New research has helped answer a nagging question among scientists who study population health: How much time has to elapse before a society growing more unequal starts paying the price — in higher rates of illness and death? The best estimate: five years after inequality spurts.
From Manhattan to Monaco, the world’s deepest pockets are fashioning themselves into a new global tribe of footloose affluent souls. The business press has dubbed them the “stateless super rich.” The rest of us get to gawk at their excess — and wind up footing the ultimate bill.
So few Americans are cheering America’s rising productivity, a new Economic Policy Institute report suggests, because so few Americans are sharing in the new wealth that boosts in productivity have been creating over the past three decades. That wealth has gone largely to the top.
A new labor report reinforces the case for more transparency on the gap between what U.S. CEOs take home and what they pay their workers. The SEC is currently dragging its feet on implementing the new law that requires individual corporations to reveal just how wide that gap has become.
A new Citizens for Tax Justice report looks at all the taxes Americans pay, from federal and state income taxes to local property and sales taxes. Do the rich bear a heavier tax load than average Americans? Yes, but just barely. By one yardstick, U.S. taxes rate as just 0,6 percent progressive.
By any rational benchmark, hedge fund manager rewards remain positively stratospheric. Back in 2002, a hedge fund manager needed to earn $30 million to enter the hedge fund top 25. In 2011, a downer of a year for hedge fund managers, that entry level stood at $100 million.
Behind last week’s record-smashing $2 billion sale of the Los Angeles Dodgers sits a global economy that’s essentially enriching only the world’s super rich. A new report that tallies the latest stats on global wealth details just how incredibly far that enriching has gone.
On the eve of the release of the annual CEO pay survey reports, we review the recent research literature and take a look at the causes and consequences of the chief executive compensation spirals the United States has experienced since the late 1970s.
“Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only.”
J.J. Mulva, the CEO of oil giant ConocoPhillips, has emerged as the highest-paid U.S. chief exec of the past year. His take-home: $154.7 million. (source)
America’s top nurses union is pressing for a financial transactions tax, and that campaign has hedge fund billionaires seeing red. (source)
To claim social mobility as your guiding principle yet ignore income inequality, note two of the world’s top experts on the impact of top-heavy distributions of income and wealth, does not make for serious policy making. (source)
Corporations that pay their CEOs over 40 times what their workers are making should face a higher federal income tax rate on their profits. (source)
The American people, more and more of us are realizing, aren’t powerless in the face of extreme inequality.
A string of surprising ‘say on pay’ votes has some executive pay critics sensing an impending revolution in corporate boardrooms. But that ‘revolution’ won’t amount to much until CEO pay reformers start factoring worker pay into the corporate compensation equation.
Europe’s big banks and vulture hedge funds should pay the price for austerity, not government workers and the poor.