wealth inequality

Ghastly Glimpses Of America’s Most Rich-People-Friendly Year

December 22, 2024 Sam Pizzigati, Counter Punch. Educate! Billionaires, Elon Musk, wealth inequality

The good times — for America’s super wealthy — are now rolling way past good. Our richest have in 2024 enjoyed their best year ever. No other nation’s deepest pockets have watched their fortunes grow as large or as fast. Elon Musk, of course, perfectly embodies this unprecedented surge in the personal wealth of America’s wealthiest. Musk has entered 2024’s last two weeks with a net worth spilling past $450 billion, nearly half a trillion dollars. Over the last 12 months, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index neatly notes, Musk’s wealth has doubled.

Many Wealthy Members Of Congress Are Descendants Of Rich Slaveholders

December 17, 2024 Neil K. R. Sehgal and Ashwini Sehgal, The Conversation. Educate! Congress members, History, Slavery, United States, wealth inequality

The legacy of slavery in America remains a divisive issue, with sharp political divides. Some argue that slavery still contributes to modern economic inequalities. Others believe its effects have largely faded. One way to measure the legacy of slavery is to determine whether the disproportionate riches of slaveholders have been passed down to their present-day descendants. Connecting the wealth of a slaveholder in the 1860s to today’s economic conditions is not easy. Doing so requires unearthing data for a large number of people on slaveholder ancestry, current wealth and other factors such as age and education.

Rich-People-Friendly Think Tank Confirms Richest Pay Under One Percent In Annual Taxes

December 2, 2024 Bob Lord, Inequality.org. Educate! Taxes, Think Tanks, wealth inequality, Wealth Tax

The Washington, D.C.-based Tax Foundation has long functioned as an apologist for America’s deepest pockets. Analysts at the Foundation have spent years assuring us that our wealthiest are paying far more than their fair tax share — in the face of a reality that has our richest aggressively growing their share of the wealth all Americans are creating. This past August, the Biden administration’s Treasury Department commissioned a new study that documented just how little of their wealth America’s richest are actually paying in taxes. Last month, the Tax Foundation responded with a predictable critique.

The Potential Of Cooperatives For Economic Equality

November 25, 2024 Cooperatives Europe. Create! Cooperatives, European Union (EU), United Nations, wealth inequality

Released on October 17th under the title “Social Development in Times of Converging Crises: A Call for Global Action”, the report is the output of the global call by the GA resolution 77/281 in April 2023 to promote the social and solidarity economy for sustainable development. Overall, the report estimates that the economic cost of crisis mitigation from 2020 until 2030 will translate into “a cumulative output loss of over $50 trillion”, to the detriment of social development. It is a global plea to prioritise people and the planet over profit, and for public-private social investments to be at the same level as their economic counterparts.

In Baku, At The Climate Conference, Hand-Wringing Abounds

November 17, 2024 Sam Pizzigati, Inequality.org. Educate! climate crisis, COP29, Fossil Fuels, wealth inequality

The world desperately needs to pull the plug on fossil fuels. So agree most of the official delegates from nearly 200 nations who have gathered this month by the Caspian Sea for the 29th annual global “Conference of the Parties” on climate change — COP29 for short — in Azerbaijan’s capital city Baku. But not all the estimated 70,000 attendees at this year’s COP are practicing what they should be preaching. Private jet arrivals at Baku’s international airport, news reports note, have just doubled. What makes that such a big deal?

United States And China Why Not A Deal?

October 21, 2024 Richard D. Wolff, Counter Punch. Strategize! Capitalism, China, US Imperialism, wealth inequality

An old theme within social theory holds that societies with very unequal distributions of wealth can sustain their social cohesion so long as total wealth is growing. Such total growth enables all who get a distributed share of that wealth—even those with the smallest shares—to experience at least some increase. The rich with the biggest shares can grab most of the growth so long as some is provided to those with small shares. The pie analogy works well: so long as the pie is growing all distributed shares of it can also grow.

Hotel CEOs Prioritize Their Own Paychecks, Not Improvements

September 6, 2024 Sarah Anderson, Inequality.org. Educate! Hotels, Service Industry, Strikes, Unions, wealth inequality, Worker Rights and Jobs

Labor disputes are continuing to rage between unionized hotel workers and the bosses at three major chains: Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt. Over Labor Day weekend, more than 10,000 UNITE HERE members went on strike at 25 hotels in nine cities after months of unresolved contract negotiations. While most are back on the job for now, they’re urging guests not to patronize any of their target hotels until the union secures good new contracts. (They’ve mapped hotels with labor disputes here) Among the workers’ key demands: higher wages in line with the rising cost of living, fair staffing and workloads, improved benefits, and a reversal of pandemic-era cuts.

Capitalism’s Unequal Distribution Deprives You Of True Freedom

August 9, 2024 Richard D. Wolff, Counter Punch. Educate! Capitalism, Democracy, Freedom, wealth inequality, Worker Rights

As the French economist Thomas Piketty most recently exposed, capitalism, across time and space, has always tended to produce ever-greater economic inequality. Oxfam, a global charity, reported that 2022’s 10 richest men together had six times more wealth than the poorest 3.1 billion people on earth. The lack of democracy inside workplaces or enterprises is both a cause and an effect of capitalism’s unequal distribution of income and wealth. Of course, inequality predates capitalism. Powerful feudal lords across Europe had blended autocracy with unequal distributions of wealth on their manorial estates.

Debt Is Political: Why Wealth Flows From Poor To Rich

August 5, 2024 Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson, Geopolitical Economy. Resistance Report Capitalism, Debt, Federal Reserve, wealth inequality

You may think that today, given the events of recent weeks, we might be talking about the wars that seem set to spiral out of control, particularly with Israel appearing so determined to escalate its hostilities with Hezbollah that it is willing to make accusations on entirely and visibly flimsy grounds. You might think that we will talk about how it’s not at all clear who’s in control, particularly in that country that so often fancies itself as the world’s policeman or woman, as the case may be. And indeed, we certainly intend to cover these topics in the future. However, today we will focus on a very closely related topic, and that is debt.

The World’s Richest Just Got Extraordinarily More Wealthy

July 13, 2024 Max B. Sawicky, In These Times. Educate! Class Struggle, Finance and the Economy, Taxes, wealth inequality

In every measurement of economic inequality, personal wealth is found to be more unequal than income. Naturally, this state of affairs invites attention and criticism, along with demands for a reduction of that inequality by various means, including to reduce the stubborn racial wealth gap. The latest World Wealth Report for 2024, published last month by The Capgemini Research Institute, brings this level of inequality into stark relief. We learn from the report that very high net-worth individuals (“HNWI,” defined as those with at least $1 million of investable assets) have been doing quite well, which is probably not a surprise.

To Best Understand Inequality, Think Class, Not Generation

July 7, 2024 Sam Pizzigati, Inequality.org. Educate! Class Struggle, Multigenerational, Public investment, wealth inequality

How much does the generation we belong to define the comfort of the lives we lead? Just about nothing impacts our comfort, suggests a recent spate of major media news analyses, more than our generation. “Millennials had it bad financially,” as a Washington Post feature put it last month, “but Gen Z may have it worse.” Demographers typically define millennials as those Americans born between 1980 and 1994. Gen Z covers the cohort that came on the scene between 1995 and 2012. The tens of millions of Americans in both these generations, goes the standard analysis, enjoy precious little of the good life that has blessed America’s baby boomers, those lucky 60- and 70-year-olds born right after World War II between 1946 and 1964.

A Practical Prescription For Taxing Our World’s Richest

June 29, 2024 Sam Pizzigati, Inequality.org. Create! Class Struggle, Finance and the Economy, Tax the rich, Taxes, wealth inequality

Ever wonder why the divide between the world’s richest and everybody else keeps getting wider? Gabriel Zucman, one of the world’s finest young economists, has just produced a report that riffs on one key reason: Our super rich pay next to nothing in taxes. Just how close to nothing? This close: Over the past four decades, the world’s “ultra-high-net-worth individuals” have seen their fortunes increase, after taking inflation into account, an average 7.5 percent per year. How much annually have these rich paid in taxes? They’ve been paying, Zucman calculates, an effective tax rate “equivalent to 0.3% of their wealth.”

A Fair Tax Agenda For Wall Street

June 15, 2024 Sarah Anderson, Inequality.org. Create! Economic crisis, Tax Reform, Wall Street, wealth inequality

Financial institutions still extract too much wealth from working families and funnel too much of that wealth into massive executive bonuses that encourage excessive risk-taking – and even financial fraud.[2] And, as we saw with the spate of regional bank failures in 2023, reckless executives can still drive their firms into the ground and walk away with grand fortunes while relying on taxpayer money to contain the damage.[3] Much more needs to be done to ensure our financial system contributes to a healthy economy and focuses on long-term value creation instead of short-term speculation that might pump up CEO pay but does little for the rest of us. Today’s hearing will examine one important tool for guiding Wall Street in this direction: tax policy. Next year, the scheduled expiration of several provisions in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act will force a major tax debate in Congress.

For The Rich, One Nation Isn’t Rolling Out The Red Carpet

June 10, 2024 Sam Pizzigati, Inequality.org. Create! Norway, Taxes, wealth inequality, Wealth Tax

So you think the rich have life easy, do you? Just try telling that to the deep pockets who’ve spent tens of millions buying condos at 432 Park Avenue, the 11-year-old Manhattan luxury tower that once rated as our hemisphere’s tallest residence. Condo owners in the tower have had to put up with “faulty elevators, leaky plumbing, and noise issues.” They’re now suing the building’s operator. Or consider the plight of those fabulously wealthy souls who’ve had to pay millions to move their mansions off the sandy coast of Nantucket, the one-time hippie refuge that’s become a summer “holiday hot spot for billionaires.” The problem?

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