...onservative politicians have been planning to overthrow the entire federal taxation system. If successful, these radical reformers would effectively shift the burden of taxation from wealth onto wages and therefore onto lower income Americans. This idea is known as the consumption tax. A Flawed System Advocates of the consumption tax have tried to claim the mantle of reformers challenging a broken and unfair system. They’ve been helped by the fac...
...percent, the conservative attack on welfare intensified. Declaring that the War on Poverty had been won – by poverty – Reagan radically restructured welfare, cutting cash assistance to dependent families in favor of offering income tax credits to low-income earners. The conservative counter-vision had been stated and boldly so; government welfare created a cycle of dependency, trapping generations within poverty. The government’s role in combati...
...bor unions: workers’ ability to bargain collectively. In today’s economy, however, labor unions should be expanded, not simply tolerated. The rights of workers to bargain collectively is extremely important at a time in which income inequality in the United States is the greatest it has been since the Great Depression. According to the Congressional Budget Office, between 1979 and 2007, incomes for the richest 1 percent of Americans tripled. In t...
...th their initial loan returned amidst price inflation, they lose purchasing power. Understandably, lending to a government likely to inflate its currency is unappealing. While seignorage (to print fresh cash to pay off debts) income has not been a significant problem in American economic history, the US government can and will inflate the dollar to repay debt and keep interest rates low. Investors know this. The Fed’s money printing will help nei...
...er of limited accessibility to women’s health and other general health services through a cut in funding is analogous to the current situation of Americans on Medicaid, who theoretically have health insurance due to their low incomes but are unable to find any specialist willing to see them. Budgetary cuts to the Medicaid program induced abysmally low rates of reimbursement jointly provided by the state and federal governments to physicians seei...
...vices: everything from preventative care to substance abuse treatment is covered under HSF. Payment for the program is based on a simple sliding scale. Participants pay a participant fee that is dependent on two factors—their income and source of health care (employer or personal). The highest fee is $450 for those participating individually and $150 for those signing up through an employer. In both individual and employer sign-up cases, particip...
...ts prove otherwise: Social mobility has been declining in America. The Economic Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank, claims that 40 years ago in the United States eight percent of those born into the second-lowest income bracket remained in the same socio-economic position throughout their lives. As the increase from eight percent to 32 percent in the 1980s and 36 percent in the 1990s indicates, more of the poor are simply remaining p...
...issue and restore the programs that aid the poor in our society. NON-PROFITS 101 At the most basic level, non-profits are organizations that seek ends other than generating profit. These organizations do not distribute their income to shareholders or owners, but rather use it to pursue the group’s goals. While there are many different types of non-profits (such as the government, some corporations, and religious organizations), the most commonly...
...least partially motivated by crushing debt burdens. In fact, this rising class inequality is not unique to education. Chile, long described as the Latin American success story, has a Gini coefficient — a standard measure for income inequality — of over 0.5, the highest among developed countries and nearly twice the OECD average. In response to this inequality, protests have emerged in Chile as a challenge to the free-market education model. Stud...
...dinavian countries like Denmark and Sweden, investments in education and training are responsible for high levels of competitiveness (third and fourth in the World Economic Forum’s competitiveness index) despite high marginal income tax rates of up to 55 percent . This leads to low inequality (smallest Gini coefficients), and fiscally sustainable welfare systems. In terms of education, Finnish students, for example, are amongst the best in the wo...
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