Chris Hayes Quotes

A winner-takes-all economy that offers only limited access to the middle class is a recipe for democratic malaise and dereliction.

One of the major forces driving the decline in wages and the concentration of wealth at the top is the offshoring of American jobs overseas - reducing wages not only in manufacturing but also across the economy.

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.

When there is no middle class, and the poor greatly exceed in number, troubles arise, and the state soon comes to an end.

You have six of the ten wealthiest counties in America surround Washington, D.C., and the poor and middle class are getting squeezed while people at the top and people with influence in government seem always to be doing better.

For 40 years, the American middle class has been disappearing. Millions of people are working longer hours for lower wages despite a huge increase in technology and productivity. And what we have seen during that period is a massive transfer of trillions of dollars from the middle class to the top one-tenth of 1 percent of America

The massive upward distribution of wealth engineered by our political class over the last few decades has solidified the plutocratic control of the rule-making machinery in Washington and state capitals.

Contrast 1968, when the CEO of General Motors took home, in pay and benefits, about sixty-six times the amount paid to a typical GM worker. Today the CEO of Wal-Mart earns nine hundred times the wages of his average employee. Indeed, the wealth of the Wal-Mart founder's family in 2005 was estimated at about the same ($90 billion) as that of the bottom 40% of the US population: 120 million people.

BRAZILIFICATION:The widening gulf between the rich and the poor and the accompanying disappearance of the middle classes.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the richest 5 percent of people receive one-third of total global income, as much as the poorest 80 percent.

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.

There's a very committed effort to convert the US into something resembling a Third World society, where a few people have enormous wealth and a lot of others have no security.

It is staggering that in the 21st century, half of the world's population - that's three and a half billion people - own no more than a tiny elite whose numbers could all fit comfortably on a double-decker bus.

Nobody should be hitting lotto for 36 million dollars when we got people starving in the streets. That is not idealistic, that's just real. That is just stupid. There's no way Michael Jackson, or whoever should have thousands, millions, billions of dollars and we got people broke with two-three jobs and still can't pay bills on time. There's no way! No way these people should have planes when people don't have houses, apartments, shacks, drawers, pants!!!

The burning issue of our time is the growing inequality in income and wealth in our country, and it's got to be addressed. We've got to stop it. It's eroding our politics. It's separating our society into the haves and the have-nots. It's condemning a whole younger set of our population to not be able to enter the middle class. And, it hits hardest in the prairie areas of the United States, our small towns and communities, where the jobs just aren't available and the incomes are low.

Trickle down economics is a fraud. Giving tax breaks to the rich and large corporations does not create jobs. It simply makes the rich richer, enlarges the deficit and increases income and wealth inequality. We need economic policies which benefit working families, not the billionaire class.

There are two economic realities in America today. There's been a record six straight years of job growth, and new census numbers show incomes have increased at a record rate after years of stagnation. However, income inequality remains significant, and nearly half of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.

Between 2013 and 2015, the wealthiest 14 people saw their wealth increase by $157 billion. This is their wealth increase, got it? Not what they are worth. Increase. That $157 billion is more wealth than is owned by the bottom 40 percent of the American people. One family, the Walton family, owns more wealth than the bottom 40 percent.

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.

Increasingly, staying in the middle class - let alone aspiring to become middle class - is becoming a game of chance.

I have a lot of sympathy with the ideas and frustration of the Occupy movement. I absolutely agree with the sense that Wall Street has brought an economic calamity to the middle class and that no one has been held accountable.

Globalization is stirring widespread economic anxiety, and middle class incomes have stagnated while a class of super-rich has emerged.

It is the tendency of the social burdens to crush out the middle class, and to force society into an organization of only two classes, one at each social extreme.

The Clinton administration cared a lot about the middle class and the poor. But it also cared a lot - too much, in retrospect - about the rich.

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.