Tag: income inequality

Meager Rewards for Workers, Exceptionally Rich Pay for C.E.O.s

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The gap between workers and C.E.O.s widened during the pandemic as public companies granted top executives some of the richest pay packages ever.

Even in a gilded age for executive pay, 2020 was a blowout year.

A comprehensive survey of the 200 highest-paid chief executives at public companies conducted for The New York Times by Equilar,an executive compensation consulting firm, revealed some of the biggest pay packages on record, and showed that the gap between C.E.O.s and everybody else widened during the pandemic.

Alexander Karp, the chief executive of Palantir, a data mining company that gets over half its revenue from government contracts, was the highest paid C.E.O. at a publicly traded company, with compensation worth $1.1 billion. Continue reading.

At least 55 of America’s largest corporations paid no taxes last year — on billions in profits

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As President Joe Biden’s administration continues its push to increase tax rates for profitable corporations, a new study is highlighting how some of the largest and most profitable corporations in the United States managed to sidestep paying any federal taxes last year despite earning billions in revenue. 

According to The New York Times, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a Washington-based research group, compiled the analysis which focuses on at least 55 of America’s biggest corporations and how they were able to maximize on “a range of legal deductions and exemptions that have become staples of the tax code.”

Of the 55 companies named, 26 massive corporations including FedEx, Duke Energy, and Nike have benefited from former President Donald Trump’s corporate tax reduction. Since Trump reduced corporate tax rates from 35 percent down to 21 percent, many large corporations have managed to avoid paying any federal taxes for the last three years while collectively earning more than $77 billion during that time span. Continue reading.

The rich are getting richer and everyone else is getting poorer. That is exactly the plan

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The reason everybody is so angst-ridden about the economy is because we all have the wrong idea about what it is supposed to do and how it’s supposed to work. 

Most of us have a quaint, 19th century idea about free markets and all that up-by-the-bootstraps Horatio Alger stuff. You know, work hard, play by the rules, keep your nose clean, and you’ll do well. That is certainly the cultural myth our society bathes us in.

But that’s not how things actually work. It’s the dissonance between how we imagine things work and how they really work that causes our perplexity and angst, and rage. It is also that dissonance that has been so deftly manipulated by Donald Trump and given rise to Trumpism. Continue reading.

$546 Billion and Counting: Senate Inaction on Paycheck Fairness Continues to Shortchange Women

Center for American Progress logoIt’s been one year since the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Paycheck Fairness Act (H.R. 7)—and still the Senate has failed to take action. In the absence of meaningful action, with each passing day, women are being shortchanged and harmed by the lack of access to equal pay. The earnings gap between women and men has been a stubborn problem for decades, and it continues to erode women’s wages. Women working full time in the United States collectively earned an estimated $546.3 billion less than their male counterparts in the one year since the House passed the comprehensive equal pay legislation, according to new CAP analysis. (see Methodology and Figure 1) The same CAP analysis found that, on an individual level and in that same period, a full-time working woman earned about $9,585 less than a man on average. Continue reading “$546 Billion and Counting: Senate Inaction on Paycheck Fairness Continues to Shortchange Women”

‘Parasite’ paints a nightmarish picture of Korean inequality. The reality in America is even worse.

Washington Post logoKorean director Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite” is a dark parable about the yawning gulf between the rich and the poor in South Korea. It’s a story of a society where the working class have no hope of attaining a better life, and instead squabble among themselves for the literal scraps of prosperity cast off by the wealthy as they move serenely through their charmed lives.

The film and its message have strongly resonated with American audiences, and last week’s best picture win means its stateside influence is only likely to grow. That’s probably not an accident: By any number of measures, inequality here in the States is much, much worse than in Bong’s South Korea.

Here’s one way to visualize Korean inequality: According to the World Inequality Database, an authoritative resource on income and wealth around the world, the top 1 percent of South Koreans own about 25 percent of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom half of the population owns just under 2 percent. Continue reading.

Here’s how the pay of CEOs of Minnesota’s biggest companies compares to their average workers

They make a lot more than you.

CEO pay at Minnesota’s Fortune 500 companies was 278 times more on average than the pay of median workers at their companies in 2018, an analysis of data from company proxy statements shows.

The Dodd Frank Act’s requirement that public companies report ratios of CEO-to-median worker pay, effective in 2018, was met with protest by many corporations, while labor advocates cheered the mandate as a window into what they deem excessive executive pay. In Minnesota, the ratios span a wide range, from 110-to-1 at agricultural cooperative CHS, Inc. to 767-to-1 at Target.

CEO pay in the United States has ballooned in the last several decades, increasing roughly 940% from 1978 to 2018 at the nation’s 350 largest companies, adjusted for inflation, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan, think tank. Meanwhile, wages of the typical worker have grown 11.9%. Back in 1978, CEOs made about 30 times more than the average worker, a ratio that has exploded since then.  Continue reading.

Billionaires Have More Wealth Than 60% of the World’s Population, Report Finds

A new report found that the world’s 2,153 billionaires have more wealth than 4.6 billion people, underscoring the degree of global inequality.

The Oxfam International study, released Monday and dubbed “Time to Care,” shows that the number of billionaires has doubled in the past decade. The authors add that these fortunes have largely been amassed while everyday people, especially poor women, continue to struggle.

“The gap between rich and poor can’t be resolved without deliberate inequality-busting policies, and too few governments are committed to these,” Oxfam India CEO Amitabh Behar said in a press statement. “Our broken economies are lining the pockets of billionaires and big business at the expense of ordinary men and women. No wonder people are starting to question whether billionaires should even exist.” Continue reading.

America’s Ruinous Monopoly Of Wealth

I should start this homily on inequality by distinguishing income from wealth. Income is your annual wages or salary, as well as your earnings from a business, pension or government benefits such as Social Security, etc.

As the average U.S. worker’s real wages have stagnated for more than a decade, income disparity has become enormous. The bottom 90 percent of us average $30,000 a year, while the top 0.01 percent and 0.001 percent (about 1,400 taxpayers) rake in average annual incomes of $35.1 million and $152 million, respectively.

Meanwhile, even mediocre CEOs pocket many millions a year, and the greediest Wall Street hucksters annually amass more than $1 billion in booty. Until relatively recently, the ethical standard was for workers to gain a proportionate share of the income growth we generate. But in the last dozen years, the rich have been gobbling more and more of the total income pie, so the bottom half of Americans now get only 14 percent.

View the complete November 17 article by Jim Hightower on the National Memo website here.

Treasury May Ease Restrictions On Offshore Tax Avoidance

The Treasury Department is mulling plans to weaken or eliminate an Obama-era regulation meant to discourage companies from moving their cash offshore to avoid paying taxes, Bloomberg reported Tuesday.

In 2016, President Barack Obama put a rule in place to remove incentives for companies shuffling money overseas to make it appear on paper as if they had less profit. Lower profits would mean a lower tax bill in the United States.

Treasury is contemplating this move at the same time the Congressional Budget Office reports that the national deficit is just shy of $1 trillion this year, thanks in large part to lower corporate taxes in the wake of the 2017 tax law.

View the complete October 10 article by Dan Desai Martin on the National Memo website here.

For the first time in history, U.S. billionaires paid a lower tax rate than the working class last year

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A new book-length study on the tax burden of the ultrarich begins with a startling finding: In 2018, for the first time in history, America’s richest billionaires paid a lower effective tax rate than the working class.

Continue reading “For the first time in history, U.S. billionaires paid a lower tax rate than the working class last year”