This superb six-minute video builds on pioneering research about American attitudes toward wealth by economists Michael Norton and Dan Ariely. Most Americans, the research shows, would like to see wealth in the United States much more equally distributed than they believe it is. But most Americans underestimate how staggeringly unequal the United States has become.
An eight-minute animation narrated by veteran actor and activist Ed Asner, this superb video short explores how Americans arrived at our current moment of crisis, an age of poorly funded public services matched with a widening economic divide between the nation’s wealthy and everyone else.
Sam Pizzigati, the editor of the Institute for Policy Studies inequality weekly Too Much takes viewers on a historical tour of the nation’s capital as he discusses his new book, The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph Over Plutocracy That Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970 (Seven Stories Press).
The U.S. Senate Budget Committee February 9, 2012 hearing on “Assessing Inequality, Mobility, and Opportunity” featured testimony from Institute for Policy Studies analyst Sarah Anderson. In her remarks, Anderson showcased how excessive corporate executive pay has turbocharged the gap between America ultra wealthy and everyone else.
In this TEDxHampshireCollege talk, Chuck Collins, the director of the IPS Program on Inequality and the Common Good, discusses an economic and moral rationale for increasing taxes on the wealthy.
TED Talk: We feel instinctively that societies with huge income gaps are somehow going wrong. Richard Wilkinson charts the hard data on economic inequality, and shows what gets worse when rich and poor are too far apart: real effects on health, lifespan, even such basic values as trust.
Some of America’s most flush corporations are demanding a tax holiday on their profits sitting offshore. In 2004, 58 corporations that benefited from a holiday slashed a total of nearly 600,000 jobs through layoffs while they collectively saved $64 billion from what they otherwise would have owed in taxes.
But we’re not broke. Not even close. The United States of America is awash in wealth. Our corporations are holding record trillions in cash. And overall individual wealth in the United States, the Credit Suisse Research Institute reported this past fall, has risen 23 percent since the year 2000, to $236,213 per American adult. Video [...]