Free Republic

Income inequality has surged as a political and economic issue, but the numbers don’t show that inequality is rising from a global perspective. Yes, the problem has become more acute within most individual nations, yet income inequality for the world as a whole has been falling for most of the last 20 years. It’s a fact that hasn’t been noted often enough. The finding comes from a recent investigation by Christoph Lakner, a consultant at the World Bank, and Branko Milanovic, senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study Center. And while such a framing may sound startling at first, it...

WMBF in Myrtle Beach, SC, reported Wednesday on the growing trend of businesses hiring only part-time workers, due to an inability to afford Obamacare. This situation leaves workers without healthcare and without a full-time income or other benefits. Local staffing agencies say more small business are starting to hire more part time employees. Not because there is more full time work, but as WMBF reporter Mandy Noell found out, it's because they can't afford to have more full time employees. Obamacare places requirements for health care benefits that many small businesses just cannot afford to pay. As a result, they...

"Young people are exploited!" "Income mobility is down!" "Poor people are locked into poverty!" Those are samples of popular nonsense peddled today. Leftist economist Thomas Piketty's book "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" has been No. 1 on best-seller lists for weeks (with 400 pages of statistics, I assume "Capital" is bought more often than it is read). Piketty argues that investments grow faster than wages and so the rich get richer far faster than everyone else. He says we should impose a wealth tax and 80 percent taxes on rich people's incomes. But Piketty's numbers mislead. It's true that...

Concerned that the City is an inhomogeneous hodgepodge with pockets of great wealth in some neighborhoods and squalor in others, newly appointed Housing Preservation and Development Commissar Vicki Been announced a plan to move 80,000 to 120,000 poorer families into middle class neighborhoods. “This way instead of having blight and filth in every direction they might look poorer families will be within easy walking distance of a better kept neighborhood,” Been boasted. “The crimes that plague poorer sections of our City would be more evenly dispersed throughout the whole City. Victims will come from a more broadly representative subset of...

... Personal income tax collections plunged last month from a year earlier in 27 of 32 states for which Reuters was able to collect data. That's most of the 43 states that levy income taxes, and drops were as high as 50 percent. While many states predicted tough times this year, a handful including New Jersey and Pennsylvania is set to face hard decisions on either cutting spending or raising taxes. By the end of last year, 26 states had still not seen overall tax revenue return to pre-recession levels, according to recent data from Pew Charitable Trusts.

SEE: Bridenstine: Repeal the 16th Amendment ”U.S. Rep. Jim Bridenstine, R-Okla., has introduced a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives to repeal the 16th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution which allows the federal government to levy the income tax.” Wrong Mr. Bridenstien! The 16th Amendment does not allow the federal government to levy an “income tax”. In fact, the phrase “income tax” does not even appear in the 16th Amendment, and the power to levy an income tax was exercised long before the 16th Amendment was adopted! The first so called “income tax” is found in An Act to...

Atlanta, Georgia suffers the greate income inequality of any city in the US - closely followed by New Orleans. According to Bloomberg, which ranked 300 U.S. cities with populations of at least 100,000 based on their level of income inequality and identified the 50 with the greatest inequality. What is stunning is that while top-down many are focused on the widening gap overall, in these 2 cities alone, over one-quarter are in poverty (earn less than $4,020), while 60% are in the nation's top quintile for household income. Interestingly, the median income does not correlate well with the inequality.Income...

In the heated debate over inequality, the wealthy are usually portrayed as the cause rather than the solution. But CNBC's first-ever Millionaire Survey reveals that 51 percent of American millionaires believe inequality is a "major problem" for the U.S., and nearly two-thirds support higher taxes on the wealthy and a higher minimum wage as ways to narrow the wealth gap. The findings show that—far from being a purely self-interested voting bloc—American millionaires have complicated views when it comes to the wealth gap and opportunity in America. They are unashamed of their own wealth and attribute their success to hard work,...

Avarice: Many people, it seems, can't get over how well investors are doing these days — as if they shouldn't be able to do OK if others aren't. Instead of taking offense, maybe the others ought to be taking notes. Let's see if we have this right: Some people work to exhaustion, earning money for their security and that of their families. And instead of spending it on stuff they don't need, they set it aside. The latest idea — coming from a French economist — is that eight of every 10 of their dollars should be taken away and...

"President Obama Vows Zero Tolerance on Gender Wage Gap," read one headline. Another read, "Women Still Earned 77 Cents On Men's Dollar In 2012." It's presumed that big, greedy corporations are responsible for what is seen as wage injustice. Before discussing the "unjust" wage differences between men and women, let's acknowledge an even greater injustice -- which no one seems to care about -- age injustice. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, workers ages 16 to 24 earn only 54 cents on every dollar earned by workers 25 or older (http://tinyurl.com/n6puf6j). This wage gap is 43 percent greater than...

It’s getting tougher for Minnesotans to avoid the state’s taxes by spending part of the year somewhere else. Snowbirds and high earners are discovering that they must do more than buy a condo in the Sun Belt and register a vehicle there, after a court decision last year reinforced the state’s ability to use any of more than two dozen criteria to determine who is a Minnesota resident. “People refer to it as Hotel Minnesota,” said Matt Shea, a lawyer at Gray Plant Mooty. “You can come any time you like, but you can never leave.” To determine tax residency,...

Have you ever wondered why poor people are poor? It's not as though there aren't plenty of role models around. Millions of people live highly successful, productive lives in this country. So why don't people at the bottom of the income ladder copy the behavior of those several rungs above them and better their lot in life? As I wrote previously, the federal government's own pilot programs established conclusively from the very early days of the War on Poverty that the welfare state encourages people not to be married, not to work and not to invest in human capital. This...

Paul Krugman is a distinguished economist, Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University, a NY Times columnist, and a Nobel Laureate. As a frequent commentator on cable news shows, he speaks passionately about income inequality and politics. From his book, The Conscience of a Liberal, he notes that, “Impersonal forces such as technological change and globalization caused America’s income distribution to become increasingly unequal, with an elite minority pulling away from the rest of the population.”How ironic that Dr. Krugman will provide a first hand as a member of this “elite minority” benefiting from income inequality. The City...

Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) views income inequality as a moral issue that governments should address. Warren also says that a minimum wage increase is needed to stop income inequality. She equated the minimum wage to income inequality. Warren said that concentrated wealth as the result of a rigged system that funnels the gains from workers' productivity to their bosses, who suppress minimum wages. Isabel Sawhill, co-director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution, about a minimum wage increase: "It will reduce inequality." Dear Leader Barack Hussein Obama loves the idea of income inequality. Obama says "I...

 I am very disappointed to learn that some Tea Party Activists are now promoting Representative Jim Bridenstine’s H.J.RES. 104 as a way to “repeal the 16th Amendment and abolish the income tax”.  Additionally, donations are being asked to support this movement.  The problem is, if H.J.RES. 104 was adopted and its proposed wording added to our Constitution, the 16th Amendment would indeed be repealed, but Congress would continue to have power to lay and collect taxes calculated from profits, gains, and other “incomes”. The important wording in Representative Jim Bridenstine’s proposed amendment declares:`Effective 2 years after the ratification of this article...

The day when the nation collectively has made enough money to pay its total tax burden for the year is three days later this year, according to a new report. According to a report released Monday by the Tax Foundation, this year Tax Freedom Day falls 111 days into 2014, on April 21. By April 21, to group says, Americans will have made enough to pay the $3 trillion in federal taxes and $1.5 trillion in state taxes — more than they will spend on food clothing and housing combined. Tax Freedom Day is later than it was last year,...

You can't get blood out of a rock. Traditionally the United States has had a consumer-driven economy, but now years of declining incomes and rising debts are really starting to catch up with us. In order to have an economy that is dependent on consumer spending, you need to have a large middle class. Unfortunately, the U.S. middle class is steadily shrinking, and unless that trend is reversed we are going to see massive economic changes in this country. For example, in poor neighborhoods all over America we are seeing bank branches, car dealerships and retail stores close down at...

Earlier today U.S. Representative Dave Camp, Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, released a bill designed to fundamentally reform both the federal corporate and individual income tax (press conference video here and executive summary here). America is far overdue for such reform. As Camp points out in the Wall Street Journal: “According to Nina Olsen, the National Taxpayer Advocate at the IRS, Americans overall spend over six billion hours and $168 billion every year to file their returns. This is stark testimony to the complexity of the tax code. Meanwhile, owners of small businesses face tax rates as...

The Republican plan to overhaul and simplify the nation’s tax code is expected to call for a cut in the top corporate income rate to 25 percent from 35 percent, and a reduction of the seven individual tax brackets to two — at 10 percent and 25 percent — according to aides familiar with the proposal. The proposal, which is set to be released Wednesday after nearly three years of behind-the-scenes work, is the brainchild of Representative Dave Camp of Michigan, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, and it reflects the long-held tax overhaul goals of the Republican-passed...

Online mortgage company HSH.com recently estimated the salaries needed to afford a house in 25 metropolitan areas across the United States. Because, the cost of real estate varies across cities and regions — you need to be making about four times as much money in San Diego as in Cincinnati to afford a house. The map illustrates these differences. The wider the circle over a city, the more you need to make to afford a house there: CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE MAP AND TABLE