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You`ve got to just follow the money [in Washington]. You see it. There`s no countervailing power.

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
Washington
Follow
Money
Power
Countervailing

More quotes by Robert Reich

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The intellectual equipment needed for the job of the future is an ability to define problems, quickly assimilate relevant data, conceptualize and reorganize the information, make deductive and inductive leaps with it, ask hard questions about it, discuss findings with colleagues, work collaboratively to find solutions and then convince others.
Robert Reich
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I think that it's difficult to talk about large questions of economics or social policy without understanding the building blocks of society. And those building blocks are organizations, the people who run them, and the people who work in them.
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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I have found over the years that the most important way of getting people to relax is self-deprecating humor.
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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Cynicism is the last refuge of those who don't want to do the work of creating a better society.
Robert Reich
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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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We need to expand Social Security to prevent the looming retirement crisis, and we can do it simply by asking billionaires to pay their fair share.
Robert Reich
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Education is not the only answer and it's certainly not the immediate solution. At best, it's a necessary, but not sufficient response to widening inequality.
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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I wish it were simply a nightmare, but I think that any reasonable person watching American politics would come to the conclusion that a second Bush administration would in fact incorporate a more radicalized version of what we've seen in the first administration.
Robert Reich
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We are now enjoying the liberation that comes with not having to be organization men and women, and that's fabulous. But there are new social consequences here of which we need to be aware, and the sale of the self and what that entails for the rest of our lives is quite sobering.
Robert Reich
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There`s sort of a chilling effect on non-profits and the media and a lot of other places because the establishment is so powerful. That`s where the money is.
Robert Reich
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When corporations get special handouts from the government, subsidies and tax breaks, it costs you. It means you have to pay more in taxes to make up for these hidden expenses, and government has less money for good schools and roads, Medicare and national defense and everything else you need.
Robert Reich
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Terrorism itself is not the greatest danger we face.
Robert Reich
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The federal budget deficit isn't the nation's major economic problem and deficit reduction shouldn't be our major goal. Our problem is lack of good jobs and sufficient growth, and our goal must be to revive both.
Robert Reich
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Those who analogize the federal budget to a family's budget must know nothing about either.
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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Most Americans stopped looking at what was happening through a variety of coping mechanisms - starting with women entering paid work and then everyone working longer hours and using their homes for raising equity and generating more money through debt. The typical household basically staved off the day of reckoning.
Robert Reich
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If consumers don't have the wherewithal to spend because all the money's going to the top, and the people at the top only spend a very small fraction of what they earn, then the economy is almost inevitably destined to slow.
Robert Reich