Poverty in the United States Quotes

“Homelessness”

“American Dream”

“Racism in the United States”

“Hunger in the United States”

“Social Security (United States)”

“Child poverty in the United States”

“Social programs in the United States”

“Socioeconomic mobility in the United States”

“Residential segregation in the United States”

“The war on poverty has become a war on the poor.”

“Wikipedia: Poverty in the United States”

“Tens of millions of Americans do not end up poor by a mistake of history or personal conduct. Poverty persists because some wish and will it to.”

“There is growing evidence that America harbors a hard bottom layer of deprivation, a kind of extreme poverty once thought to exist only in faraway places of bare feet and swollen bellies.”

“One in five American children live in poverty, even as pundits tout employment highs.”

“It has always been hard to measure poverty, because Poverty is as much a state of mind as a condition of material well-being. Still, we seem to have made a bad situation worse.”

“And in terms of poverty and race in this country, again, you know, one of the things that I really, really wanted to stress is, the level of poverty specifically that you see in the African-American community is not accidental. It’s not accidental. This is part of the process. The process of enslavement involves stealing something from someone. It involves taking something from someone.”

“It was [senator] Bernie Sanders who said to me at one stage, look how many colleagues have rallies in very poor areas. They don’t see votes in them. And the overwhelming success of the ideological campaign that supports neoliberal policies is that it has succeeded in convincing people that those in poverty have no one to blame but themselves, while supporting the notion that trickle down policies will address it.”

“We have to stop saying things were well before COVID. It’s almost as though we give that away to the Trump and Pence. The reality is, Wall Street was well. The reality is, those who got his tax cuts were well. The reality is, though, that before COVID, they were trying to overturn healthcare. Before COVID, they were blocking living wages. Before COVID, we were not addressing the issue of poor and low-wealth people.”

“In Bentham's vision, the poor should be treated like criminals, forced to labor in prison for the private profit of capitalist entrepreneurs. Such a totalitarian idea might seem remote from purportedly enlightened twenty-first-century practices in liberal democracies. Yet both the criminalization of poverty, and the subjection of the criminalized poor to unpaid labor for corporate profit, exist in the United States today.”

“The irresistible ascent of the penal state in the United States over the past three decades responds not to the rise in crime—which remained roughly constant overall before sagging at the end of the period—but to the dislocations provoked by the social and urban retrenchment of the state and by the imposition of precarious wage labor as a new norm of citizenship for those trapped at the bottom of the polarizing class structure.”