Sam Pizzigati

Sam Pizzigati co-edits Inequality.org. Among his books on maldistributed income and wealth: The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970. His latest book, The Case for a Maximum Wage, will appear this spring. Follow him at @Too_Much_Online.

Does the United States Really Have a ‘Strong’ Economy?

For the average American, the US economy hardly merits any kudos. Two new data dumps make that reality even plainer.

US Dollar Economy

Long-time Republican Party political strategists are having fits. If only we could get average Americans to focus in on the economy instead of The Donald, they’re telling all comers, the GOP would do just fine in the upcoming November midterm elections. Those Republican strategists should be careful what they wish for. Getting average Americans

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Mexico’s Coming Election Could Be The World’s Most Important Referendum on Inequality

Mexico rates as one of the world’s most unequal major nations, and the party of the presidential candidate topping the polls pledges to confront those concentrating the nation’s “economic and political power.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador

The upcoming presidential election in Mexico — now just eight weeks away — may well prove to be this year’s most significant worldwide referendum on inequality. Mexico, after all, rates as one of the world’s most unequal major nations, and the party of the presidential candidate currently topping the polls — Andrés Manuel López Obrador —

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A Timely Tale of Taxes and Toys ‘R’ Us

High taxes on the rich, cheerleaders for grand fortune tell us, kill the entrepreneurial spirit. What does history tell us?

Charles Lazarus, the founder and former chair of Toy R Us.

The orthodoxy that dominates today’s Republican Party — and the ranks of “business-friendly” Democrats — rests on a simple approach to economic policy. Let’s be nice, this orthodoxy holds, to rich people. Let’s be particularly nice at tax time. Let’s keep taxes on rich people, conservatives advise us, as low as possible. High taxes on high

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Congressional Budget Office Report Reveals The Rich Are Once Again Outpacing Everyone Else

The Congressional Budget Office has just released the latest iteration of its U.S. household income distribution series, and this new research rates as the nonpartisan agency’s most comprehensive yet.

A homeless man sits outside a high-rise building converted into apartments, Dec. 4, 2017, in downtown Los Angeles. The U.S. Department on Housing and Urban Development release of the 2017 homeless numbers are expected to show a dramatic increase in the number of people lacking shelter along the West Coast. (AP/Jae C. Hong)

Back in the 1980s, the decade that saw researchers start detailing America’s increasing concentration of income and wealth, flacks for the emerging Reagan economic order disdainfully dismissed the significance of the alarming new data. The United States isn’t getting more unequal, the Reaganites pronounced, and the middle class isn’t shrinking.

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The Big Pharma Family that Brought Us the Opioid Crisis

We’re not talking El Chapo or any of his drug-running buddies. We’re talking about the mega-billionaire family behind one of America’s most profitable drug-industry empires, the privately held Purdue Pharma.

Pills persciption pharma OpioidPills prescription pharma Opioid

If the devil wears Prada, what do America’s most destructive drug pushers wear? They wear smiles. The drug pushers we have in mind here have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, enough fatalities to decrease overall U.S. life expectancy at birth for the last two years running. Yet no police SWAT teams have pounded down any doors hunting these

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The Richest Americans Now Live 10-15 Years Longer Than The Poorest

Deeply unequal societies, researchers have documented over the past four decades, generate far more of these stresses than more equal societies.

Homeless Library Patrons

Rich people live longer than poor people. No big news there — we’ve known that health tracks wealth for quite some time now. But here’s what we haven’t known: The life-expectancy gap between rich and poor in the United States is actually accelerating. Since 2001, American men among the nation’s most affluent 5 percent have seen their

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