No less an authority than the Internal Revenue Service reports that at least 10,080 households with gross incomes of over $200,000 paid nothing at all in income taxes in 2009. (OK, that doesn't literally put them all in the top 1 percent, but pretty close.) Those high earners are not (necessarily) breaking any laws—just taking clever advantage of a panoply of tax deductions. They're also ducking the alternative minimum tax, which, as Bloomberg explains, "was created in 1969 in response to a report that 155 people earned $200,000 and paid nothing in taxes." The horror. Interestingly, ... Read More
Gender Wage Gap Skewed By Survey Flaws
February 10, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
The wage gap between the sexes in America has been narrowing much faster than observers ever realized, although this revelation by a pair of University of Georgia researchers isn’t as good a tiding as it could be. Jeremy Reynolds and Jeffrey Wenger, who have stumbled upon a quirk in existing survey data that could also color how we measure all types of other sociological trends, say statisticians have been as much as 50 percent off in tracking the progress of women’s wages in the work force. “But that’s only because things were worse in the past than we had realized,” Reynolds ... Read More
Income Inequality Linked to Senate Standoffs
October 21, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
In the United States, the past quarter-century has been marked by two disturbing societal trends: increasing levels of both income inequality and political polarization. The rich are growing richer, and Democrats and Republicans are growing farther apart. In 2006, a group of researchers led by Nolan McCarty, a professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton, presented evidence linking these two phenomena. They reported that "the average positions of Democratic and Republican legislators have diverged markedly since the mid-1970s," adding that "this turning point occurs almost exactly ... Read More
How the Poorest Americans Dropped Out of Politics
May 21, 2009 • By • 1 Comment
In the 2008 election, lower-income Americans voted at significantly lower rates than higher-income Americans. This was not, in itself, news. Just as in 2004, more than 60 percent of voters came from families above the median household income of $50,000. That family income is a significant predictor of individual voting is a long-standing and oft-lamented fact of American political life. But over the last several decades, inequality in the United States has worsened. Between 1973 and 2000, the richest one-fifth of Americans saw their family income grow by 66.9 percent, while the poorest ... Read More
