When you put all our social programs together, low-income Americans face roughly 100% marginal tax rates. Earn an extra dollar, lose a dollar of benefits. It’s not that simple, of course, with multiple cliffs of infinite tax rates (earn an extra cent, lose a program entirely), and it depends on how many and which programs people sign up for. But the order of magnitude is right.
Zucman’s/Emmanuel Saez view of inequality and the case they make for a wealth tax. The American Economics Association has awarded the prestigious John Bates Clark medal to University of California, Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman. At the link you’ll find what the AEA decision makers thought made him deserving.
This PDF is the main document concerning National Policy Topic of Economic Inequality.
The ethnic differences in the prevalence of traditional marriage are huge. Among the nearly five million children in the ACS from 2014 to 2021, these were the percentages of children living with married birth parents broken down by the child’s ethnicity.
Source: Charles Murray, “The Geography of Traditional Families in America.” American Enterprise Institute, April, 2023.
For the past two decades the US has been experiencing shortages of cancer drugs, antibiotics and even saline, a drug potentially needed by almost every patient who gets admitted to the hospital. Nearly all thirty of the most frequently used emergency department drugs experienced shortages from 2006-2019.
That’s the difference between the federal government’s spending commitments and its income – looking indefinitely into the future. Closing the gap through time requires an immediate and permanent 41.3 percent increase in all federal taxes or an immediate and permanent 35.3 percent cut in all non interest federal spending. More
Senior retirees on fixed incomes are inflation’s worst victims. What can be done?
It seems like only yesterday that the $15 minimum wage was high on the agenda of every self-respecting progressive politician, including Hillary Clinton in her presidential campaign. The “Fight for 15” was successful in several states and even went statewide in New York and California. So why aren’t we hearing more about the idea these days? It may be because labor markets are working, just like textbook economics say they should. More