Poverty More than a Matter of Black and White
Far too many Americans still see poverty and poor people through a racial prism that distorts demographic realities — and undermines efforts to narrow income inequality.
Articles
The World’s Smallest Shipwreck
Last month Mitt Romney released a somewhat redacted version of his 2011 tax returns. The Romneys reported $13,696,951 in adjusted gross income, not a cent of it earned through work...
Can We Get Tougher on Crime in the Suites?
Federal regulators have actually been cracking down somewhat lately on financial industry fraud. But the power-suited executives responsible for that fraud are still paying no personal price. What should we,...
Washington’s Promiscuous Protectors of Privilege: A Congressional Inequality Report Card
Mitt Romney and I both grew up in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, a wealthy suburb of Detroit. For much of our childhoods, we were represented in Congress by a tireless defender...
A Massive Income Shift from Work to Wealth
A new Cleveland Fed study details the declining share of U.S. national income that comes from the labor we do and the rising share of national income that comes from...
Romney versus realonomy: A peek inside the bubble
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has been roundly criticized for being a wooden, out-of-touch plutocrat who pays a lower effective tax rate than the vast majority of Americans yet believes...
The ‘Self-Made’ Myth: Our Hallucinating Rich
In real life, working hard only takes you so far. Those who go all the way — to grand fortune — typically get a substantial head start. So documents a...
New York Times’ teacher pay comparisons are way out of line
Understandably in these difficult times, much of the reporting on the Chicago teachers' strike has focused on teachers' pay. Most influentially, reporting from The New York Times strongly implies that...
Teacher Bashing: The Inequality Psychology
In any society where wealth concentrates at the top, the affluent will almost always come to sneer at public services and the men and women who provide them. [caption id="attachment_4557"...
How to End Hard Times? Reduce Inequality
A new report from a United Nations group details how low inequality promotes economic growth — and blasts away at a status quo where the most profitable firms end up...
More than 46 Million Americans Still in Poverty
According to Census Bureau figures released today, 15 percent of the US population lives in poverty. In 2011, more than 46 million Americans lived below a poverty line that was...
We Won the War on Poverty, then Lost the Peace
When President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a war on poverty in January 1964, the poverty rate was over 19 percent. By 1972 it had fallen to less than 12 percent,...