American companies have no monopoly on avoiding taxes. British companies are also paying less in tax while reporting record profits. And American companies operating in Britain — like Amazon, Google, and Starbucks — happen to be some of the UK’s biggest tax-avoiders of all.
The Institute for Policy Studies weekly on excess and inequality has released its fifth annual list of America’s most avaricious. Their stories remind us just how much needs to change, economically and politically, for the United States to become a more equal society in the year that beckons ahead.
Friends of America’s financially favored have argued loud and long that higher taxes on the nation’s rich punish small business and generate no new revenue. What does the research tell us? Academic analysts have just brought a cart of “facts on the ground” to Capitol Hill.
Almost every single U.S. state has seen a significant growth in income inequality since the late 1970s, documents a new study from two leading Washington, D.C. think tanks. But states, the study stresses, can take equalizing action even if the federal government doesn’t.
Some 40,000 people a day are dying from poverty, the London advocacy group Share the World’s Resources details in a comprehensive new report, and austerity regimes are only compounding the world’s suffering. What’s needed? A “wholesale reform of the world economy.”
We’ve lost our manufacturing economy in the United States. Now we’re losing our service economy. We’re rapidly becoming, some observers fear, a “servant economy.” Today’s youth are facing an economy where serving rich people seems to offer the best future with real opportunity.
Far too many Americans still see poverty and poor people through a racial prism that distorts demographic realities — and undermines efforts to narrow income inequality. But recently released annual data from the Census Bureau can help point the way to a better understanding of deprivation in America today.
A new study out of the Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank details the declining share of U.S. national income that comes from the labor we do and the rising share of U.S. national income that comes from the wealth we own. The big problem with that: Only a few of us own that wealth.
“An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.”
Two new videos that analyze the particulars of the resolution to the “fiscal cliff” debate. (source)
Reductions in wages and benefits explain about 75 percent of the increase in corporate profits between 2000 and 2007. Taxing wage income at a higher rate than investment income, consequently, only increases America’s growing economic inequality. (source)
The fiscal cliff deal just approved by the Senate and House cuts taxes substantially compared to the tax policies that would have been in effect for 2013 if Congress had allowed all the Bush-era tax cuts to expire. But the deal directs only a fraction of the overall tax cuts to low- and middle-income Americans. (source)
The “fiscal cliff” tax deal includes a little-noticed new tax cut that will cost the federal government tens of billions in years to come. (source)
Mitt Romney and I both grew up in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, a wealthy suburb of Detroit. For much of our childhoods, we were represented in Congress by a tireless defender of the rich and powerful, William Broomfield.
How much can a billion dollars buy? The undivided attention of America’s entire political and chattering classes. Case in point: our ongoing national fixation on debt and deficit.
Who won in the fiscal cliff deal? The lawyers, the doctors, the dentists, the middle managers, the advertising executives, the whole MBA crowd.