Why, then, should we have to lower our living standards? What is the m — Robert Kuttner

"By default, we have created a "system" of nursing-home care for the aged in which middle-class people pay exorbitant rates to for-profit nursing-home entrepreneurs - and then when private resources are consumed and the patient qualifies as a pauper, the nursing home begins billing Medicaid. This is precisely the antithesis of social citizenship; instead of the poor being accorded the dignity associated with the middle class, equality of treatment is achieved by making the middle class undergo pauperization."

"Can we reverse these deeply rooted sources of inequality? Or are they just endemic to a capitalist economy?"

"But of course you can have your cake and eat it, too - if you decide to bake a second cake. And you may well find that baking two cakes does not take twice the work of baking one."

"Technological change is beneficial only when other jobs replace the ones lost."

"In America, we build public housing by creating lucrative inducements to private developers, and then wax indignant at the public waste."

"Political conservatives have focused on tax reduction as an economic growth strategy for three reasons. First it is self-serving; it saves rich people lots of money. Second, it comports with their ideological allegiance to laissez-faire economics. And third, tax incentives are less intrusive to business-as-usual than any other form of government planning."