#unemployment

I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions--poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed--which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished. It must surely be a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit that even a small number of those men and women in the hell of the prison system survive it and hold on to their humanity. ↗

— Howard Zinn

#criminal-justice-system #cycle-of-violence #desperation #greed #homelessness

I define genuine full employment as a situation where there are at least as many job openings as there are persons seeking employment, probably calling for a rate of unemployment, as currently measured, of between 1 and 2 percent. ↗

— William Vickrey

#calling #currently #define #employment #full

Currently a level of unemployment of 7 percent or more seems to be required to keep inflation from accelerating, a level quite unacceptable as a permanent situation. ↗

— William Vickrey

#inflation #keep #level #more #percent

If unemployment could be brought down to say 2 percent at the cost of an assured steady rate of inflation of 10 percent per year, or even 20 percent, this would be a good bargain. ↗

— William Vickrey

#bargain #brought #cost #could #down

Larger deficits are necessary and proper means to mitigate unemployment as the far greater evil in terms of human welfare. ↗

— William Vickrey

#evil #far #greater #greater evil #human

But if the choice is a cool president and 8 or 10 percent unemployment in a declining economy and a country that seems to be going in the wrong direction and structural unemployment for young people at 50 percent, I'd rather have a dorky president who fixed those problems. ↗

— Jonah Goldberg

#cool #country #declining #direction #dorky

The shock of unemployment becomes a pathology in its own right. ↗

— Robert Farrar Capon

#own #pathology #right #shock #unemployment

If you've got unemployment, low pay, that was just too bad. But that was the system. That was the sort of economy and philosophy against which I was fighting in the 1930s. ↗

— Barbara Castle

#bad #economy #fighting #got #i

It was to carry the American democratic journey beyond these failings that Black citizens and civil rights workers risked unemployment, violence and death. ↗

— Elijah Cummings

#beyond #black #carry #citizens #civil

What is a danger is that we stay stuck in a new normal where unemployment rates stay high, people who have jobs see their incomes go up, businesses make big profits. But they're learned to do more with less, and so they don't hire. ↗

— Barack Obama

#businesses #danger #go #high #hire