Changes in state tax laws now encourage America’s awesomely affluent to create “perpetual” trusts for their heirs. The combination of these new laws and new technology, legal scholars warn, allows the “dead hand” of the past to rule over the living. In effect, immortality for the rich.
In 2030, the latest United for a Fair Economy State of the Dream report points out, the majority of U.S. residents under 18 will be people of color. If current household wealth trends continue, the majority of America’s young people will be growing up in economically insecure households.
Inflation has been steadily eroding the value of the U.S. minimum wage over recent decades. But inflation only explains part of the story why the minimum wage has become such an inadequate guarantor of low-wage decency and justice in the United States today.
Retail sales are up this holiday season in the top 1 percent plutonomy, but down in the realonomy where the other 99 percent live. And it’s not just the poor who are struggling. Even high-income, college-educated professionals have seen no income growth in over a dozen years.
One puts on football pageants. Another makes millions on a virtual farm. From Too Much, the Institute for Policy Studies inequality weekly, we present the year’s ten most avaricious. All ten remind us just how much needs to change, economically and politically, in 2012 and beyond.
In the past, analysts at the OECD global think tank have consistently recommended tax cuts around the world. The incomes of the richest have now grown so large that even the OECD, in a major new report on developed world inequality, is urging tax increases.
The other 99 percent do far worse in the United States than in any other developed country. The other 99 percent take home, the data show, just 82.6 percent of America’s personal income. The share of national income going to America’s other 99 percent has been falling for decades.
A blue-ribbon commission in the UK has just released a final report that demolishes all the major defenses that overpaid executives and their flacks, in the UK and the United States, have advanced to justify why executives today merit so much more than their counterparts a generation ago.
“Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.”
How U.S. corporations are escaping federal strictures meant to executive bonus pay during bankruptcy cases. (source)
With income inequality rising in most of the developed world, says John Evans, general secretary of the OECD’s Trade Union Advisory Council, “we’re sitting on a social time bomb.”
At the World Economic Forum in Switzerland this week, the word “inequality” appears only once in the event’s 130-page program. (source)
We have more than one new Gilded Age to confront, warns a top business analyst. (source)
A powerful coalition of U.S.-based global companies is lobbying hard for a “tax holiday” on offshore profits. Congress should say “no!”
The rich don’t much like paying taxes when tax rates run high. They don’t much like paying taxes when tax rates run low either.
Declines in government spending are holding back GDP growth at a time governments at all levels should be hiring to create jobs.