Income inequality: America's worst states. Courtesy of Movoto. Click an image for a slideshow. The United States has a greater gap between rich and poor than any other advanced nation. President Obama has called it "the defining challenge of our time. " Financial inequality fueled Occupy Wall Street (which spread into a broader Occupy movement seen most recently in Hong Kong) and the rise of the term (epithet?) The writers at the Movoto real estate blog got to wondering: How does that kind of inequality play out nationally? They devised a formula to rank the states, using census data on four criteria: income by gender (wide disparities score high on the "unequal" scale); whether or not a household earns income (a high non-earning proportion scores high); the size of the middle class (smaller middle classes scored high); and each state's Gini index, the world's most commonly used measure of inequality (a high ranking translates to a high score on Movoto's "unequal" scale).
Related on Yahoo Homes: President Obama. Commonwealth Club. Elon Musk Says This Is The Chart About Arctic Sea Ice That Really Matters. In 2012, Arctic sea ice covered the smallest area ever recorded. The yellow line shows the average sea ice minimum in the Arctic from 1979 through 2010. There is more sea ice in the Arctic this summer than there was two years ago in 2012, a fact that has led to misleading stories that imply that there's more uncertainty about what's happening in the Arctic than there actually is.
But comparing right now to two years ago and drawing conclusions about climate from those isolated data points is like saying "it's cold outside, guess we don't have to worry about global warming. " It's an absurd comparison that doesn't take into account all the available information. Although Arctic sea ice waxes and wanes with the seasons, it covers the smallest area in late September of every year — which is why, since we've been able to measure the extent of the ice with satellites, we look at the area covered each year and talk about what that means. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 1, 2014 Related Video: How Much $100 Is Really Worth in Every State. 25 Easy Nutella Recipes - Food.com.
S&P: Wealth gap is slowing US economic growth: Associated Press Business News. August 5, 2014 2:44 PM ET By By JOSH BOAK WASHINGTON (AP) - Economists have long argued that a rising wealth gap has complicated the U.S. rebound from the Great Recession. Now, an analysis by the rating agency Standard & Poor's lends its weight to the argument: The widening gap between the wealthiest Americans and everyone else has made the economy more prone to boom-bust cycles and slowed the 5-year-old recovery from the recession.
Economic disparities appear to be reaching extremes that "need to be watched because they're damaging to growth," said Beth Ann Bovino, chief U.S. economist at S&P. The rising concentration of income among the top 1 percent of earners has contributed to S&P's cutting its growth estimates for the economy. In part because of the disparity, it estimates that the economy will grow at a 2.5 percent annual pace in the next decade, down from a forecast five years ago of a 2.8 percent rate. The S&P report advises against using the tax code to try to narrow the gap.
Meet Executive Order 12333: The Reagan rule that lets the NSA spy on Americans. John Napier Tye served as section chief for Internet freedom in the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor from January 2011 to April 2014. He is now a legal director of Avaaz, a global advocacy organization. In March I received a call from the White House counsel’s office regarding a speech I had prepared for my boss at the State Department. The speech was about the impact that the disclosure of National Security Agency surveillance practices would have on U.S.
Internet freedom policies. The draft stated that “if U.S. citizens disagree with congressional and executive branch determinations about the proper scope of signals intelligence activities, they have the opportunity to change the policy through our democratic process.” But the White House counsel’s office told me that no, that wasn’t true. I was instructed to amend the line, making a general reference to “our laws and policies,” rather than our intelligence practices.
Outlook@washpost.com. Full List CEO to Worker Pay Ratios. Obama Student Loan Policy Reaping $51 Billion Profit. The Obama administration is forecast to turn a record $51 billion profit this year from student loan borrowers, a sum greater than the earnings of the nation's most profitable companies and roughly equal to the combined net income of the four largest U.S. banks by assets. Figures made public Tuesday by the Congressional Budget Office show that the nonpartisan agency increased its 2013 fiscal year profit forecast for the Department of Education by 43 percent to $50.6 billion from its February estimate of $35.5 billion. Exxon Mobil Corp., the nation's most profitable company, reported $44.9 billion in net income last year. Apple Inc. recorded a $41.7 billion profit in its 2012 fiscal year, which ended in September, while Chevron Corp. reported $26.2 billion in earnings last year. JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo reported a combined $51.9 billion in profit last year.
Valuing Work, Part III: Work, Employment, Survival, and Fulfillment. (By NCrissie B) This week’s series considers how we value each others’ contributions to society. We began by unpacking work versus employment, that is: work a boss or customer pays for. Yesterday we considered Matthew Yglesias’ proposal for a Guaranteed Basic Income. Today we conclude with Ross Douthat’s claim that a post-employment society, while fiscally sustainable, may trap those without jobs in mere survival with no opportunity to grow and thrive.
“The right not to have a boss” In a recent New York Times column , conservative Ross Douthat offered an interesting take on A World Without Work. After reviewing 19th century Marxist visions of an industrialized leisure society, Douthat writes: Yet the decline of work isn’t actually some wild Marxist scenario. I should note that the National Bureau of Economic Research study that Douthat cites focuses only on employed men. He also notes that the U.S. is still a very wealthy society, and: “Human flourishing is another matter” Living in a “post-work” society. In Sunday’s , conservative columnist Ross Douthat invokes the utopian dream of “a society rich enough that fewer and fewer people need to work—a society where leisure becomes universally accessible, where part-time jobs replace the regimented workweek, and where living standards keep rising even though more people have left the work force altogether.”
This “post-work” politics may be unfamiliar to many readers of the , but it won’t be new to readers of . The basic vision of the post-work Left, then, is one of fewer jobs , and shorter hours at the jobs we do have. Douthat suggests, however, that this vision is already becoming a reality, and he warns that it is not a result we should welcome. It’s something of a victory that a columnist is even acknowledging the post-work perspective on labor politics, rather than ignoring it completely. Hopefully he’s been taking his own advice , and reading about it in . But Douthat’s take is a rather peculiar one. Health care limits leave some UC students with few options. By Ryder Diaz rdiaz@mercurynews.com Posted: 01/25/2013 06:12:51 PM PST0 Comments|Updated: about a year ago UC Santa Cruz graduate student Micha Rahder suffers from a rare disorder that requires her to be hooked up to an IV over two days, five to eight hours at a time, every four weeks.
Afterward, her body returns to more than 95 percent normal. Without the exhaustive treatments, the effects can be severe. "I can barely walk and can't really move my hands," said Rahder, diagnosed with Chronic Inflammatory Demyelinating Polyneuropathy -- a disease that attacks the nervous system. But the therapy is also expensive. In November, she got a letter from the university saying she had used $378,000 of the $400,000 lifetime limit for students on the University of California student health insurance plan (also known as UC SHIP), Rahder said. In early January, a little more three years after her first treatment, she received another letter. But annual and lifetime limits are a lingering issue.