Latest College Trend: Wanting to Be Wealthy - U.S. Business News. Rising student debt and high unemployment may be causing part of the shift toward financial reward.
Is the American Dream in Danger? This Was the First Class Warfare Election of Our Gilded Age — and the Middle Class Won Big. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney arrives on stage on election night November 7, 2012 in Boston, Massachusetts.
Romney, in his first remarks since an unexpectedly lopsided election loss to Barack Obama, blamed his defeat on "gifts" showered by November 15, 2012 | Corporate Wealth Share Rises for Top-Income Americans. The billionaires next door. Recession-and-older-americans.pdf (application/pdf Object) Race for President Leaves Income Slump in Shadows. They are the issues that have dominated the political debate in recent years and have played a prominent role in this presidential campaign.
Interview: Chrystia Freeland, Author Of 'Plutocrats' Journalist Chrystia Freeland has spent years reporting on the people who've reached the pinnacle of the business world.
For her new book, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, she traveled the world, interviewing the multimillionaires — and billionaires — who make up the world's elite super-rich. Freeland says that many of today's richest individuals gained their fortunes not from inheritance, but from actual work.
"These super-rich are people who, as they like to say, 'did it themselves,' " Freeland tells NPR's Steve Inskeep. "And what's interesting for me, and actually I didn't expect it, I think it's a paradox of this sort of working super-rich, which is that you would think ... that having done it yourself, you might have more sympathy, be closer to the 99 percent. " But, she says, that's often not the case. "It is a sense of, you know, 'I deserve this,' " she says. Hide captionChrystia Freeland is an editor at Reuters. Chicago Booth Blog: Fault Lines by Raghuram Rajan - Fault Lines by Raghuram Rajan. This was published in the Financial Times.
Democracy and free enterprise usually are found together – it is hard to think of any flourishing democracy that is not a market economy. Moreover, while a number of autocratic economies have embraced free enterprise (or “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” as the Chinese Communist Party would say), it seems to be only a matter of time before they are forced to become more democratic. Yet it is not clear a priori why democracy and free enterprise should be mutually supportive. After all, democracy treats individuals as equal, with every adult getting an equal vote, whereas free enterprise empowers individuals based on how much economic value they create and how much property they own. The Role of Politics in Wealth Distribution.
If Mr.
Romney’s points were to be reformulated in a more defensible direction, the outline might look something like this: OF MAKING AND TAKING The correct distinction is not “makers versus takers.” The problem is that taking, rather than making wealth, appears to be growing in relative influence. Most of us are actually both makers and takers. Consider farmers who produce food and favor agricultural subsidies. Chrystia Freeland. President Barack Obama did a miserable job of making his own case last week.
But speak to his supporters and the pitch is clear: The American middle class is being hollowed out; Obama’s self-appointed mission is to try to save it. Laura D'Andrea Tyson and Owen Zidar: Tax Cuts for Job Creators. Laura D’Andrea Tyson is a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and served as chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Clinton.
Owen Zidar, a doctoral student in economics at the University of California, Berkeley, was previously a staff economist at the Council of Economic Advisers and, in 2008-9, an analyst at Bain Capital Ventures. The centerpiece of Mitt Romney’s tax plan is an across-the-board 20 percent cut in marginal tax rates. This cut, along with a few other tax changes Mr. How Propagandists for the 1% Are Manipulating Christian Teachings to Rob the Middle Class October 17, 2012 | Like this article?
Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. Plutocrat Bosses to American Employees: Vote for Romney – Or Else. Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com October 16, 2012 | Like this article?
Why the Obscenely Wealthy Whine When They Have It So Good. October 9, 2012 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. The Role of Politics in Wealth Distribution. The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent. The High Inequality of U.S. Metro Areas Compared to Countries - Jobs & Economy. Income inequality in America has reached levels not seen since the Gilded Age. As Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, noted in June, “America has the highest level of inequality of any of the advanced countries — and its gap with the rest has been widening.”
This already-high national level of inequality is even worse in certain American cities and metro regions. Pathways to the Middle Class: Balancing Personal and Public Responsibilities. Pathways_middle_class_presentation (application/pdf Object) Five Myths About the 47 Percent. 1. Forty-seven percent of Americans don’t pay taxes. The most pernicious misconception about people who don’t pay federal income taxes is that they don’t pay any taxes. That oft-heard claim ignores all the other taxes Americans encounter in their daily lives. Almost two-thirds of the 47 percent work, for example, and their payroll taxes help finance Social Security and Medicare.
Accounting for this, the share of households paying no net federal taxes falls to 28 percent. The 10-year decline in wages for most college graduates. As the new State of Working America shows, the last 10 years have been a lost decade for income, wealth and wage growth for most Americans. Classic Koch: How California's Prop. 32 Could Enrich Two Billionaires.
Photo Credit: Tatiana Popova/ Shutterstock.com September 21, 2012 | Wealth losses by race and ethnicity. Inequality, exhibit A: Walmart and the wealth of American families. Confirming the further redistribution of wealth upward. The ‘democratization of the stock market’ that never happened. Despite minute-by-minute dissection of the stock market in the news media, the share of the population owning stock is surprisingly low, even when including shares purchased indirectly through retirement accounts. In 2010, less than half (46.9 percent) of all households had stock holdings, and less than a third (31.1 percent) had stock holdings of $10,000 or more. Rich Got Richer and Poor Poorer in N.Y.C., 2011 Data Shows. While the national recession officially ended in 2009 and Mayor Michael R. What You Need to Know About a Worldwide Corporate Power Grab of Enormous Proportions.
Photo Credit: Rainforest Action Network September 11, 2012 | Casey B. Mulligan: Changes in Inequality the 21st Century. Casey B. American Experience . The Richest Man in the World: Andrew Carnegie. Empathy. Infographic: How The Poor Spend Their Money Vs. The Middle Class. Middle-Class Areas Shrink as Income Gap Grows, New Report Finds. Review: Voice of the New Global Elite. Yes, The Rich are Different & Pew Research. Revolt of the Rich. World's richest woman advises poor to stop socializing. Who Killed American Unions? - Derek Thompson. Older, Jobless and Forced Onto Social Security. Millionaires are not the new middle class. What do Americans think of the rich? Yes, the Rich Are Different.