Economy of the United States Quotes

“The United States is the most extreme case of the subjection of society to the brute force of the market.”

“We're the richest country, but if you're living in a shed
When does the economy trickle down
Through the corrugated roof above your head?”

“[T]he chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world.”

“We in America reject planning except for the private sector of the economy, so what we have is democratic socialization for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor.”

“Banks are the temples of America. This is a holy war. Our economy is our religion."Book of Business Quotations". Ridgers, Bill, ed. The Economist. July 31, 2012.”

“When the economy falls over, we won’t be jellyfish. We’ll still have backbones and teeth, white teeth, and double standards to equalize the equilibrium that is never the same.”

“From the moment they took a republic rather than a monarchy as the shape of their government, Americans prided themselves on being a nation of peace, dedicated to the arts of commerce rather than the rapacity of empire and "the spirit of war."”

“[T]he stakes for America are never small. If our country does not lead the cause of freedom, it will not be led. If we do not turn the hearts of children toward knowledge and character, we will lose their gifts and undermine their idealism. If we permit our economy to drift and decline, the vulnerable will suffer most.”

“In the United States (and to a lesser degree, in most of the advanced world) money is an economic good. Something that has value in and of itself, and so it should be applied with a degree of forethought for how efficiently it can be mobilized. This is why banks require collateral and/or business plans before they’ll fund loans.”

“Solving this issue is going to require cooperation between the private sector, including rail and trucking, ports and labor unions.”

“The blood, sweat, tears, and suffering of Black people are the foundations of the wealth and power of the United States of America. We were forced to build America, and if forced to, we will tear it down. The immediate result of this destruction will be suffering and bloodshed. But the end result will be perpetual peace for all mankind.”

“When people complain about the economy, what they’re really complaining about is the longer-term failure in certain parts of the country - rural America’s de-industrialised communities. Those are parts of the country that are hurting even in a good economy.”

““The economic and employment picture for younger men without college degrees is significantly worse than previous generations,” said Dan Cox, director of the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute, whose research has focused on young adults. “These sort of traditional norms around masculinity and what it means to be a man and a husband are wrapped up in economic success, and that makes it really, really challenging when their economic outlook is not as bright.””

“The U.S. economy was organized differently from the New Deal until 1973. As incomplete, uneven, and racist as it was, social welfare and public housing worked to ameliorate the grossest injustices of the capitalist system. Capitalism was organized in a way that was less mean than it is now. The world can be organized such that it doesn’t simultaneously produce the people we call homeless and the thinking that we have to get rid of them.”

“Only "America," of all national designations, took on the combined force of eschatology and chauvinism. Many forms of nationalism have laid claims to a world-redeeming promise; many Christian sects have sought, in open or secret heresy, to find the sacred in the profane; many European Protestants have linked the soul’s journey and the way to wealth. But only the "American Way," of all modern symbologies, has managed to circumvent the contradictions inherent in these approaches. Of all symbols of identity, only "American" has succeeded in uniting nationality with universality, civic and spiritual selfhood, sacred and secular history, the country’s past and the paradise to be, in a single transcendent ideal.”

“Only during two periods since 1776 has the government mostly left the economy alone: during the early years of the federal republic; and in the two decades previous to the Civil War. The political economist Condy Raguet called the first period of economic freedom, from 1783 to 1807, "the golden age" of the republic: Trade was free, taxes were low, money was sound, and Americans enjoyed more economic freedom than any other people in the world. Sumner thought the years from 1846 to 1860—the era of the independent treasury, falling tariffs, and gold money—was the true "golden age."”

““This is just a huge economic fact that lies behind a lot of this sense of cultural dislocation among men, this sense of not really knowing whether you are going to be needed, or feeling like you’re failing against the standard that was set 50 years ago about the position of men and women in the labor market,” said Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, which he founded to study the unique problems males face.
Reeves said his research indicates that a sense of economic and social dislocation could also be contributing to higher suicide rates among young men and wider substance abuse.
“It’s a very, very difficult and painful transition right now between some of the cultural expectations we have about the role of men and the economic reality on the ground,” he said.”

“Part of the US success was how its massive economic power intersected with the daily lives of American citizens. Other rising powers in history had seen their rise mainly benefit their elites, while ordinary people had to be satisfied with the scraps left at the table of empire. The United States changed all that. Its economic rise created a domestic consumer society that everyone could aspire to take part in, including recent immigrants and African-Americans, who were otherwise discriminated against and had little political influence. New products offered status and convenience, and the experience of modernity through goods produced by new technology defined what it meant to be American: it was about transformation, a new beginning in a country where resources and ideas fertilized each other through their abundance.”

“The object of this new American industrial empire, so far as that object was conscious and normative, was not national well-being, but the individual gain of the associated and corporate monarchs through the power of vast profit on enormous capital investment; through the efficiency of an industrial machine that bought the highest managerial and engineering talent and used the latest and most effective methods and machines in a field of unequaled raw material and endless market demand. That this machine might use the profit for the general weal was possible and in cases true. But the uplift and well-being of the mass of men, of the cohorts of common labor, was not its ideal or excuse. Profit, income, uncontrolled power in My Business for My Property and for Me—this was the aim and method of the new monarchial dictatorship that displaced democracy in the United States in 1876.”

“Privatization and deregulation of the U.S. economy has obliged employers and labor to bear the rentier costs, including higher housing prices and rising debt overhead, that are part and parcel of today’s neoliberal policies. The resulting loss of industrial competitiveness is the major block to its re-industrialization. After all, it was these rentier charges that deindustrialized the economy in the first place, making it less competitive in world markets and spurring the offshoring of industry by raising the cost of basic needs and doing business. Paying such charges also shrinks the domestic market, by reducing labor’s ability to buy what it produces. Trump’s tariff policy does nothing to address these problems, but will aggravate them by accelerating price inflation.”