Once Upon a Time, Corporations Paid Taxes
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The current European revolt against CEO greed, if successful, might leave Corporate Europe looking just like Corporate America — in the 1950s. Read Post
Brazilian and U.S. Inequality: The Shrinking Gap
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Luxury fortresses. Armored cars. Helicopter commutes. The abominably unequal ‘good life’ may be closer than you think. Meanwhile, in South Africa . . . A dozen years ago, Brazil ranked as the world’s most unequal major nation. Brazil’s most affluent 10 percent were grabbing nearly 50 times more income, on average, than the nation’s poorest [...] Read Post
From Inequality, We Can’t Take a Vacation
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What more vivid symbol of the indignity our corporate-driven inequality imposes than the Carnival Triumph. Thousands of people adrift, going nowhere in a nightmare of sewage and stench, while a billionaire chief exec sits faraway in a courtside seat and cheers. Read Post
Our Residential Future: Segregation Forever?
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Rising inequality, newly released data make plain, has left America's metro areas — and neighborhoods — considerably less mixed by income. Are the rich about to bid the rest of us good-bye? Read Post
The Scruffy and the Stuffy Agree: Cap CEO Pay
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From hiking trails in Oregon to boardrooms in Berlin, critics of our staggeringly unequal corporate order are calling for new limits that link executive compensation to worker paychecks. Read Post
If This Southern California Mansion Could Speak . . .
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. . we would have a fascinating, first-hand history of the roller-coaster first century of the modern federal income tax. Industrialist Frederick Peabody started building this manse of his dreams in 1913, the same year the federal income tax started biting into the nation’s highest incomes. Read Post
To End Extreme Poverty, Let’s Try Ending Extreme Wealth
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The world’s wealthy gathered in the Alps again last week to discuss how to ‘solve’ the world’s problems. The world’s biggest problem, suggests one top global anti-poverty outfit, may be their fortunes. Apologists for inequality have a standard retort to anyone who calls for a more equal distribution of the world’s treasure. If you took [...] Read Post
Why Some Folks Are No Longer Singing the Beltway Blues
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How do unequal societies solve the problems — like traffic congestion — that make us miserable? They come up with solutions that make life easier for rich people. Politicians and bureaucrats “inside the Beltway” that circles Washington, D.C., pundits like to prattle, simply do not understand the challenges of daily life that average Americans face [...] Read Post
Swell Times for America’s Swollen Fortunes
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Can a democracy survive if the richest of the rich within it can pass on to their heirs, generation after generation, the vast bulk of their fortunes? In the United States, that question first became a top-tier topic of political debate back over a century ago. Fortunes of almost unimaginable size were then towering over [...] Read Post
The Tax Legacy of George W. Bush: It Lives!
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The Bush years gave America’s rich new and unprecedented preferential treatment at tax time. The fiscal cliff deal enacted in the early moments of 2013 leaves that preferential treatment in place. Who won the New Year’s eve standoff over the “fiscal cliff”? In one sense, everyone “won.” The deal that Congress blessed last week includes [...] Read Post
