Tailspin Quotes

“He has spread all these termites throughout the departments and agencies”
― Steven Brill, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It

“President Trump took office, the clawback rule, which was supposed to be co-drafted by six agencies, had still not been written,”
― Steven Brill, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It

“Americans all became gamblers. A house was not a home. It was a bet.”
― Steven Brill, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It

“A contest was then held for their kids, and they won, too”
― Steven Brill, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It

“The elites have become so skilled and so hardworking that they are able to protect each other better than ever before.”
― Steven Brill, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It

“divided America. On one side are the protected few—the winners—who don’t need government for much and even have a stake in sabotaging the government’s responsibility to all of its citizens. For them, the new, broken America works fine, at least in the short term. On the other side are the unprotected many, who rely on government, as they always have, to protect and preserve their way of life and maybe even improve it. That divide is the essence of America’s tailspin. The protected overmatched, overran, and paralyzed the government.”
― Steven Brill, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It

“The rest were over-budget by a cumulative $296 billion, an amount that would give nearly three million Americans a $100,000 college education, or rebuild the country’s fifty largest airports.”
― Steven Brill, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It

“This lack of concern about inequality among the elite is not a partisan matter,” Markovits and Fisman wrote. “Even when they self-identify as progressive Democrats, elite Americans value equality less highly than their middle-class compatriots.” These results, they continued, “suggest that the policy response to rising economic inequality lags so far behind the preferences of ordinary Americans for the simple reason that the elites who make policy—regardless of political party—just don’t care much about equality.”
― Steven Brill, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It

“Markovits explained it this way in a conversation a year and a half after his graduation speech: “The elites have become so skilled and so hardworking that they are able to protect each other better than ever before.”
― Steven Brill, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It

“Nationally, about a third of American adults have college degrees.”
― Steven Brill, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It

“The top twenty-five hedge fund managers in America make more than all the country’s kindergarten teachers combined.”
― Steven Brill, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It

“That, rather than a split between Democrats and Republicans, is the real polarization that has broken America since the 1960s: The protected versus the unprotected. Enhancing the common good versus maximizing and protecting the elite winners’ winnings.”
― Steven Brill, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It

“Following the Great Recession, the recovery passed over most of America. Incomes for the top 1 percent rose 31.4 percent from 2009 to 2012, but crept up a barely noticeable .4 percent for the bottom 99 percent. The moats built by those who were largely responsible for the Great Recession, or at least prospered in the run-up to the crash, worked. They survived the damage suffered by everyone else.”
― Steven Brill, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It

“it is time to storm the moats.”
― Steven Brill, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It

“It will be about the unprotected demanding that the protected become responsible”
― Steven Brill, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It

“the spectacular collapse of Trump’s flimflam act”
― Steven Brill, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It

“George W. Bush asked Americans to shop.”
― Steven Brill, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It

“Americans have to get better at democracy”
― Steven Brill, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It

“more than one in four jobs pay below the poverty level,”
― Steven Brill, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It

“America has become exceptional in the wrong way.”
― Steven Brill, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It

“a catastrophe under the Hudson River is inevitable”
― Steven Brill, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It

“The United States ranked tenth in the world in overall infrastructure quality in 2017.”
― Steven Brill, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It

“the Trump administration featured the ultimate in moat fortification.”
― Steven Brill, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It

“it’s really a cultural problem. No one is accountable for anything.”
― Steven Brill, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It

“This is a company with $19 billion a year in profit, even with those lawsuits”
― Steven Brill, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It

“the traders’ favorite phrase: IBGYBG—“I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone”
― Steven Brill, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It

“they are looking out for themselves, reinforcing resentment”
― Steven Brill, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It

“the basic rules of responsibility and accountability do not apply to those at the top”
― Steven Brill, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It

“Mike Pence cast the tie-breaking vote in favor of the banks”
― Steven Brill, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It

“moats have been dug even around America’s treasured courthouses to protect those with power.”
― Steven Brill, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It