Top 55 Annie Lowrey Quotes

Older people still see socialism and communism as dangerous, authoritarian political systems, whereas younger people are more likely to see them as economic systems, and to care far less one way or another.

Members of Congress – with or without inside information – simply should not be allowed to trade stocks.

In functioning high-income countries, the government guarantees the provision of essential goods and services: medical care, transit between cities, supplies for public schools, financial support to weather a period of unemployment.

Cows and other livestock account for roughly one-sixth of all greenhouse-gas emissions, and as a general point, eating meat means taxing the Earth.

Americans have become more atomized by education, income, and political leanings. That polarization has meant sharply increased antipathy toward people with different beliefs.

Home-health and personal-care work is one of the country’s fastest-growing occupational sectors. But it is one marked by low pay and meager benefits, a problem that might become more urgent as the U.S.’s population continues to age.

Cell-based meat, or ‘clean’ meat – real meat produced in labs – has not become a commercial product yet. But analysts expect it to hit the shelves in 2021 or soon thereafter, and start-ups in this space, such as Memphis Meats, have raised tens of millions of dollars.

At a personal level, there’s ample evidence that being aware of your emotions and generous to yourself improves your physical and mental health, as well as your relationships with others.

The workforce is getting Uberized. The gig economy is taking over the world. Independent-contractor jobs are the new normal.

Lower-income immigrant families might receive more in benefits than they pay in taxes. But that mathematical equilibrium is temporary, and an artifact of the way the tax-and-transfer system is structured to help lower-income families and to support families with kids.

The government is more responsive to wealthy communities than poor communities, and to wealthy people than poor people.

The gig economy isn’t taking over, but it has become a useful emblem of what it is like to work for a living in late-stage capitalism.

A thin safety net, an expansive security state: This is the American way. At all levels of government, the country spends roughly double on police, prisons, and courts what it spends on food stamps, welfare, and income supplements.

During a coronavirus-induced downturn, families will be at greater risk for food insecurity, eviction, and job loss; kids will go hungry; food pantries and social-service organizations will come under more strain.

The things to watch are whether the country’s borrowing costs are rising, whether its budgetary allotment for payments on the debt is increasing, and whether it is spending on good priorities. Those big, scary debt numbers are not as big and scary as they used to be.

Wolves are afraid of humans, whereas dogs are not. Wolves hunt game, whereas dogs scavenge human leftovers or eat what their human companions put out for dinner. Wolves are not great at following human commands, whereas dogs are brilliant at it.

So overall in the entire economy, the issue is not that health care costs are growing dramatically. The issue is that the burden placed on families is. So just between 2010 and 2016, the cost burden of family private insurance premiums jumped 28%, whereas incomes rose less than 20%.

In the long run, lawmakers should keep in mind that tax rates are far from the only reason a rich person might consider flight: Decaying infrastructure and degrading public services are surely just as important.

The Trump administration, for its part, has pushed for childcare to basically be written off on your taxes, which would subsidize the wealthiest families the most but would act as a significant subsidy to all families.

The world is falling apart and nobody is there for you, 2020 has shown it over and over again. But American capitalism is.

The United States needs a much more progressive tax-and-transfer infrastructure, given how dramatically inequality has increased. But not every single policy needs to be ideally progressive to achieve that goal.

Even very low-income communities are seeing rising rates of obesity, diabetes, cancer, and heart disease as a result. But many countries lack the tax revenue and medical infrastructure to treat such conditions, leading to a burgeoning global-health crisis.

Many women are the lower-earning partner in a married couple, thanks in part to forces that relegate women to less remunerative professions and pay them less for the same work.

Taxes do have a clear record of curbing the consumption of, and thus the public-health impact of, tobacco and alcohol.

The U.S. has fewer, stingier, more complicated, and more conditional safety nets available to people than many other advanced economies – less generous ‘automatic stabilizers,’ in economic parlance.

The bunker business is just one instantiation, the grandest instantiation, of what you might think of as conspiracy capitalism.

Numerous studies have shown income inequality growing since the late 1970s. Real earnings have fallen for many families, with globalization, the decline of unions and technological innovations eroding workers’ wages.

Kids of the 1980s and 1990s have had a new, huge, financially catastrophic demand on their meager post-recession earnings, too: a trillion dollars of educational debt. About a quarter of Gen Xers who went to college took out loans to do so, compared with half of Millennials.

Wolves want to be wolves. Servals want to be servals. Bears want to be bears. And it is impossible to be a wolf or a serval or a bear when living in a cage.

Black women are three times as likely to die giving birth or shortly after birth as white women. Black women in the United States die having a child at roughly the same rate as women in Mongolia.

Along with the rise of inequality, the slowdown in productivity growth, and the shrinking of the middle class, the spiraling cost of living has become a central facet of American economic life.

Perhaps the country’s most pressing problem is its high uninsured rate. Every other country as wealthy as the United States has figured out how to cover its entire population, generally at a much lower cost, too.

Fighting recessions and building public infrastructure, including care, health, and educational infrastructure – this should not be the work of citizens. When it is, let’s acknowledge that’s a tragedy.

No country save for India is expected to bear a heavier financial burden from climate change than the United States.

Talking with economists, climate scientists, and psychologists convinced me that depersonalizing climate change, such that the only answers are systemic, is a mistake of its own. It misses how social change is built on a foundation of individual practice.

The risk that people pose to wolfdogs is far greater, statistically, than the risk that wolfdogs pose to people. Many are bred in miserable, inhumane conditions, and kept in equally miserable, inhumane conditions.

Millions of Millennials and Gen Zers were never exposed to the threats of the Soviet Union; they did not live through the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev; they do not remember the Mariel boatlift or the SALT treaties or the Cuban missile crisis.

Aided by the Great Society and the New Deal, the middle class grew, everywhere from Winnetka to Orlando to Humboldt.

In some ways, modern life has made us unkind. That unkindness has profound personal effects. And if we can build a kinder society, that would make life better for everyone.

Immigrant families pay taxes. They work. They start businesses. They spend money in their communities. They join native-born families in being economically productive, both paying money to the government and receiving benefits from the government.

Recycling, cutting back on driving, and changing out old light bulbs for energy-efficient ones might save half a ton of carbon a year. A household going car-free, flight-free, and vegan – changes impractical, if not outright impossible, for many families to make – might reduce emissions by four tons a year.

Arguably, it might prompt consumers to think about their consumption, with paper straws and reusable grocery bags and shared urban bicycles acting as a gateway to more meaningful changes.

A warming planet is destroying the country’s physical infrastructure: In 2019 alone, the United States experienced more than a dozen billion-dollar weather events, and 2020 might be worse.

Products marketed as being earth-friendly are often not that earth-friendly.

In the longer term, immigrants contribute more to the government’s coffers than they receive in social spending. Moreover, these programs are not just welfare or a handout, but also an investment, helping ensure that families are healthy, educated, and able to work and support themselves over the course of generations.

Indeed, the share of teachers in a union has fallen to less than half, driven in part by older, unionized teachers retiring, the rise of certain districts’ reliance on charters and other private education options, and legal changes that have curtailed the ability of unions to bargain on behalf of workers.

In Opportunity Zones, as they are called, investors will receive huge tax breaks for building office parks, warehouses, housing, grocery stores, and the like, helping to ease poverty and end blight in distressed communities.