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Social change occurs when the gap between the ideals that people hold and the reality that they see every day gets too large.

Robert Reich

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Robert Reich
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: June 24
Economist
Former United States Secretary Of Labor
Political Scientist
Politician
University Teacher
Scranton
Pennsylvania
Robert Bernard Reich
Hold
Social
Reality
Change
Occurs
Every
Gaps
People
Ideals
Large
Gets

More quotes by Robert Reich

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Now, inventiveness and empathy, those qualities, if they're together in the same person, you've got an entrepreneurial genius. But they do tend to be slightly separate.
Robert Reich
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Cutting taxes is not bad. But if you cut taxes on the wealthy, which is what they wanted to do, you're not helping people who need better schools and better infrastructure and healthcare. You're basically robbing the middle class and the poor to provide tax cuts to the rich.
Robert Reich
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Disney is no longer just Mickey Mouse Disney is family entertainment. And we're seeing more and more brands change into something that is far greater and broader than individual products and services.
Robert Reich
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Radical conservatives want to police bedrooms.
Robert Reich
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The United States is a safe harbor.
Robert Reich
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If we're concerned about volatility of earnings because we want some more stability in our lives, then let's create, instead of an unemployment insurance system, an earnings insurance system that will moderate the volatility for a certain period of time until we get back on our feet.
Robert Reich
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I, from the luxury of my laptop computer, can summon extraordinary bargains on everything I want, and I can also move my savings anywhere. This ability to choose more broadly and to switch more easily is the central fact of modern economic life.
Robert Reich
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We reform the system. We save capitalism from its own excesses.
Robert Reich
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We do not want to live in a theocracy. We should maintain that barrier and government has no business telling someone what they ought to believe or how they should conduct their private lives.
Robert Reich
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The managers of the big brands have a very clear responsibility. It's attracting and keeping talented people in order to sustain and build the trustworthiness of that brand. There is no clearer objective in the economy. Your economic success depends on expanding and building your economies of trustworthiness.
Robert Reich
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The key to understanding the rise in inequality isn't technology or globalization. It's the power of the moneyed interests to shape the underlying rules of the market.
Robert Reich
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When I was a kid, the bigger boys would pick on me. So I got an idea that I would make alliances with older boys, like just one or two, who would be my protectors.
Robert Reich
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I started in the law and the study of law, when it precedes the study of economics, gives you a set of foundation principles about how human beings interact. Economics is very useful, and I studied economics in graduate school. But without understanding the social and organizational context of economics, it becomes a theory without any groundwork.
Robert Reich
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The only way America can reduce the long-term budget deficit, maintain vital services, protect Social Security and Medicare, invest more in education and infrastructure, and not raise taxes on the working middle class is by raising taxes on the super rich.
Robert Reich
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One thing I've learned from 35 years in the classroom is that people learn best when they are laughing, when they are emotionally hit, that it's both the brain and the heart.
Robert Reich
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We used to be so proud that our country offered far more economic opportunities than the feudal system in Great Britain, with its royal family, princesses and dukes. But social mobility in the UK is higher than in the US. Our social rift is as big as it was in the 1920s.
Robert Reich
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Median wages of production workers, who comprise 80 percent of the workforce, haven't risen in 30 years, adjusted for inflation.
Robert Reich
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The dirty little secret is that both houses of Congress are irrelevant. ... America's domestic policy is now being run by Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve, and America's foreign policy is now being run by the International Monetary Fund [IMF]. ...when the president decides to go to war, he no longer needs a declaration of war from Congress.
Robert Reich
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The poverty line understates the true amount of poverty because it measures it as three times the breadbasket that a family needs, but it doesn't consider all the other things that are inflating far, far faster than food prices.
Robert Reich
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The path to success used to be up and through an organization. Now the path to success is increasingly through self-promotion.
Robert Reich