With inequality now a global front-page matter, the stats that measure inequality have taken on a new importance. And no inequality stat has a longer pedigree — or more confusion surrounding it — than the “Gini coefficient.” We explain the Gini stat and clear the confusion.
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.
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.
The gender gap in wages, statistics show, has stopped narrowing. Median wages have stopped growing entirely. What’s happening? Highly paid men, the few men at the very front of the line, have been taking almost all the recent increase in American national income.
All sorts of federal agencies publish income inequality data. But only the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office directly takes on America’s income inequality deniers. The CBO’s latest survey shows more than a doubling of the top 1 percent’s share of national income.
The Census won’t count it. The IRS won’t tax it, at anywhere near full freight. What is it?
The private sector’s declining union presence, two top sociologists contend, explains a major chunk of America’s growing wage inequality. In 1973, over a third of all private sector workers belonged to unions. Today’s rate. Less than a tenth of private sector workers carry union cards.
Corporate America, advises one of the nation’s most prestigious management consulting companies, needs to wake up and stop rewarding employee loyalty and performance. With one exception.