And we keep marching on into the New Gilded Age: Once upon a time, the American economy worked for everybody, and even the middle class got richer. But this story has only been a fairy tale for almost 30 years now. The new, harsh reality is that the bottom 90 percent of households are poorer […]
Tag: income inequality
OK, no one would really say that Houston is an urban utopia. But this op-ed in the Houston Chronicle actually does make some good points, even if it can be read as a defense of low-density, auto-inten
Wow, the Dow topped 17,000! That must mean these corporate profits are really trickling down to American workers, right? Call it the no-raises recovery: Five years of economic expansion have done almo
In other words, people who whine that the poor have cell phones instead of their proper role of starving or that those “choosing” to have something like a cell phone rather than health insurance are the undeserving poor are idiots. Because these often aren’t actually choices and even if they are, what the hell is […]
Standard and Poor’s says that American income inequality is impeding the nation’s economic recovery. Rising levels of income inequality in the U.S. is a drag on economic growth, and was a
Tyler Cowen’s solutions to poverty would not have been original in 1890: You and other thinkers on the right have proposed that cultural factors play a large role in the widening income gap. Wha
For the plutocrats, the real outrage is that income inequality hasn’t grown by more. Give it another 5 years: Economic inequality in the United States has been receiving a lot of attention. But it’s not merely an issue of the rich getting richer. The typical American household has been getting poorer, too. The inflation-adjusted net […]
The Washington Center for Equitable Growth, a fairly new economic think tank, decided to throw a bunch of money at economists to work on economic inequality issues. Being intentionally centrist, it wa
Should businesses who pay atrocious wages, just offloading the responsibility to keep people fed and clothed onto the state, be taxed to make up for it? Can you name the worst job you’ve ever had? F
I mostly agree with Harold Meyerson’s essay on the Democrats reaping a huge political opportunity by refocusing itself on class-based issues. While I might quibble with a couple of points (not sure FDR’s speechmaking is relevant plus it plays into green laternism), there’s a lot to suggest real political opportunities. Polls and demographics are a […]
Like those takers serving you at Red Lobster deserve to even make this much: Last year, according to a new analysis from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), the CEOs of America’s top 25 restaur
Joseph Stiglitz is ending his The Great Divide series on the Times and in doing so notes that extreme economic inequality under capitalism is not inevitable, but rather a series of policy choices: So