Political Quotes

“The point the gentleman is making is that many people out there may say, well, that is too bad, but it does not affect me. But it does affect us, because what is going on, if an employer can hire somebody for $3 an hour, for $3.50 an hour, that means all wages will go down as well. That is what this effort is about. It is not only to save money by hiring people below the minimum wage, it is to push everybody's wages down in exactly the opposite way that when we raise the minimum wage working people's wages will go up. The gentleman before made an interesting point, and I want to pick up on that because, again, it is an issue that is not discussed very much on the floor of the House. He said, quite correctly, that the United States now has the most unfair and unequal distribution of wealth and income in the entire industrialized world. They used that dubious distinction that used to accrue to Great Britain, with all their dukes and queens and kings. The point is that today the United States has claimed what England used to have and that we now have, the most unfair distribution of wealth and income. When we talk about economics, ultimately, like a football game or a basketball game, it is about who wins and who loses. And what is going on in the United States today is that we know who is winning. We know the wealthiest 1 percent of the population now owns over 40 percent of the wealth, which is more than the bottom 90 percent.”