Subsistence Level Quotes

Nobody in America lives at the survival level, Most people in the world would love to live the way poor Americans live.

A good prince will tax as lightly as possible those commodities which are used by the poorest members of society ... staples without which human life could not exist.

It is manifestly unjust that a privileged few should continue to accumulate excess goods, squandering available resources, while masses of people are living in conditions of misery at the very lowest level of subsistence.

There may be some backward countries where the mass of the people are on a subsistence level and where, as an aftermath of wars or partial crop failures, the standard of living has to be drastically reduced, but this certainly is not the case in our prosperous nations.

On a macro level, four billion people on Earth make less than four dollars a day.

A year's worth of Social Security for an individual is not considered to be below the poverty level, and yet we know that would be extraordinarily tough to live on.

Had population and food increased in the same ratio, it is probable that man might never have emerged from the savage state.

The subsistence level is only a conventional idea, and conventions change.

Since it is to the advantage of the wage-payer to pay as little as possible, even well-paid labor will have no more than what is regarded in a particular society as the reasonable level of subsistence. The lower ranks of labor will commonly have less, and if public relief were afforded even up to the wage-level of the lowest ranks of labor, that relief would compete in the labor market; check or dry up the supply of wage-labor. It would tend to render the performance of work by the wage-earner redundant.