Barack Obama Quotes

I think the media and the candidates have got to talk about why the middle class is in decline and why we have massive levels of income and wealth inequality.

They talk about class warfare -- the fact of the matter is there has been class warfare for the last thirty years. It's a handful of billionaires taking on the entire middle-class and working-class of this country. And the result is you now have in America the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on Earth and the worst inequality in America since 1928. How could anybody defend the top 400 richest people in this country owning more wealth than the bottom half of America, 150 million people?

If there is any law governing the distribution of income between classes, it still remains to be discovered.

The class war is over.

The distribution of wealth is just as important as its creation.

There's not a lot of wealth throughout all the country shared equally.

I think greed is a critical problem - the gap between the poor and the rich. The gap between the top 10 percent and the bottom 10 percent.

There is a legitimate concern about wealth distribution in the United States, but the answer is not to scapegoat any individual who makes over $200,000 per year and to try to sell the fraud that the government can equitably take the money of those who have earned it and give it to those who haven't.

American democracy in the past has always been known for its large middle class and its relatively few very wealthy people and very few very poor people, but that is gone to today and the middle class is shrinking.

The central issue of our time remains the fact that the rich are getting richer and the poor, poorer.

For the good of Spain, I should like there to be rather fewer rich people and rather fewer poor.

To be concerned about inequality is not engaging in class warfare.

The United States is the richest and also the most unequal country in the world.

I don't really care much about what the top one per cent earn. The gap we ought to care about in wealth is between the middle and the bottom.

In the United States today we have the most unequal wealth and income distribution of any major country on earth - worse than at any time since the 1920s. This is an economy that must be changed in fundamental ways.

Sometime in the eighties, Americans had a new set of 'traditional values' installed. ... the poor and the middle class were shaken down, and their loose change funneled blithely upwards to the already overfed.

Here's what income and wealth inequality is about. Last year, the top 25 hedge fund managers made more than 24 billion, enough to pay the salaries of 425,000 public school teachers. This level of inequality is neither moral or sustainable

We [Americans] have to get beyond the greed-run-amok. We have to get beyond indifference to the poor and working people. We have to get beyond polarized politics.

There are too many people trying to take opportunity from people in the middle class.

Under this [Bush] Administration, America's middle class has been abandoned -- its dreams denied, its Main Street interests ignored and its mainstream values scorned by a White House that puts privilege first.

There is far too little discussion in Washington about the collapse of the middle class , almost no discussion at all about the incredible income inequality and wealth inequality in this country, and the fact that we're moving toward an oligarch form of society.

The interesting thing about class warfare is that it's only class warfare if it's up, not down. If you talk about welfare cheats or something, that's not class warfare because it's down; you have to talk about rich people before it's class warfare.

Economic growth without social progress lets the great majority of the people remain in poverty, while a privileged few reap the benefits of rising abundance.

You need to look at inequality as a typical condition of modern society.

The lower half of households by wealth held just 3% of wealth in 1989 and only 1% in 2013.