George Osborne should come clean over who wins or loses in his budget | UK news. When thousands of poor American families saw the homes they had loved and saved for seized by the banks in the depths of the sub-prime mortgage crisis, it was scant comfort that they had only been able to afford to clamber on to the property ladder in the first place because of reckless lenders, toothless regulators and short-sighted politicians. Losing your home is losing your home. Yet when George Osborne contemplates the cuts many households will face as a result of his planned reductions in tax credits – three million will lose £1,000 a year, says the Institute for Fiscal Studies – he wants to kid us, and maybe himself, that it doesn’t matter because the state could ill afford such generosity to the needy in the first place.
Keen-eyed Treasury-watchers thumbing through the budget red book last month quickly noticed a key chart was missing: the one showing the gains and losses of the chancellor’s spending decisions for households at different points on the income spectrum. Growth’s Secret Weapon: The Poor and the Middle Class. By Era Dabla-Norris, Kalpana Kochhar, and Evridiki Tsounta (Versions in Español, 中文 , 日本語, عربي,and Русский) The gap between the rich and the poor is at its widest in decades in advanced countries, and inequality is also rising in major emerging markets (Chart 1). It is becoming increasingly clear that these developments have profound economic implications. Earlier IMF work has shown that income inequality is bad for growth and its sustainability. Our new research shows that income distribution itself—not just the level of income inequality—matters for growth. Specifically, we find that making the rich richer by one percentage point lowers GDP growth in a country over the next five years by 0.08 percentage points—whereas making the poor and the middle class one percentage point richer can raise GDP growth by as much as 0.38 percentage points (Chart 2).
Put simply, boosting the incomes of the poor and the middle class can help raise growth prospects for all. Factors at play Like this: Oxfam Campaigns sur Twitter : "Oh, what's that? Obama quoting our #inequality stat? Part one: Domestic policy | Barack Obama: The Vox Conversation. In his 2007 book The Audacity of Hope, then-Sen. Barack Obama laid out his theory of America's political and policy problems as it stood on the eve of his first presidential campaign. He worried, he said, about "the gap between the magnitude of our challenges and the smallness of our politics. " On January 23, he sat down with Vox for a wide-ranging interview about his theory of America's political and policy problems as it stands at the beginning of the seventh year of his presidency.
What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the first part of the conversation, which focused on domestic policy and politics. You can find the second half, which focuses on America's role in the world, here. Ezra Klein The economy is growing. 1 Corporate profits and workers' wages as a share of GDP Source: St. Barack Obama Well, this has been at least a three-decade-long trend. Now, there are a whole bunch of reasons for that. Then the third thing is making sure that we have an economy that's productive. Institute for the Study of Labor. This website uses Google Analytics, a web analytics service provided by Google, Inc. ('Google'). Google Analytics uses 'cookies', which are text files placed on your computer, to help the website analyze how users use the site. The information generated by the cookie about your use of the website (including your IP address) will be transmitted to and stored by Google on servers in the United States.
In case of activation of the IP anonymization ( which is true for this website ), Google will truncate/anonymize the last octet of the IP address for Member States of the European Union as well as for other parties to the Agreement on the European Economic Area. Only in exceptional cases, the full IP address is sent to and shortened by Google servers in the USA. Why extreme inequality hurts the rich. 19 January 2015Last updated at 04:39 ET "We could have developed a vaccine for Ebola years ago if we had chosen to allocate the resources to the appropriate research". That is what a senior and respected medical scientist, a man who would be seen as a world authority on such matters, said to me. So why wasn't the cure found? The relevant research didn't happen because Ebola was seen for a long time to be a disease only of the poor, especially in Africa - and therefore the giant pharmaceutical manufacturers couldn't see how to make big money out of an Ebola medicine.
Today of course it is clear that Ebola is a global threat - and hence there is a mad rush to find a treatment. What the preventable tragedy of Ebola shows is that in a globalised world the interests of rich and poor are frequently the same - although it is hard for businesses to recognise this mutuality of interest when driven to make short-term profits. “Start Quote End Quote 19 January 2015Last updated at 04:39 ET “Start Quote. Living Wage 'key' for tackling health inequalities. 9 December 2014Last updated at 08:03 ET The new report suggests the Living Wage is better for tackling health inequality than health initiatives Changes to tax and benefit systems have more impact on health inequalities than changes to healthcare, new study found. Researchers said the introduction of a Living Wage and benefit increases made more difference than schemes to help lose weight or stop smoking.
The study was carried out by the Scottish Public Health Observatory. It also concluded an increase in active travel - such as cycling to work - had a "minimally positive effect" on population health. Taxation on tobacco had a positive impact on health but made little difference to health inequalities, the study suggested. The gap between the health of the most and least affluent sections of Scottish society has widened since the 1970s, and is larger in Scotland than most of the rest of Europe. 'Save lives' Revealed: how coalition has helped rich by hitting poor | Politics. A landmark study of the coalition’s tax and welfare policies six months before the general election reveals how money has been transferred from the poorest to the better off, apparently refuting the chancellor of the exchequer’s claims that the country has been “all in it together”.
According to independent research to be published on Monday and seen by the Observer, George Osborne has been engaged in a significant transfer of income from the least well-off half of the population to the more affluent in the past four years. Those with the lowest incomes have been hit hardest. In an intervention that will come as a major blow to the government’s claim to have shared out the burden of austerity equally, the report by economists at the London School of Economics and the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex finds that: “In effect, the reductions in benefits and tax credits financed the cuts in taxes. Oxfam Campaigns sur Twitter : "There's rich. And then there's the megarich. #inequality... Chart: Big Gains for the 1 Percent of the 1 Percent.
We'll be posting a new chart on the current state of income inequality every day for the next couple of weeks. Yesterday's chart looked at how the richest Americans bounced back from the Great Recession. Today's chart: How the richest of the rich have enjoyed massive income gains for decades. Since 1980, the average real income of the 1 percent has shot up more than 175 percent while the bottom 90 percent's real income didn't budge. But as this chart shows, the vast majority of gains have gone to the tippy-top—the 1 percent of the 1 percent. Source: Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty (Excel) Illustrations and infographic design by Mattias Mackler Why Inequality is a (very) Big Deal, and you need to get involved. A few years ago I was touring the US to promote my book, From Poverty to Power, which focuses on inequality and redistribution. Big mistake. Even the word ‘redistribution’ was so politically loaded that it effectively closed down debate (it was just after the row over then presidential candidate Obama’s exchange with Joe the Plumber on ‘spreading the wealth’).
I ended up replacing ‘redistribution’ with ‘rebalancing’ on the powerpoint. How times change. It's about power First inequality of what? Often the inequalities are overlapping and mutually reinforcing – a poor, disabled, elderly indigenous woman faces an interlocking set of obstacles to having her voice and desires heard and responded to by those in power. "We had shadows in our eyes" People on the sharp end of inequality have always tried to improve their lot through everything from cultural resistance (language, song, dress) to public protest and insurrection.
Telling the story of inequality, and its defeat So now it’s over to you. Fp2p : Dilbert does income #inequality ... Grammar schools 'barred from giving priority to the poor' MiamiLib : Conservative Confusion #p2... UK mortgage approvals near six year high in October. Life expectancy in England and Wales highest in East Dorset | Society.
People in East Dorset have the highest life expectancy in the country, according to the latest official figures which show a continuing stark north-south divide. Both men and women appear to benefit from the climate or, more likely, the lifestyle of East Dorset, which extends from Weymouth on the coast inland to Dorchester and Blandford Forum. In 2009-11, according to the Office for National Statistics, it had the highest male life expectancy at birth in England and Wales, which was 83 years. Women also had the highest life expectancy there, at 86.4 years. The lowest life expectancies were in the north of England. Men in Blackpool had the lowest average at birth, which was 73.8 years – nine years less than their compatriots in East Dorset.
The lowest for women was in Manchester, where women could expect to live to an average of 79.3 years – seven years less than those in East Dorset. The north-south divide in life expectancy matches patterns of socio-economic deprivation. UN warns global youth unemployment will continue to rise.