The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.
— John Maynard Keynes
Successful Income Distribution quotations
The more one considers the matter, the clearer it becomes that redistribution is in effect far less a redistribution of free income from the richer to the poorer, as we imagined, than a redistribution of power from the individual to the State.
Practically all government attempts to redistribute wealth and income tend to smother productive incentives and lead toward general impoverishment.
Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on "income distribution," the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned.
Kelsoism is not accepted by modern scientific economics as a valid and fruitful analysis of the distribution of income but rather it is regarded as an amateurish and cranky fad.
Increasing inequality in income distribution in this country has broader policy implications, and there is also the growing problem of perverse incentives that result from executives receiving grossly disproportionate compensation based on decisions they themselves take.
A premise of the new city is that we want a society to be as egalitarian as possible. For this purpose, quality-of-life distribution is more important than income distribution. [And quality of life includes] a living environment as free of motor vehicles as possible.
Modern government has become a universal transfer agency that utilizes the political process for distributing vast measures of income and wealth. It preys on millions of victims in order to allocate valuable goods and services to its beneficiaries.
Only now are increasing numbers of political and social scientists beginning to realize that Kelso's theories provide a private-property-based alternative to the imminent passage of a government-distributed "guaranteed income" or "negative income tax."
By adopting programs to distribute substantial amounts of income, a nation guarantees that its government will become more powerful and invasive in other ways.
If your Income Taxes go to help out the less fortunate, there could be no legitimate kick against it in the world. This is becoming the richest, and the poorest Country in the world. Why? Why, on account of an unequal distribution of the money.
Cities that tend of have better schools for middle-income families, they tend to have much better prospects for kids moving up in the income distribution.
Most intellectuals outside the field of economics show remarkably little interest in learning even the basic fundamentals of economics. Yet they do not hesitate to make sweeping pronouncements about the economy in general, businesses in particular, and the many issues revolving around what is called 'income distribution'.
The climate change problem is at its heart an ethical problem.
It's a problem of income distribution and it's a problem of income distribution with dimensions that we don't usually think about very much.
My research in this period centered around growth, technical change, and income distribution, both how growth affected the distribution of income and how the distribution of income affected growth.
In socialism, private property is anathema, and equal distribution of income the first consideration. In capitalism, private property is cardinal, and distribution left to ensue from the play of free contract and selfish interest on that basis, no matter what anomalies it may present.
The middle class in the rich countries is where the political game is being played. They are voting in elections in the U.S., U.K., France and Germany. They are working people in the upper part of the global income distribution. They might on average be happy that the Chinese are doing well, but they are not happy that the Chinese are doing well relative to them.
We live in a world where economic positions - income and wealth - are very unevenly distributed, and this leads to the widespread persistence of poverty.
Even in our own agriculture strategy, if we got a great new drought-resistant seed and we managed to get it distributed in the system, we just assumed that it would reach female farmers. That's a false assumption, because women don't interact with agro-dealers. So if you don't develop specific programming to ensure that seed gets in a woman's hands, then the extra income [generated by higher-yielding crops] goes into her husband's hands.
The Supreme Court consistently favors organized money and the political privileges of the corporate class. We have a Senate that is more responsive to affluent constituents than to middle-class constituents, while the opinions of constituents in the bottom third of income distribution have no apparent effect at all on the Senate's roll call votes.
Income tax in particular in the United States is concentrated on the top half of the income distribution, and very heavily skewed towards the top 10 or even top 1 percent.
If the economy is growing fast, there is call for a distributing income from the rich to the poor to to put in place social safety nets.
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.
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.
The power to gossip is more democratically distributed than power, property, and income, and, certainly, than the freedom to speak openly.
Unequal distribution of income is an excessively uneconomic method of getting the necessary saving done.
Government spending is always a “tax” burden on the American people and is never equally or fairly distributed. The poor and low-middle income workers always suffer the most from the deceitful tax of inflation and borrowing.
Two-factor economics makes it clear that our economic problem is not what one-factor (labor-centric) thinkers assert: an inequitable distribution of income. It is an inequitable distribution of productive power, from which an unworkable distribution of income results.
If capital produces most of the economy's wealth and income is distributed on the basis of productive input, the individual can hardly reach his goal - an affluent level of income - solely by means of his labor.
A better distribution of incomes would increase that efficiency by diverting a great fund of wealth from the useless to the useful members of society. To cut off the income of the useless will not impair their efficiency. They have none to impair. It will, in fact, compel them to acquire a useful function.
The distribution of wealth is even more unequal than that of income.
...The wealthiest 5% of American households held 54% of all wealth reported in the 1989 survey. Their share rose to 61% in 2010 and reached 63% in 2013. By contrast, the rest of those in the top half of the wealth distribution families that in 2013 had a net worth between $81,000 and $1.9 million held 43% of wealth in 1989 and only 36% in 2013.
If there is any law governing the distribution of income between classes, it still remains to be discovered.
The real scientific study of the distribution of wealth has, we must confess, scarcely begun. The conventional academic study of the so-called theory of distribution into rent, interest, wages, and profits is only remotely related to the subject. This subject, the causes and cures for the actual distribution of capital and income among real persons, is one of the many now in need of our best efforts as scientific students of society.