If the Trump administration is a pair of bifocals, one lens is the military, the other is corporate power
We should start by assigning each of America’s super rich their own personal tax collector.
Any effort to block wage increases, gut workers’ rights or healthcare, deport immigrants, or support racism or racist policies, will be met with unrelenting opposition.
Our country's greatest failing, the true disaster, of our time: the scourge of growing inequality, economic and political. It is despicable as the very wealthy convert their financial might into political power to guard that wealth while exacerbating inequality further. This is the vast difference between a society whose arrangements serve all its citizens or one whose institutions have been converted into a stupendous fraud - democracy in name only.
The typical millionaire receives about $145,000 in public tax benefits, while working families get a grand total of $174 on average. In 2043, minorities will be the majority and the will have doubled. The lingering effects of generations of discriminatory and wealth-stripping practices have left black and Latino households far behind white families, and may impact their economic trajectories in the decades to come.
Indeed, the parallels with the United States are clear. In the lead up to the November elections, rampant inequality continues to grip the nation while campaign finance laws push lawmakers to unabashedly peddle policies that solely benefit the corporate elite.
Great Britain’s citizens haven’t been losing control over their fate to the EU. They’ve been losing it because their own country’s leaders – as well as those of most other Western democracies – are increasingly in thrall to corporate and financial interests.
It is no coincidence that CEO pay has reached astronomical levels at the same time that income inequality has widened to a level not seen since the eve of the Great Depression or even the Gilded Age of the late 19th century. A wide body of scholarship has linked the two. CEOs, who earn 335 times the pay of their average employee, make up a big chunk of the 1 percent. Some ideas to change that are kicking around.
Gwen Moore to propose bill requiring tests for returns with itemized deductions of more than $150,000, in response to right’s ‘criminalization of poverty.’ The alternative would be to take the much lower standard deduction.
Branko Milanovic offers us not just a plethora of facts about income inequality but brings them into a sound and rigorous global perspective, showing that what are too often treated as isolated national issues are on a world scale income massively maldistributed. While some nations saw the growth of a middle strata (China, for one) the real increase in world income is owned by the unprecedented 50-percent rise in incomes for the top 1 percent globally.
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