January 10, 2024                                                             Home   Subscribe    Open in Browser

Happy 2024! We hope you’ve had a wonderful start to the new year.

On our desks this week: the newly released Who Pays? report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a comprehensive state-by-state analysis that makes for a perfect incentive to get going on a year of tax justice advocacy. 

In 44 states, this ITEP study finds, tax structures exacerbate inequality. In 41 of those states, the top 1 percent are even paying taxes at a lower rate than everyone else. And in most all of these states, the lower the income, the higher the overall effective state and local tax rate turns out to be. You can check out how your state is faring on ITEP’s website. 

On the plus side: Six states — and the District of Columbia — are actually using their tax codes to reduce inequality. What can we learn from these states? Plenty. All these jurisdictions have in place highly progressive income tax brackets, offer targeted and refundable low-income tax credits, and rely much less on regressive consumption taxes.  

“The wide variety of results seen across states in this study,” conclude the authors of the new Who Pays? report, “proves that regressive state and local taxation is not inevitable.”

We agree. How we tax at every level will always be, as Who Pays? notes, “a policy choice.” Here’s to making transformative egalitarian choices in 2024!

Chuck Collins and Bella DeVaan
for the Institute for Policy Studies' Inequality.org team

A Professor Reckons with Redlining’s Racist Legacy

When Professor Emanuel Carter talks about redlining, he doesn’t mince words. “No good jobs, no good housing, and no good schools,” the associate professor in New York’s state university system observes, “have killed more of our people than a lot of wars.”

Carter grew up in a redlined part of Philadelphia during the 1950s and 1960s. But redlining — denying mortgages and other financial services to communities based on their race, ethnicity, and place — began a generation earlier, with roots in the New Deal's Home Owners’ Loan Act. Its impact can’t be overstated.

In recent years, for instance, the national homeownership rate has hovered around 44 percent for Black families versus 74 percent for white families. And as our colleagues’ recent Still A Dream: Over 500 Years to Black Economic Equality report lays plain, the racial wealth divide stubbornly persists.

Erasing redlining’s legacy, explains our former Next Leader Danielle Browne, will require innovative, reparations-oriented policy action at all levels of government.

“It is time for our country to take a comprehensive approach and marshal our resources in support of that,” adds Dr. Carter. “We must treat our entire population as if it deserves quality housing and, with that, the better opportunity to build community.”

Read more from Browne and Carter at the link below.

A Working Class Victory on Colombia’s Horizon

When first assuming the presidency of Colombia in 2022, Gustavo Petro made transformative labor reform one of his chief priorities. But Petro's landmark reform bill quickly encountered fierce opposition from the business community and its political representatives.

Despite that opposition, the bill has now advanced to a second round of legislative debate. If passed, Colombia’s government will increase overtime pay, extend social security provisions to delivery and tech platform workers, and strengthen workplace rights by ensuring protections for immigrant workers. 

How much does Colombia need labor reform? Right before the New Year, a scandal erupted at a tuna factory in Cartagena. Women workers at that factory, the nation learned, felt obligated to wear diapers on the job since management was tallying their bathroom breaks and deducting those minutes from their pay. 

Read more from our Inequality.org researcher Omar Ocampo on why a 2024 passage of these reforms will be crucial for Colombian workers.

The Billionaires Who Own the Home Next Door

What’s happened to the American dream of owning your own home? The gruesome story: About 85 percent of America’s renting households cannot currently qualify for a mortgage. The economic reality behind that stat: the shrinking share of America’s wealth that belongs to average Americans. And America’s richest aren’t just enjoying that trend. They’re exploiting it — on a wide variety of housing-related fronts. These rich have spent recent years buying up homes for sale on a massive scale and turning their newly purchased single-family houses into rental properties. Inequality.org’s Sam Pizzigati has more.

A Needed New Year’s Resolution: Keep Foot in Sock, Not Mouth

This week’s dour deep pocket: Tim Gurner, an Australian luxury property developer currently within hailing distance of billionaire status.

What has him sour: The global derision that greeted his tirade last September against workers who need to be reminded “that they work for the employer, not the other way around.”

Speaking before a business conference, Gurner had declared that his nation’s employees “have been paid a lot to do not too much in the last few years, and we need to see that change.” His proposed solution: “We need to see unemployment rise, unemployment has to jump 40, 50 percent.”

Summed up Gurner: “We need to see pain in the economy.”

The immediate pain from that pitch would fall on Gurner, who found himself forced days later to “sincerely regret that my words did not convey empathy” for people who lose their jobs.

The last word: Empathy has not exactly been Gurner’s calling card. Earlier in his career, the New York Post notes, “he accused younger workers of spending too much money on smashed avocados.”

Taxpayers Funded a Life-Saving Drug. Now It's Unaffordable, More Perfect Union. Merck is charging $200,000 for the life-saving cancer drug Keytruda. But it was developed using tax-payer dollars, meaning the federal government can lower the price.

Sasha Lilley and C. S. Soong, Fueling Change, KPFA's Against the Grain. What does bold and militant action in the face of climate calamity look like? What sorts of individual and collective actions should the movement encompass, embrace, or at least tolerate? Chuck Collins explores these questions in a provocative novel packed with information about real-life activists and iconic campaigns.

David Sirota, Master Plan, Lever News. The upcoming podcast series will expose the 50-year plot to legalize corruption in America.

Income disparities have become so pronounced that America’s richest 1 percent of households averaged 104 times as much income as the bottom 20 percent in 2020, according to the Congressional Budget Office. For an interactive version of this chart and other income inequality charts, check out the link below.

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