To most Americans, the best marker of a healthy economy will always be a decent-paying, full-time job. An economy only deserves celebrating when people with full-time jobs have rising paychecks. In America today, they don’t.
Moving to a Graduated State Income Tax in Illinois. The state tax system would become fairer, more sustainable, and better for the Illinois economy. All that’s needed is the bipartisan political will.
Given that wage theft disproportionately affects workers from low-income households—who are already struggling to make ends meet—the loss of wages can be devastating. And these recovery numbers likely dramatically underrepresent the pervasiveness of wage theft—it has been estimated that low-wage workers lose more than $50 billion annually to wage theft.
Americans didn't magically suffer a collective collapse in self-discipline over the last four decades. So what changed? The economy, stupid.
More and more working-age men in the United States aren’t working at all. The number of nonworking white men grew from about 8 percent in 1960 to 17 percent in 2014. The numbers look still worse among black men: In 1960, 19 percent of black men were not working; in 2014, that number had grown to 35 percent of black men. That includes men who are incarcerated as well those who can’t find jobs.
The disparities in wealth that we term “income inequality” are no accident, and they can’t be fixed by fiddling at the edges of our current economic system. These disparities happened by design.
Child care costs constitute a large portion of the income families need in order to achieve a modest yet adequate standard of living—and are particularly onerous for workers paid the minimum wage.
In 2013, for the first time, over half of public school students were low-income—and this poverty growth spurt shows little sign of abating.
African-Americans are disproportionately likely to be poor, they are only a quarter of Americans living in poverty; whites make up about 41% of the poor. Those white Americans who don't want to help the poor because they'd be helping people of another race are actually screwing over white people big time.The wealth gap between /white and African-American families tripled between 1980 and 2009.
The lack of wage growth is one reason why many consumers feel that the broader economic recovery hasn’t reached their wallets. The problem has divided academics and fueled political debate on Capitol Hill and across the country, turning an increase in the minimum wage, for example, into a central issue in the midterm elections.
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