Divided Quotes

“No person, I think, ever saw a herd of buffalo, of which a few were fat and the great majority lean. No person ever saw a flock of birds, of which two or three were swimming in grease, and the others all skin and bone.” —Henry George, American reformer, 1839–1897”
― David Cay Johnston, Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality

“it shouldn’t be the case that the only route out of poverty is to get married to someone who also has a job.”
― David Cay Johnston, Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality

“Millions of Americans instinctively associate “poverty” with “black.”
― David Cay Johnston, Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality

“Women run a majority of nonprofit organizations with budgets under $1 million. But as budgets grow, the ranks of women shrink.”
― David Cay Johnston, Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality

“Before Ms. magazine was a gleam in Gloria Steinem’s eye, men had quite a deal. Married middle-class men often controlled the purse while enjoying the pleasures of a full-time homemaker, who might work a few hours here and there for “pin money” they could spend on themselves. Mothers of small children seldom worked full-time.”
― David Cay Johnston, Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality

“We should also remember that punishment and inequality are intimately linked—that the causality runs in both directions. Disparities in punishment reflect socioeconomic inequalities, but they also help produce and reinforce them.”
― David Cay Johnston, Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality

“In America, criminal justice policies have become a second line of defense, if you will, against individuals whose development has not been adequately fostered by other societal institutions, like welfare, education, employment and job training, mental-health programs, and other social initiatives.”
― David Cay Johnston, Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality

“a massive, malign indifference to people of color is at work.”
― David Cay Johnston, Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality

“In 2008, one in a hundred American adults was behind bars. Just what manner of people does our prison policy reveal us to be?”
― David Cay Johnston, Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality

“Longer sentences also build incarceration rates and create a chronic condition of social incapacitation for those imprisoned, as they face severe restrictions on their rights and opportunities after release from prison. Individuals who enter prison and become a case in the criminal-justice system today have a 50 percent or more chance of remaining under the system’s control for life with recurrent arrests and periods of incarceration.”
― David Cay Johnston, Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality

“Not surprisingly, this huge American “industry” has huge political clout—with the expansion of prosecutorial and correctional workers’ power, the growing number of lobbyists for these groups, and the many vendors who build and service prisons.”
― David Cay Johnston, Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality

“Part of this is related to the vast apparatus created to administer the criminal-justice system; part is related to the new laws that mandate longer sentences and keep the prisons full of older inmates for longer periods; part is due to the rules governing release and reentry—parole policies that lower the threshold for violations and ensure recidivism; and part is the result of lasting damage done to the families and the social fabric of the communities from which most prisoners are drawn.”
― David Cay Johnston, Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality

“Today, the United States has the highest rate of imprisonment of any nation in the world—possibly the highest rate in the history of any nation.”
― David Cay Johnston, Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality

“the rapid growth of a larger prison system creates an expanded and more powerful system of “correctional” administration, which tends to have self-perpetuating features.”
― David Cay Johnston, Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality

“The judicial mechanisms that states employ to accomplish programs of mass incarceration include laws and strategies of enforcement explicitly designed to imprison large populations. Methods include expansion of the list of criminal offenses punishable by prison terms, as well as harsher sentencing practices that impose long prison terms for crimes not previously prosecuted at all: being Jewish in Nazi Germany, or being an enemy of the state in Stalin’s Russia.”
― David Cay Johnston, Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality

“Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot all employed mass imprisonment, each presiding over a process that arrested and incarcerated millions. Such systems are often part of massive programs of slave labor or forced resettlement, in which high death rates are a typical by-product. And some examples of mass incarceration are explicitly part of a program of ethnic cleansing or genocide—a tool of policy that intends the extermination of entire populations. But now, for the first time, we see mass incarceration in a democratic society.”
― David Cay Johnston, Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality

“Having described the unprecedented scale of imprisonment in America, we may still ask: is America’s use of imprisonment really a justifiable (and effective) solution to an epidemic of crime? Indeed, with crime rates at historic lows, one might even conclude that all this imprisonment is a good thing. Or is it a problem in its own right? How can we assess the significance of mass incarceration in America?”
― David Cay Johnston, Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality

“It is no coincidence that pollution so often accompanies poverty. Imagine a cost-benefit analysis of siting an undesirable facility, such as a landfill or incinerator. Benefits are often measured by willingness to pay for environmental improvement. Wealthy communities are able and willing to pay more for the benefit of not having the facility in their backyards; thus when measured this way the net benefits to society as a whole will be maximized by putting the facility in a low-income area.”
― David Cay Johnston, Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality

“Wage insurance works best when all workers are covered under the same plan and the coverage starts at the beginning of their working lives. The only entity that can mandate this kind of universal program is the federal government and it has.”
― David Cay Johnston, Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality

“The reality is that Social Security is not a government handout. It is a benefit that is earned and paid for through hard work.”
― David Cay Johnston, Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality

“The worst proposals are to radically transform Social Security by privatizing, which would put people at the mercy of the stock and bonds markets as well as cost much more to administer or to add means-testing which would deny benefits to higher-income workers. Either of these ideas would destroy the fundamental features that have made Social Security so successful, and wildly popular, which is what opponents of Social Security want to destroy so they can end the program.”
― David Cay Johnston, Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality

“One change we believe should be made is increasing the maximum amount of wages on which Social Security’s contributions are assessed. Contributions are assessed only on the wages that are insured against loss.”
― David Cay Johnston, Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality

“Without Social Security, the official U.S. poverty rate among the aged would jump from 9 percent to nearly 50 percent—about the same rate as in the 1920s and early 1930s, prior to the enactment of Social Security.”
― David Cay Johnston, Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality

“Although Social Security’s benefits are modest, they are extremely important for the vast majority of beneficiaries, especially those with low and moderate incomes.”
― David Cay Johnston, Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality

“Social Security runs seamlessly and efficiently—less than 1 percent of its expenditures are for administration.”
― David Cay Johnston, Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality

“Social Security gives concrete expression to widely held and time-honored American commitments. Grounded in values of shared responsibility and concern for all members of society, it reflects an understanding that, as citizens and human beings, we all share certain risks and vulnerabilities; and we all have a stake in advancing practical mechanisms of self- and mutual support. It is based on the belief that government—which is simply all of us acting collectively—can and should uphold these values by providing practical, dignified, secure, and efficient means to protect Americans and their families against risks they all face.”
― David Cay Johnston, Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality

“Generations of Americans built our Social Security system to provide basic and widespread protection against loss of earnings arising from the death, disability, or retirement of working Americans—for themselves, their families, and those who follow.”
― David Cay Johnston, Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality

“Two scholars who served on the staff of President Reagan’s 1982 National Commission on Social Security Reform explain that Social Security does more to reduce income inequality and prevent poverty among the old in the United States than any other program, public or private, while providing crucial protection for orphans and the disabled. And, contrary to widely circulated claims, they show it does not add one dollar to the federal government’s budget deficits and can remain financially sound as long as our government exists.”
― David Cay Johnston, Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality

“Equality works. Extreme inequality does not. Out of the grotesque opportunism that we’ve seen among owners of great wealth in the past ten years has come a colossal waste of financial capital and human energy.”
― David Cay Johnston, Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality

“The Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, who was the chief economist of the World Bank at the time, called the food riots in Indonesia “the IMF Riots.” “When a nation is down and out,” Stiglitz told the London newspaper the Observer, “the IMF takes advantage and squeezes the last pound of blood out of them. They turn up the heat until finally the whole cauldron blows”
― David Cay Johnston, Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality