Extreme income inequality poses a threat to the well-being of American democracy.
NEW YORK—The United Nations Commission on Human Rights will open debate June 21 on a special report by its lead investigator, who said the U.S. not only “is the most unequal society in the developed world,” but that Trump administration policies – notably the $1.5 trillion tax cut for the rich – have made a bad situation worse. UN Special
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.
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.
Countries with lower rates of wealth disparity tend to have happier citizens and offer a better quality of life. A more nearly equal distribution of wealth also has substantial environmental benefits, as less meat is consumed, less waste is produced, and citizens consume what they need rather than acquiring excess products.
As the rich get ever richer -- courtesy, in countries like the United States, of corporate-friendly deregulation and tax “reform” -- does the planet get ever warmer and dirtier? New research suggests economic balance is linked to environmentally-friendly practices. Countries with lower rates of economic disparity have citizens who enjoy a better
Rajan Menon takes a clear-eyed look at the populism of the Trumpian moment, the growing inequality that is increasingly the heart and soul of this society, and what is(n’t) being done about it.
Among the stranger features of the 2016 election campaign was the success of Donald Trump, a creature of globalization, as an America First savior of the white working class. A candidate who amassed billions of dollars by playing globalization for all it was worth -- he manufactured clothes and accessories bearing his name in low-wage economies and
The tens of thousands of American deaths from drug overdoses are a measure of the hopeless desperation left behind by the soul-starving socio-economic system of late-stage capitalism.
Opinion -- According to a nationwide study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a greater number of U.S. Americans died (approximately 65,000) from drug overdoses last year than were killed during the course of the Vietnam War. At the start of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, President George W. Bush ordered the
With people of color projected to make up the majority of Americans by 2043, a new study warns against policies that keep many black and Latino households out of the middle class.
A new study finds that if the racial wealth divide is left unaddressed, the median wealth for black Americans will fall to $0 by 2053, with Latino Americans reaching the same median wealth two decades later. According to the report by the Institute for Policy Studies and Prosperity Now, the wealth gap between people of color and their white
