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Inequality

Protests In Haiti: An Overlooked Crisis The World Should Not Ignore

There have been protests occurring and growing in Haiti for over a year now. Widely dismissed as riots over fuel and food shortages, the unrest in Haiti is actually a response to much larger and deeper issues that cannot continue to be ignored. Here to talk with me about some of these issues is Keston Perry. Keston is a political economist with expertise in climate policy, finance, and global development, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean. He has previously served as an external advisor to the United Nations Development Program. Thank you Keston so much for joining me today.

The Egalitarian Promise Of 1989—And Its Betrayal

The ideological victory of liberal democracy over communism shaped the way in which historians, politicians, and social scientists made sense of the events of 1989. But there is a strong case today for a revised look at the revolutions of 1989—a critique of the way the prevailing narratives and theories have presented these revolutions as essentially a transition from the tyranny of the party-state to a free and democratic society. A more complex picture of that momentous year reveals not only the eclipse of different possibilities...

How Much In ‘Inequality Tax’ Are You Paying?

What nation ranks as the world’s richest? A simple question to answer, right. Well, not so much, suggests the just-released tenth annual Global Wealth Report from the banking giant Credit Suisse. Everything turns out to depend on how we define “richest.” If we mean by “richest” the nation with the most total wealth, we have a clear worldwide number one: the United States. The 245 million adults who call the United States home held, as of this past June, a combined net worth of $106 trillion. No other nation comes close to that total. China ranks a distant second, with a mere $64 trillion, Japan even farther back at $25 trillion.

Lebanon’s ‘October Revolution’ Must Go On!

The ‘streets’ of Lebanon have exploded in massive protests since October 17th. Following months of austerity and dire economic conditions, a shortage of US dollars that caused a serious threat of devaluation of the Lebanese currency resulting in a potential crisis of gasoline and bread, the continuing power and water outages, and a catastrophic week with wildfires ravaging the country and exposing the ruling class, the government met on Thursday and agreed to impose new taxes on the people, including a tax on Whatsapp calls!

Can An Economic Stat Help Narrow Our Grand Economic Divide?

Why do so many Americans deeply distrust government? One part of the reason, two top economists suggested to a key congressional committee this week, just might be the most basic — and familiar — of the economic statistics the federal government produces. That stat — gross domestic product, or GDP — “measures the market value of the goods, services, and structures produced by the nation’s economy,” as calculated by the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis. The Bureau generates new GDP figures for every quarter of the year, and the release of these figures regularly makes headlines.

Inequality Is Literally Killing Us

What do the folks at the U.S. Census Bureau do between the census they run every 10 years? All sorts of annual surveys, on everything from housing costs to retail sales.  The most depressing of these — at least this century — may be the sampling that looks at the incomes average Americans are earning. The latest Census Bureau income stats, released in mid-September, show that most Americans are running on a treadmill, getting nowhere fast. The nation’s median households pocketed 2.3 percent fewer real dollars in 2018 than they earned in 2000.

400 Richest U.S. Families Paid Lower Tax Rate Than Working Class, Study Finds

For the first time in a century, the nation’s richest billionaires are paying a lower tax rate than working-class Americans, according to an analysis in a forthcoming book. The wealthiest 400 families paid an average effective tax rate of 23% last year ― the second year of President Donald Trump’s new tax law ― while the bottom half of all American households paid an average rate of 24.2%, according to the study. The superwealthy paid a lower rate than any other income group, according to an analysis in the new book “The Triumph of Injustice,” by economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman of the University of California at Berkeley.

In Stockton, Early Clues Emerge About Impact Of Guaranteed Income

A totaled car. A mother with cancer. Two kids at home, with field trips and Quinceañera outfits and football gear to pay for. Rent bills of $1,250 due each month. Two jobs—one part-time—both paying around $15 an hour, supplemented by unpredictable child support payments. Lorrine Paradela used to lie awake at night, thinking through all her expenses and income streams, struggling to breathe from the stress of it all. Now, Paradela says, she’s started sleeping again.

The Wealthiest Americans Haven’t Paid Their Fair Share In Decades

Donald Trump tried to sell America on his 2017 tax bill by calling it a middle class tax cut, and regurgitating Reagan-era talking points about how tax cuts for the wealthy actually benefit everyone. As Heather Long warns in The Washington Post however, while some middle class families got a modest cut in 2018, in 2019, millions of Americans were—or were about to be—“surprised to learn that their refunds will be less than expected or that they owe money to the Internal Revenue Service.”

Red-Green Alliance: A Green Earth With Peace And Room For Us All

The world economy is characterized by major economic inequalities and by a production system that has already exceeded the limits of what is globally sustainable. Today we see upheaval and war, recurring deep economic crises, climate change, over-exploitation of resources, deep poverty, slavery, increasing inequality, authoritarian and undemocratic regimes, and gross human rights violations. At the same time, we are approaching an ecological disaster with lightning speed. The main reason is that the capitalist system is based on exploitation and repression. It is also the main obstacle to solving the world’s problems.

Making Corporations Pay For Big Pay Gaps

For two full years now, publicly held corporations in the United States have had to comply with a federal mandate to report the gap between their CEO and median worker compensation. The resulting disclosures, this report makes clear, have produced truly staggering statistical results. Americans across the political spectrum have been decrying the yawning gaps between CEO and worker compensation for several decades now. Yet Americans still, the research shows, vastly underestimate how wide these gaps have become.

US Census Report: Inequality Grew Rapidly In 2018 To Record Levels

Over the course of just the last year, the poorest 20 percent of the country—some 65 million people—saw its share of aggregate income decline from 3.11 percent to 3.10 percent. The share of the second poorest quintile declined from 8.4 percent to 8.35 percent, while the third and fourth quintiles, representing those in the 40 to 60 percent and 60 to 80 percent range of incomes, declined from 14.29 to 14.21 and 22.63 to 22.53, respectively. Only a very narrow section of the population benefited from this income redistribution.

More Cities Pass Laws To Block Dollar Store Chains

Many residents end up shopping at dollar stores for food instead, the mayor reported. Although most dollar stores sell no fresh foods and offer only a narrow selection of processed items, they’re a ready option in nearly every corner of the city. Over the last decade, the two dominant chains, Dollar General and Dollar Tree, which owns Family Dollar, have multiplied to nearly 40 outlets within Birmingham and more just beyond the city lines. These chains aren’t just taking advantage of food deserts, the mayor had concluded; they’re creating and perpetuating them.

We Need A Homes Guarantee. Now.

I lost everything during the financial crisis. The government decided that the perpetrators of the crisis were “too big to fail” and bailed them out with our money. I was not bailed out. Today, a decade after the crisis, I’m part of a grassroots-led effort to ensure every person in the United States has safe, accessible, sustainable, and permanently affordable housing. I don’t want anyone to have to go through what I’ve gone through. After the crash, I had to change my whole life. I didn’t have a 401(k) retirement account to fall back on. I had to cancel travel plans. I had to find a place to live.

The US Welfare State Cut Poverty By Two-Thirds In 2018

When you want to determine how much poverty is reduced by the nation’s welfare programs, what you normally do is determine how many people are in poverty based on the distribution of market income and then compare that number to how many people are in poverty when you include taxes and welfare benefits, i.e. the distribution of disposable income. Using this approach, we see in the below graph that there are 77.9 million poor people based on market income and 42.4 million poor people based on disposable income.
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