Yesterday, I published a report by myself and Ben Spielberg analyzing the Congressional Budget Office’s comprehensive data series on household income. Here we dive a bit deeper into some of the weeds, expanding on some of our findings.
One motivation for our report was to correct the record of those who claim that the trend of increasing income inequality is significantly reduced when accounting for government taxes and transfers. In fact, as we show, between 1979 and 2011, inequality measured by the Gini coefficient rose 24% based solely on market outcomes and by 22% based on CBO’s comprehensive, post-tax and transfer income data.
It is a common mistake to overestimate the contribution of immigration to the increase in poverty. Today’s purveyor of this erroneous association is the WaPo’s Robert Samuelson, who writes in the context of a discussion about immigration reform:
Our system of politics has been breaking for some time. I’ve made numerous public comments on various aspects of our degrading democracy over the last few years. What I’ve only recently begun to articulate, however, is that the problems we’ve all been focused on in connection to events pertaining to the right, also exist on the left, perhaps to a lesser extent. The rot on the left is my focus here.
It’s a chilly, gray, October Sunday, an apt backdrop for a bit of navel gazing. Assuming the midterm elections turn out as predicted, why is it that the arguments you read here and in other similar venues are failing to persuade? Why does it seem like the OTE world view is getting crushed in the midterms?
It is disappointing, to put it mildly, that in the day and age we live in, some people still readily equate racial homogeneity with a societal harmony. If anything, this is yet another sign that our knowledge of relatively recent history is fading and we badly need a refresher.
As the Editor of AlterNet for 20 years, I have read and seen the entire range of horrendous and growing problems we face as a society and globe virtually every day. It is not just climate change, or ISIL, or Ferguson, or poverty and homelessness, or more misogynistic murdering of women, or the Democrats about to lose the Senate as Obama gets more unpopular. It is much, much more. Every day. It passes by before my eyes. At AlterNet, there are no issue silos—there is just the open faucet of depressing political information coming and going every hour of every day (with the occasional story of success and inspiration).
In 2009, Ford brought its new supermini, the Fiesta, over from Europe in a brave attempt to attract the attention of young Americans. It passed out 100 of the cars to influential bloggers for a free six-month test-drive, with just one condition: document your experience online, whether you love the Fiesta or hate it.
Young bloggers loved the car. Young drivers? Not so much. After a brief burst of excitement, in which Ford sold more than 90,000 units over 18 months, Fiesta sales plummeted. As of April 2012, they were down 30 percent from 2011. Continue reading The Cheapest Generation | The Atlantic→
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