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The upward redistribution of income has cost Americans workers $50 trillion over the past several decades. On average, extreme inequality is costing the median income full-time worker about $42,000 a year.
Apart from filling corporate coffers and the pocketbooks of the 1 percent, the $1.9 trillion cut has put the federal government in a financial straightjacket.
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.
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