage points of GDP from the very top earners. But even if they had to pay another 2 percent of GDP, there would certainly be no need to shed tears for the rich. Their net-of-tax income would remain around 10 percent of GDP, a share of national income two-thirds higher than the 6 percent of GDP in 1980. There — Jeffrey D. Sachs

First, that a Socialist believes in the common ownership and democratic management of the means of producing the necessities of life; and, second, that a Socialist believes that the means by which this is to be brought about is the class conscious political organization of the wage-earners. Thus far they were at one; but no farther. To — Upton Sinclair