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A Walmart employee earning the company’s median salary of US$19,177 would have to work for more than a thousand years to earn the US$22.2 million that Doug McMillon, the company’s chief executive, was awarded in 2017. At Live Nation Entertainment, the concert and ticketing company, an employee earning the median pay of US$24,406 would need to work for 2,893 years to earn the US$70.6 million that its chief executive, Michael Rapino, made last year. And at Time Warner, where the median compensation is a relatively handsome US$75,217, an employee earning that much would still need to work for 651 years...

Cuba is so lucky.  With the installation of their new president, Miguel Díaz Canel, Cubans will be able to continue with their terrific lifestyle.  What lifestyle?  Income equality. We are repeatedly told that income inequality is bad.  Apparently, you should be ashamed of yourself if you earn more money than what lazier people get.  We are supposed to assume that the definition of paradise is a place where everyone has the same income.  So what is it like in a country with income equality? Cuba has income equality.  Verifying this requires a careful look at the data.  Most sources – for example, Brookings – cite a per capita...

Global inequality has stabilized at high levels in recent years, a report said Friday, despite gains among the poor in China and much milder disparities in incomes and wealth in Western Europe. The World Inequality Report 2018 is based on a massive, interactive collection of data compiled by an international team of researchers that includes renowned economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. It shows inequality has soared since 1980, although the global top “1 percent” saw their share of global income slip slightly after the 2008 financial crisis, to just above 20 percent. At the same time, the share of...

Income inequality has leapt in Germany since 2000, a new study shows, with the lowest earners having less money in their pockets than 15 years ago despite sustained economic growth. The study by the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau, a government-owned development bank, shows how unevenly the fruits of prosperity have been divided over the past decade and a half. Whereas in 2000 Germany had arguably the lowest income inequality in the world, it has now fallen behind the Czech Republic, Sweden and Denmark. The report does however emphasize that Germany is still one of the most equal countries in the world...

"It is in the character of very few men to honor without envy a friend who has prospered." – Aeschylus The fundamental issue behind income inequality could be boiled down to a single question: Are poor Americans better or worse off because Bill Gates ($79 billion net worth), Oprah Winfrey ($3 billion net worth), Michael Jordan ($1 billion net worth) and Mark Zuckerberg ($40 billion net worth) are living in the United States? Certainly, having them living in America creates more income inequality. It also hurts the poor by….oh wait, having them here doesn’t hurt the poor at all. None...

The Democrats are right, there are two Americas. The America that works, and the America that doesn’t. The America that contributes, and the America that doesn’t. It’s not the haves and the have nots, it’s the dos and the don’ts. Some people do their duty as Americans, to obey the law and support themselves and contribute to society, and others don’t. That’s the divide in America. It’s not about income inequality, it’s about civic irresponsibility. It’s about a political party that preaches hatred, greed and victimization in order to win elective office. It’s about a political party that loves power...

Hillary Rodham Clinton says voters should turn pay inequity and women’s financial security into a political movement this fall. Clinton says issues like raising the minimum wage, equal pay and providing affordable child care need to be “in the lifeblood” of the upcoming elections. …

Sr. Simone Campbell A Catholic social justice activist who promoted a bus tour to encourage income equality is this year's recipient of the Pacem in Terris Peace and Freedom Award, it was announced Wednesday.Sister Simone Campbell is the executive director of NETWORK, a nonprofit Catholic social justice lobby based in Washington, D.C. She will receive the award at 3 p.m. Sept. 21 at Christ the King Chapel on the campus of St. Ambrose University in Davenport.Campbell and the "Nuns on the Bus" tour for social and economic justice drew national attention. In Iowa, the tour was active during 2012...

While appearing on CNN Wednesday night, actor Morgan Freeman spread some refreshing ideas about debating income inequality in the United States. Freeman stood up for the middle-class, telling host Don Lemon that without the middle-class, there would be no way to continue being a great nation of consumers. When Lemon asked the actor whether he believed that race was a major contributing factor to income inequality, Freeman sternly disagreed. “Do you think that race plays in a part in wealth distribution?” Lemon asked. “No, no, no, I don’t. You and I are, we’re proof. Why would race have anything to...

… In 1979, teenagers held 26% of all low-wage jobs, while adults aged 25-64 made up less than half of such workers, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, which analyzed the low wage workforce over a 30-year span. Today, only 12% of low paying jobs are held by teenagers, while adults make up 60% of them. Also, only 20% of such workers had attended some college in 1979. Today, it’s 33%. […] A key argument behind the latest wave of strikes to raise wages to $15 an hour is that fast food workers these days are no...

Pope Francis has close ties with liberation theology, the prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the body that once condemned the movement, has said. In a lengthy interview in the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller said Pope Francis “is not so much a liberation theologian in the academic sense, but as far as pastoral work is concerned, he has close ties with liberation theology’s concerns. What we can learn from him is the insight that there is no pastoral work without profound theology and vice versa”. In the 1980s the...

Today Pope Francis addressed a delegation of the UN – which I remind you is a principle agent for promoting abortion world-wide.Below please find the full text of Pope Francis’ address to the United Nations Agencies, Funds and Programmes on Friday, led by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.There is some blah blah at first, but keep reading. My emphases and comments.NOTE: A lot of this is simply warmed up John Paul II and Benedict XVI. There isn’t much new here, apart from the terrible wording about the State and redistribution. But we can, for the most part, say “Ho hum!...

VATICAN CITY (AP) - Pope Francis called Friday for governments to redistribute wealth to the poor in a new spirit of generosity to help curb the "economy of exclusion" that is taking hold today. Francis made the appeal during a speech to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the heads of major U.N. agencies who met in Rome this week. Latin America's first pope has frequently lashed out at the injustices of capitalism and the global economic system that excludes so much of humanity, though his predecessors have voiced similar concerns. On Friday, Francis called for the United Nations to promote...

The latest speech from Pope Francis is leading Drudge and the Twittersphere, and for good reason. Any time a world leader talks about “legitimate redistribution” in regard to economic policy, it raises eyebrows, if not hackles. In the case of this pontiff, the highlight of that phrase provokes heightened scrutiny. However, the longer context of Francis’ remarks this morning to UN leadership provides a much more nuanced picture of Francis’ view of economic policy — although probably not nuanced enough for libertarian ears: With this in mind, I would like to remind you, as representatives of the chief agencies of...

VATICAN CITY (AP) -- Pope Francis called Friday for governments to redistribute wealth to the poor in a new spirit of generosity to help curb the "economy of exclusion" that is taking hold today.

The American middle class, long the most affluent in the world, has lost that distinction. While the wealthiest Americans are outpacing many of their global peers, a New York Times analysis shows that across the lower- and middle-income tiers, citizens of other advanced countries have received considerably larger raises over the last three decades. After-tax middle-class incomes in Canada — substantially behind in 2000 — now appear to be higher than in the United States. The poor in much of Europe earn more than poor Americans.

The American middle class, long the most affluent in the world, has lost that distinction. While the wealthiest Americans are outpacing many of their global peers, a New York Times analysis shows that across the lower- and middle-income tiers, citizens of other advanced countries have received considerably larger raises over the last three decades. After-tax middle-class incomes in Canada—substantially behind in 2000—now appear to be higher than in the United States. The poor in much of Europe earn more than poor Americans. The numbers, based on surveys conducted over the past 35 years, offer some of the most detailed publicly...

President Barack Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress are making a concerted election-year push to draw attention to women’s wages, linking Obama executive actions with pending Senate legislation aimed at closing a compensation gender gap that favors men. Obama on Tuesday planned to sign an executive order prohibiting federal contractors from retaliating against workers who discuss their pay. He also was to direct the Labor Department to issue new rules requiring federal contractors to provide compensation data that includes a breakdown by race and gender. The Democratic-controlled Senate this week planned to take up legislation that would make it...

Sixty-three percent of the federal civilian workers who earned an annual salary of $100,000 or more in 2013 were men, according to data from the Office of Personnel Management. An OPM database—FedScope—contains historical data on the federal civilian workforce going back to 1998. The database contains information about civilian federal workers employed by most Executive Branch agencies (excluding intelligence agencies, the White House, and the Office of the Vice President) and some Legislative Branch agencies. It does not include employees of the Judiciary Branch or congressional staff. …

Former President Jimmy Carter says the Bible is to blame for women’s making less money than men in the workplace. […] “That is really derived, I would say, indirectly from the fact that religious leaders say that women are inferior in the eyes of God, which is a false interpretation of the Holy Scriptures.” […] “It is disturbing to realize that women are treated most equally in some countries that are atheistic or where governments are strictly separated from religion,” he said. …