Tag Archives: inequality

What a surprise.Zero HedgeUS Workers Only Receiving A Fraction Of Corporate Tax Cuts Tyler Durden

The premise and promise of capitalism, going back to Adam Smith, have been that global wealth would increase and serve as a benefit to all of humanity.2 However, the experience of recent decades has challenged those claims: while global wealth has indeed grown, most of the increase has been captured by a small group at the top. This has continued into the“recovery” in the United States and globally. The result is that an obscenely unequal distribution of the world’s wealth has become even...

Even if free trade is ultimately broadly beneficial, the fact remains that as trade has become freer, inequality has worsened. One major reason for this is that current global trade rules have enabled a few large firms to capture an ever-larger share of value-added, at a massive cost to economies, workers, and the environment....  The only significant exception to these trends is China, which has designed industrial policies specifically to increase the share of domestic value-added and to...

This article combines tax, survey, and national accounts data to estimate the distribution of national income in the United States since 1913. Our distributional national accounts capture 100% of national income, allowing us to compute growth rates for each quantile of the income distribution consistent with macroeconomic growth. We estimate the distribution of both pretax and posttax income, making it possible to provide a comprehensive view of how government redistribution affects...

Don't celebrate the recent expansion yet. The economic numbers look good — until adjusted for inflation.The real wage is falling. Workers are becoming worse off economically in real terms even with nominal wages improving somewhat but not substantially. They falling further behind than they were before the expansion in terms of purchasing power.Occasional Links & Commentary“Don’t class warfare me”David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics, University of Notre Dame

Workers’ wages have been stagnant for the past decade across the 36 countries that make up the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. But the problem has been particularly acute in the United States, where the “low-income rate” is high (only surpassed by two countries, Greece and Spain) and “income inequality” even worse (following only Israel). The causes are clear: workers suffer when many of the new jobs they’re forced to have the freedom to take are on the low end of...

What we need is to disaggregate growth and report on the progress of all Americans. Instead of the one-number-fits-all approach of GDP growth, this new system would report growth for Americans along the income curve, much as the graphs above do. It might indicate, for example, that the bottom 50 percent of Americans experienced growth of 1.3 percent while Americans in the top 1 percent of earners experienced 4.5 percent income growth. Unfortunately, such a system is not currently possible....

The increasing income and wealth inequalities within countries is one of today’s great social concerns. This column describes how the tendency towards increasing indebtedness in much earlier societies was held in check by debt-cancellation Jubilees, and discusses ways to deal with today’s debt overhang and accompanying wealth inequalities. The funding of a modern Jubilee could come mostly, perhaps entirely, from a land/or property tax. Vox.euSome ways to introduce a modern debt Jubilee...

When the poorest gain, the lower bound, or ‘floor’, of the distribution of living standards rises. Using microdata spanning the last 30 years, this column argues that the floor in the US has been sinking, alongside rising top incomes. The floor would have fallen further without public spending on food stamps, which helped protect the poorest in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. vox.euAlongside rising top incomes, the level of living of America’s poorest has fallen Martin...

I’ve just reviewed Professor Carey Doberstein’s book on homelessness governance (UBC Press). The book looks at the way decisions are made pertaining to funding for homelessness programs in Vancouver, Calgary and Toronto during the 1995-2015 period. Points raised in my review include the following: -Homelessness trends look quite different across the three cities. For example, it can be growing in one city, but declining in another. -One of the book’s main arguments is that better decisions...