Middle Class Decline Quotes

Neither the rich nor the poor have great interest in government. The rich can afford their own security … in their gated communities and their own information networks. The poor are usually so pushed against the wall that they do not have time for the mechanics of the government. If you lose the middle class, you lose democratic government.

What we have seen for a very long time is large corporations shutting down plants in this country, plants that are often profitable, in order to get cheap labor all over the world. And that is one of the reasons why the middle class in this country is disappearing.We have lost our manufacturing base, and that's an issue that has got to be dealt with.

The American people must make a fundamental decision. Do we continue the 40-year decline of our middle class and the growing gap between the very rich and everyone else, or do we fight for a progressive economic agenda that creates jobs, raises wages, protects the environment and provides health care for all?

People who know the economy is rigged in favor of big money, people who know that our middle class continues to decline and we have to go outside of establishment politics and economics, people who know that we need to reform a broken criminal justice system and we need comprehensive immigration reform.

Millions of people are falling out of the middle class into the ranks of the poor.

This is a very important issue that the corporate media chooses not to talk about a whole lot, that we have an economic system which is rigged, which means that at the same time as the middle class of this country is disappearing, almost all of the new income and wealth in America is going to the top 1 percent. You have the top one-tenth of 1 percent owning almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent - 58 percent of all new income is going to the top 1 percent.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Jack Welch, the CEO of General Electric, laid off over 100,000 employees. His reward? When he retired from GE, he received a golden parachute of over $400 million dollars. This is the kind of corporate greed and irresponsibility that is destroying the middle class and must be ended.

The middle class of this country, our historic backbone and our best hope for a strong society in the future, is losing its place at the table.

The TPP is another corporate-backed agreement that is the latest in a series of trade policies which have cost us millions of decent-paying jobs, pushed down wages for American workers and led to the decline of our middle class. We want American companies to create decent-paying jobs in America, not just low-wage countries like Vietnam, Malaysia or China. The TPP must be defeated.

Wouldn't it be useful to explain the factors that actually allowed this to happen [Donald's Trump Presidency]. Like, for example, their frustration of the absolute shrinking of the middle class, the heroin epidemic, things like that. I don't see any of that.

The hollowing out of the middle class. That's not just about capitalism or the structure of taxation. That is also about the fundamental truth that machines can do a lot of things better than humans used to do. A lot of those people are being pushed down to do less value-adding jobs, so they get paid less money.

I am not alone in thinking that we are at a tipping point ecologically and morally and politically. Democracy cannot survive without a vibrant middle class, yet the policies of one of the parties has been committed to wiping it out for 30 years.

The structural changes of globalization and automation that has created concentrated wealth among some people who have had the right skills and the right opportunities has also created extraordinary disruption and havoc among the American middle-class.

This is … a time when there is increasingly no such thing as a high-wage, middle-skilled job — the thing that sustained the middle class in the last generation. Now there is only a high-wage, high-skilled job. Every middle-class job today is being pulled up, out or down faster than ever. That is, it either requires more skill or can be done by more people around the world or is being buried — made obsolete — faster than ever

We cannot continue to have the upper class wealty getting richer and richer, the middle class shrinking and 43 million living in poverty.

The top end are still making bucket loads while maintaining the illusion of the American dream: that if you work hard enough, you can make a fortune. Meanwhile, the working and middle classes have been hollowed out of the system.

The greatest problem America faces is the decline of middle class incomes.

I feel very strongly that we need to change the way we do trade because it has been one of the major factors that lead to decline of middle class incomes.

Barack Obama destroyed the middle class. Whatever you want to say about his rhetoric, the rich got richer, but the poor got poorer, and the middle class got wiped out. That's really what Trump appealed to and inspired in the forgotten man.

You can only choose between rich and poor. The middle class is gone.

That we could live in a country with no rules for the rich, no rights for the poor, and no middle class to speak of, is wrong; it's a crime against the next generation and we've got to do something about it.

Technology, outsourcing, a growing temp staffing industry, productivity efficiencies, have all replaced the middle class.

Government policies and regulations in the postcrisis era have aided the hollowing-out of middle America far more than anything the private sector has done. These changes even expanded the wealth gap by making asset owners richer at the expense of renters.

In a process that had begun in the 1980s and suddenly accelerated in the early 2000s ... [t]he peaks of great wealth grew higher, rising up beyond the clouds, while the valleys of poverty sank lower into perpetual shadow. The once broad plateau of the middle class eroded away into a narrow ledge, with the white-knuckled occupants holding on for dear life.

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