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.
All across Corporate America, top executives have been feathering their own nests at the expense of their employees. The French have a better idea. And so did the famed business analyst Peter Drucker, the Austrian-born American who founded modern management science.
Egalitarian-minded academics have just subjected a central political question of our time to some rigorous research scrutiny. These researchers have found that more information about our economic divide can change how people feel about inequality, but not necessarily what they do.