The Great Recession has widened the gap between the developed world’s affluent and everyone else, details a new report from researchers at the Paris-based OECD. In fact, inequality increased more in the three years after the global crisis first hit in 2007 than in the previous 12 years.
Do American taxpayers really have to line the pockets of billionaires — and Wall Street banking giants — to help states and localities improve their infrastructures? Of course not. But they do. And this generosity toward America’s richest is costing Americans billions every year.
America’s top corporate executives love lecturing the rest of us about ‘fiscal responsibility.’ They want us to expect less from government. But they expect more, and a new report on the chief executives campaigning to “fix the debt” shows exactly how they’re getting it.
Do you know how much the cuts in Social Security benefits now getting debated in Congress will end up ‘saving’ America? Not nearly as much as a massive — and longstanding — tax loophole that benefits the wealthy and the insurance industry is currently costing America.
How much did America’s top corporate executives make last year? The scorekeepers don’t all agree. But that won’t matter if we keep our eyes on the most important figure of all: the compensation gap between CEOs and their workers.
The uproar over the future Social Security benefit cutbacks in the new White House budget proposal has overshadowed a little-known retirement tax break that, unlike Social Security, really does need trimming. The stakes with the Roth IRA? They run over $1 trillion.
Today’s conventional wisdom in Congress on taxing America’s wealthy — that tax rates on income at our economic summit have gone as high as they can sensibly go — has no real evidence to support it, details a new Economic Policy Institute and Century Foundation study.
Britain’s top unions will soon be flexing their shareholder muscles — and insisting that the corporations where their pension funds have investments start taking significant steps to narrow the pay divide between executives and workers. And the unions have a specific pay ratio in mind.
“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.”
In recent years, spending enormous sums of money while thousands of Americans lost their jobs seemed “gauche,” and those who had the means held off on purchasing pricey pads. That’s now changing. (source)
Celebrities loom large when inequality is soaring. Their superficial diversity dangles before us the myth that anything is possible — even as the American dream quietly dies. (source)
The number of condo buildings in Manhattan with apartments selling for more than $15 million has risen to 49, up from 33 in 2009. In the nearby borough of Queens, record foreclosures. (source)
Twenty cities now have more than 100,000 millionaires. New York hosts the most billionaires, with 70, says a new WealthInsight study. (source)
Mitt Romney and I both grew up in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, a wealthy suburb of Detroit. For much of our childhoods, we were represented in Congress by a tireless defender of the rich and powerful, William Broomfield.
If President Obama played basketball with the king of Bhutan, would the world have a better shot at becoming a happier place?
The inequality and growth debate is a red herring. It just doesn’t matter. The problem is inequality, and its solution is simple.
Sales taxes — of whatever stripe — fall harder on poorer than richer customers. And they squeeze smaller retailers more than big ones.