Tag Archives: economy

Obamacare Is Making It Easier to Be a Young Working Parent

by WeldonGalloway Posted on May 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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With Kevin Drum continuing to focus on getting better, we’ve invited some of the remarkable writers and thinkers who have traded links and ideas with him from Blogosphere 1.0 to this day to contribute posts and keep the conversation going. Today we’re honored to present a post from economist Dean Baker.

The main point of the Affordable Care Act was to extend health insurance coverage to the uninsured. While this is a tremendously important goal, a benefit that is almost equally important was to provide a guarantee of coverage to those already insured if they lose or leave their job. This matters hugely because roughly 2 million people lose their job every month due to firing or layoffs. As a result of the ACA most of these workers can now count on being able to get affordable coverage even after losing their job.

The ACA also means that people who may previously have felt trapped at a job because of their need for insurance now can leave their job without the risk that they or their family would go uninsured. This could give many pre-Medicare age workers the option to retire early. It could give workers with young children or other care-giving responsibilities the opportunity to work part-time. It could give workers the opportunity to start a business. Or, it could just give workers the opportunity to leave a job they hate.

While it is still too early to reach conclusive assessments of the labor market impact of the ACA, the evidence to date looks promising. Republican opponents of Obamacare have often complained that the program would turn the country into a “part-time nation.” It turns out that there is something to their story, but probably not what they intended. The number of people who are working part-time for economic reasons, meaning they would work full-time if a full-time position was available, has fallen by almost 16 percent from the start of 2013 to the start of 2015. This is part of the general improvement in the labor market over this period.

The number of people working part-time involuntarily is still well above pre-recession levels, but it has been going in the right direction.

It is true that the employer sanction part of the ACA has not taken effect (which required that employers with more than 50 workers provide insurance or pay a penalty, but it is not clear this would make a difference. Under the original wording of the law (Obama subsequently suspended this provision), employers would have expected that the sanctions would apply for the first six months of 2013. We found no evidence of shifting to more part-time work during this period compared to the first six months of 2012.

But there is a story on increased voluntary part-time employment. This is up by 5.7 percent in the first four months of 2015 compared to 2013. This corresponds to more than 1 million people who have chosen to work part-time. We did some analysis of who these people were and found that it was overwhelmingly a story of young parents working part-time.

There was little change or an actual decline in the percentage of workers over the age of 35 who were working part-time voluntarily. There was a modest increase in the percentage of workers under age 35, without children, working part-time voluntarily. There was a 10.2 percent increase in the share of workers under the age of 35, with one to two kids, working part-time. For young workers with three of more kids the increase was 15.4 percent.

Based on these findings it appears that Obamacare has allowed many young parents the opportunity to work at part-time jobs so that they could spend more time with their kids. Back in the old days we might have thought this was an outcome that family-values conservatives would have welcomed.

As far as other labor market effects of Obamacare, there has been a modest uptick in self-employment, but it would require more analysis to give the ACA credit. Similarly, older workers are accounting for a smaller share of employment growth, perhaps due to the fact that they no longer to need to get health care through their jobs. These areas will require further study to make any conclusive judgments, but based on the data we have seen to date, it seems pretty clear that Obamacare is allowing many young parents to have more time with their kids. And that is a good story that needs to be told.

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Obamacare Is Making It Easier to Be a Young Working Parent

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When You Binge-Watch "Mad Men," You Might Be Killing the Planet

by AndersoKellett Posted on May 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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You recycle. You ride your bike to work. You bring your own bags to the grocery. You might think you’re a good environmentalist. But those cat videos, TED talks, and Netflix original series you watch to unwind might be slowly killing the planet.

That’s the word from Greenpeace’s latest Clicking Clean report, which evaluates the clean energy initiatives of many different internet companies.

While we’re used to thinking about our environmental impact in terms of how much trash we throw out, how much we drive, and how much electricity we use in our homes, the report highlights the ways that our internet usage has environmental effects that we never see.

Data center emissions account for small percentage of global emissions, Greenpeace information technology analyst Gary Cook tells us. That’s not much compared to 14 percent that goes towards agriculture or the 13 percent that goes to transportation. But data center emissions are growing by at least 13 percent per year, Cook says. And within two years, information technology in general, including manufacturing servers and other gear, is expected to account for between 7 and 12 percent of all electrical use, according the report.

Greenpeace

Data centers are expected to account for about 21 percent of that usage, mostly because of the explosive demand for streaming video. Cook explains that even though streaming can offset some emissions, such as the manufacture and delivery of DVDs or BluRay disks, the convenience of streaming is leading us to consume more content. Instead of buying a few videos and watching them again and again, we’re now binge-watching entire seasons of shows in a sitting, which ends up creating a bigger carbon footprint overall.

This trend extends to other industries as well. For example, according to the report, publishers now consume more energy as a result of their data center usage than they did through their use of printing presses.

There is good news in the report. Amazon, which hosts Netflix’s streaming service, and which has long been the tech industry’s renewable energy straggler, has finally pledged to go green. Apple has continued to adopt more green energy since Greenpeace singled out the company in 2011. In its latest report, the organization gave Apple “A” ratings in all four categories that it tracks: energy transparency; renewable energy commitment; energy efficiency; and renewable energy deployment and advocacy.

In fact, most major consumer-facing internet companies are now working towards using nothing but renewables. Business-to-business companies, such as colocation providers that rent data center space, are lagging behind, though Equinix, one of the largest in the country, has pledged to switch to all-renewable power. But any company seeking to ramp up its use of renewables is likely to run into a common problem: They need more electricity to meet rising demand for their services than they can get in a renewable form from utilities.

According to the report, many energy utilities, which generally have monopolies in their areas, only offer coal-generated power, or only sell renewable energy at a premium, despite renewable energy becoming as cheap, if not cheaper, than coal power in some cases.

That’s a big problem in Virginia, which sees as much as 70 percent of global internet traffic pass through its borders every day, and North Carolina, another hotbed for data centers.

Companies can seek more renewable power by building new data centers in states where more renewable energy is available, such as Iowa and Oregon, but Cook says it’s unrealistic to expect companies to move all of their existing data centers out of Virginia and North Carolina. That means these companies will need to work with activists and policy makers to pressure utility companies into making changes, he says.

“The IT sector has been very disruptive figuring out how to change pieces of the economy,” he says. “If the industry works together it can resist the economic power of the energy sector.”

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When You Binge-Watch "Mad Men," You Might Be Killing the Planet

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China’s Future, Take 2

by LeonoreYXSX Posted on May 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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After writing my post this morning about China’s economic future, I got an email response from an American who lived there for nearly two decades and had a different perspective on what China’s biggest problem might be going forward. Obviously this is just one person’s opinion, and I can’t independently vouch for it, but I thought it was interesting enough to share. Here it is:

I read with interest your musings on the future of China. As it happens, I lived for 17 years in Beijing, married, and started a family there.

I believe the macro-level statistics and phenomena you discuss are all trailing indicators. I left China with my family almost five years ago as a large number of interrelated quality-of-life issues became increasingly unbearable. Those factors have continued to worsen since then at an accelerating rate, to the point where the economy is now largely driven by people trying to earn or steal enough money to leave.

The once-thriving expat community in Beijing has shriveled to nearly nothing. The cost of living is approaching world-capital (NY, London, Tokyo, etc.) levels for a miserable existence. The local culture has become increasingly desperate and cutthroat. And Beijing is one of the more attractive places in China to live, work, and raise a family.

People, generally, and Chinese especially, will tolerate all sorts of deprivation in service of a better future for their children. And that is largely what has driven the rapid pace of Chinese development since the end of the Cultural Revolution and the beginning of Deng Xiaoping’s opening and reform policies. My feeling is that biggest challenge ahead for China is when the population at large concludes that a better future for their children is no longer in the cards.

When it happens, it will happen gradually, then suddenly. And what happens after that, no one can say, but a continuation of the policies driving hyper-accelerated GDP growth over all else probably isn’t it.

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China’s Future, Take 2

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Why Would an Economic Analysis Want to Ignore American Slavery?

by LaurieBPKC Posted on May 8, 2015

Mother Jones

While Kevin Drum is focused on getting better, we’ve invited some of the remarkable writers and thinkers who have traded links and ideas with him from Blogosphere 1.0 to this day to contribute posts and keep the conversation going. Today we’re honored to present a post from Ryan Cooper, national correspondent for the Week.

The next several years will see a rolling 150th anniversary of Reconstruction, my favorite period in American history. From about 1865 to 1877, American society as a whole tried reasonably hard to do right by the freed slaves, before getting tired of the effort and abandoning them to the depredations of racist terrorism. For the next nine decades, black Americans had few if any political rights under the boot heel of Jim Crow.

It’s both a shining example of what can happen when a society really tries to right a past wrong, and tragic, infuriating failure of will. But most of all it’s very interesting. Things were changing, social orders were being overthrown, historical ground was being broken. At a time when few nations had any suffrage at all, roughly 4 million freed slaves got the vote in a single stroke, perhaps the single starkest act of democratic radicalism in world history.

So it’s weirdly fascinating to read conservative historiography of the 19th century, such as this piece by Robert Tracinski at the Federalist, as an example of how Darryl Worley-style historiography irons all the best parts out of American history.

He’s interested in trying to prove that a “non-coercive” economy is possible, by which he means that taxes and spending could be dramatically lower than they are today. Thus he charts government spending as a percentage of GDP, finds that it was pretty low for most of the 19th century, and claims victory:

What the left wants is not just to make America’s economic history disappear. It needs to make America’s political system disappear: to make truly small, truly limited government seem like a utopian fantasy that can safely be dismissed. Please bear in mind that this latest example came up in the context of a discussion about the justification for government force. So what they want to describe as an unrealistic fantasy is a society not dominated by coercion.

One might think that when writing a paean to a noncoercive century, it might be a good idea to address the fact that for 60 percent of that century, it was government policy that human beings could be owned and sold like beasts, or that half or more of the national economy was based on that institution. But no, the word “slavery” does not appear in the piece. Neither does “Civil War” or “Reconstruction,” which as a literal war against and military occupation of the South would seem fairly coercive.

So speaking of the 19th century as one notably free of coercion is not just utterly risible, it’s also a cockeyed way to look at what was good or bad about it. The economy of the antebellum South was founded on the labor of owned human beings, extracted through torture. Slave masters set steadily increasing quotas for cotton picking, for instance, and would flog slaves according to the number of “missing” pounds. As Edward Baptist writes, they thus increased the productivity of slave cotton-picking by nearly 400 percent from 1860 to 1865.

It was akin to the Gulag system of Soviet Russia, except that it had all the power of the red-hot Industrial Revolution, including cutting-edge financial technology, behind it. That combination of slavery plus explosive economic growth and innovation made the antebellum South one of the most profoundly evil places that has ever existed — one that was an absolutely critical part of early industrial growth in both Britain and the North.

But on the other hand, the war that ended slavery, despite involving coercion in the form of organized mass killing, was therefore good! And so was Reconstruction, even though that involved extremely harsh measures against the likes of the KKK. Whether coercion is good or bad depends on just who is being coerced and why.

And that, in turn, puts the lie to conservative complaints that liberals always “blame America first.” On the contrary, grappling with the pitch-black periods of history makes the positive notes shine all the brighter. As Ta-Nehisi Coates has written, the “epoch of slavery is…the quintessential romance of American history.” It’s just a romance difficult to detect in the GDP statistics.

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Why Would an Economic Analysis Want to Ignore American Slavery?

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Do Small Businesses Deserve Exemptions From the Minimum Wage?

by RubyeMcCants Posted on May 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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Brian Hibbs, a Mother Jones reader and owner of Comix Experience, wrote in to object to San Francisco’s plan to raise its minimum wage. Conservatives who argue against the minimum wage often point to jobs lost and heavy burdens on small businesses, and progressives largely brush off those arguments as so much Chamber of Commerce propaganda. And then you have guys like Hibbs. Read what he has to say, and then we’ll discuss.

I own two comic book stores in SF, and while we’re a profitable business and have been for 26 years, we’re only modestly profitable, y’know? When you calculate my own salary on a per-hour basis, given that 70-hour weeks are not at all uncommon for me, I don’t make much more than the high-end of SF’s new minimum wage law.

Raising the minimum wage by 43 percent (from $11.05 today to $15 in 2018) means that we need to generate at least another 80 grand in revenue. Eighty grand. I don’t personally make eighty grand in a year. I’m not some kind of fat cat getting rich off the exploitation of my workers or something. And look, if I did manage to increase sales by that amount, I’d sure be hoping that I got to keep a tiny little percentage of it myself.

Just so we’re clear: The hole I find myself soon facing isn’t one created by escalating San Francisco rents (my landlord is awesome!), or because of competition from the internet (in fact, our sales consistently grow year-over-year, and sales growth has accelerated since the introduction of digital comics), but one solely and entirely created by the increase of the minimum wage.

I’m a progressive; I support fair labor practices, and I try, above all else, to give the folks who work for me absolute agency in their jobs. I have multiple employees who quit higher paying jobs for corporate owners to come work for me, because I actively valued their passions. I don’t own a comic book store to make money as my primary goal, right? The primary goal is to wake up the morning and be excited by what you do, to feel like you’re spreading your passion, that you’re promoting art, and creators and joy—and my staff feels much the same way.

I have staff who are supported by a spouse and are working for me to essentially make pocket money; I have staff who want to be full-time artists, and this helps them get closer to their goal by exposing them to the form and helping them make contacts. I have staff who are actively working toward having their own stores, and I’m basically paying them to get a master’s class (though I am fine with that!). I have staff who are full-time students living at home.

I’m not exploiting any of them, I don’t think. They all have options, and they all work for me because they want to.

If I can’t increase sales by $80,000—which is not something that seems likely, given historical year-over-year gains—then I have to start firing people, or trimming hours of operation. We don’t run extravagant overlaps—nearly 60 percent of the hours the stores are open we only have one person on deck; nor do we have a lot of waste or absurd inventory or anything like that. I’ve survived in a kind of marginal business for 26 years by being a savvy businessperson, and a relatively nimble and predictive one. But firing people, cutting hours…how does that help the employees? How does that help the business expand so I can eventually hire more people?

I have the largest staff of any SF comics business (because I have two locations), and, in point of fact, my two closest competitors have zero employees. Not being impacted by this mandate, they’d have no reason to raise prices in tandem…and really, every reason to not do so. If I raised prices by, let’s say, 10 percent to meet this mandate, I’m absolutely positive we’d lose at least 20 percent of our business to stores that didn’t raise their prices—thereby putting us at a net negative.

We’re trying to solve this problem by growing our way out of it with a new national, curated Graphic-Novel-of-the-Month Club, but I think that if we’re able to succeed from that (and I am not at all sure we will) it will be because of years of building our exceptional reputation. As a result, I do not at all think that this type of solution is scalable for the average small business. The City of San Francisco’s own Office of Economic Analysis believes the minimum wage hike will cost 15,270 jobs, or 2 percent of the private workforce!

Honestly, if San Francisco had voted for “Minimum Wage must be at least equal to X percent of your net profit” or “Every person in America gets a guaranteed income of $20,000/year paid for by progressive taxes” or some other scheme where you know that people being asked to contribute more can afford it, then maybe we’d be on sounder ideological ground…But I think that the higher minimum wage, the higher you’re making the barriers for low-income people and marginal-but-promising businesses to even have a chance to enter the marketplace and to survive in the first place, let alone legacy businesses like ours.

Here’s my personal take: It’s hard not to feel sympathy for Hibbs, yet it would be a mistake to take his situation as a case for abolishing or making exceptions to the city’s minimum wage law. As I’ve noted elsewhere, raising the minimum wage doesn’t tend to decrease overall employment; in general, businesses find new efficiencies and their workers find themselves with more disposable income to spend on things like comics.

Of course, that’s probably little comfort to Hibbs, who faces competition from smaller comics stores whose sole proprietors are the ones manning the cash registers. Hibbs may well be able to keep his doors open by downsizing, bringing in volunteers, or drumming up donations from devoted customers (as one local bookstore has done), but when it comes down to it, there simply may not be much of a future for bricks-and-mortar comics stores in a city with astronomical real estate prices.

“I super commiserate with him because we are in almost the identical situation,” says Lew Prince, a member of the group Business for a Fair Minimum Wage and the owner of Vintage Vinyl, a record store in St. Louis. Dwindling sales and rising labor costs forced Prince to consolidate his two Vintage Vinyl locations into one. He nonetheless supports increasing Missouri’s minimum wage from $7.65 to $12 an hour because he thinks it’s the right thing to do. “The job of the business owner is to prepare for the future,” he told me. “I have great empathy and sympathy for Hibbs, but you have to do the job every day, and sometimes the marketplace defeats you.”

But maybe that point of view is too harsh. I’d love to hear, in the comments, what Kevin’s readers think about all of this.

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Do Small Businesses Deserve Exemptions From the Minimum Wage?

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Our Country’s Cartoonish Gun Debate Isn’t Just Idiotic—It’s Really Damaging

by CSNMindyihta Posted on May 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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Kevin Drum doesn’t write much about guns, which is why I’m going to keep on it a bit here and honor him by rolling out the red carpet for a bunch of grating 2A trolls to stampede into the comments thread.

How exactly is that going to honor Kevin, you ask? By underscoring what his legions of intelligent readers already know: These dudes could learn a thing or three from Kevin Drum. He’s open-minded and deeply curious. He asks shrewd questions and tests his own assumptions. He respects data. And he’s a damn fine writer—clear, to the point, and not always entirely correct but who the hell cares because he’s right there chatting with you as if happy hour has come early today and the drinks are already on the table. (Godspeed, Kevin—we miss you, we’re stoked that you’re on the road back to full-time badass blogger, and we’ll see you again soon.)

So, to the subject at hand: Late last week, I spoke with Michael Krasny on KQED’s Forum about our deep investigation into the economic toll from gun violence, which dings America for no less than $229 billion a year. (Yes, that’s capital ‘B’ billion, further explained visually here and methodologically here.) The project has made waves not just for that staggering sum, but because we spent months digging up the elusive data behind it, from the personal to the societal. Yet, as listeners called into the show with questions, I was quickly reminded of just how ridiculously dumb and polarizing the gun debate really is—thanks to both sides—even in the face of groundbreaking information.

After a former US Marine came on the air and criticized the National Rifle Association for lying, the next caller, another gun owner, promptly denounced him for speaking against the Second Amendment and being “full of it.” (Which in this arena is basically the equivalent of a puppy’s kiss.) That was followed by a woman who wanted to know what could be done to prevent gun manufacturers from manufacturing guns, whether “we could stop it at the source.”

And that, in a nutshell, is pretty much the state of America’s gun debate. Here’s more of it—but also some vivid stories and data from those who know gun violence firsthand:

Having reported on this subject intensively for the last three years, I’m still not totally sure whether guns kill people or people kill people, but I’m almost certain that you can be riddled to death with inanities. (See, for the umpteenth time: “Knives, baseball bats, and hands and feet kill people too!!”)

But while there are offenders at both ends of the spectrum, one side is fundamentally responsible for the enduring standoff. The NRA’s power tends to be regarded as legendary in politics and in the media, though it’s probably overstated, especially nowadays. Still, the gun lobby has pulled off a messaging feat decades in the making—its leaders perpetually blasting away with the idea that any discussion of guns in America can be nothing other than a brutal dichotomy. You’re either a defender of constitutional liberty, their premise goes, or you’re an anti-freedom “gun grabber.” Barack Obama’s mass seizure of law-abiding citizens’ firearms may have yet to materialize six-plus years in, but the NRA is taking no chances, already preparing as it is for Hillary Clinton’s own nefarious plans.

More than just inciting the imagination of the NRA’s political base, this construct evidently has become the default setting for the national debate. Some of the blame also falls on the gun-control movement, which expends considerable energy pontificating about how the NRA is evil. Of course, this bleak if cartoonish disconnect hardly reflects most Americans’ attitudes about firearms, gun owners included.

But it has caused some very real, very serious collateral damage, according to numerous public health experts I’ve spoken with. The American medical community is nearly unanimous that gun violence is a serious public health threat, and yet, as we detailed in the aforementioned investigation, there remains precious little research on the problem, let alone funding to do more. As Mark Rosenberg, the former director of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control put it during another recent radio conversation, the entrenched gun debate itself carries a steep price:

This is really destructive to our ability to make progress. It’s posed as an “either or,” and this was done by strategists working for the NRA over a long period of time. They wanted people to think that either you protect the rights of all gun owners to keep their guns, or you do research on gun violence, and that the two are diametrically opposed. And they had a zero-tolerance philosophy that said, “You can’t even discuss research on gun violence because that leads down the slippery slope of all of us losing our guns.” And that’s led us into the morass where we are today.

One of Rosenberg’s fiercest old adversaries, former Republican Rep. Jay Dickey of Arkansas—who in his own words “served as the NRA’s point person in Congress”—now agrees with Rosenberg. After the mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado (which cost that community at least $100 million), the two published a joint Op-Ed in the Washington Post: “We were on opposite sides of the heated battle 16 years ago,” they wrote, “but we are in strong agreement now that scientific research should be conducted into preventing firearm injuries and that ways to prevent firearm deaths can be found without encroaching on the rights of legitimate gun owners. The same evidence-based approach that is saving millions of lives from motor-vehicle crashes, as well as from smoking, cancer and HIV/AIDS, can help reduce the toll of deaths and injuries from gun violence.”

Read their whole July 2012 piece, look at the findings from our new data investigation, and you’ll also begin to see—another 100,000 deaths, 250,000 injuries, and one unthinkable elementary school massacre later—just how much we still don’t know.

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Our Country’s Cartoonish Gun Debate Isn’t Just Idiotic—It’s Really Damaging

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Hillary Wants a Piece of the Elizabeth Warren Love Fest

by FrancesLease Posted on April 24, 2015

Mother Jones

Hillary Clinton desperately wants liberals to redirect their adoration of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) toward her presidential campaign.

Since the official launch of her 2016 run earlier this month, Clinton has done everything she can to cozy up to Warren and publicly channel the spirit of the Massachusetts senator. Clinton has bemoaned hedge funders paying lower tax rates and called out CEOs for earning outsize paychecks. She penned a fawning blurb about Warren for Time‘s list of the world’s 100 most influential people. “Elizabeth Warren never lets us forget that the work of taming Wall Street’s irresponsible risk taking and reforming our financial system is far from finished,” Clinton wrote. “And she never hesitates to hold powerful people’s feet to the fire: bankers, lobbyists, senior government officials and, yes, even presidential aspirants.”

Beyond this broad political rhetoric, Clinton so far has been unwilling to reveal where exactly her views align with Warren’s. She launched her campaign by traveling to Iowa and New Hampshire for a “listening tour” of sorts, with detailed ideas promised to come later in the year. A spokesman for the Clinton campaign declined to say if Hillary Clinton would support a list of specific ideas proposed by Warren, such as breaking up big banks and imposing new taxes on financial transactions.

“As Hillary Clinton said last week, Elizabeth Warren is a champion of working families and scourge of special interests,” Clinton spokesman Jesse Ferguson said in a statement to Mother Jones. “The campaign is only two weeks old and we will be detailing our policy agenda after our ramp up period ends this summer but Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton share a record of and a commitment to fighting for everyday Americans and their families.”

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Hillary Wants a Piece of the Elizabeth Warren Love Fest

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Drum vs. Cowen: Three Laws

by AudreaDKSytd Posted on April 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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Today Tyler Cowen published his version of Cowen’s Three Laws:

1. Cowen’s First Law: There is something wrong with everything (by which I mean there are few decisive or knockdown articles or arguments, and furthermore until you have found the major flaws in an argument, you do not understand it)

2. Cowen’s Second Law: There is a literature on everything.

3. Cowen’s Third Law: All propositions about real interest rates are wrong.

I’d phrase these somewhat differently:

1. Drum’s First Law: For any any problem complex enough to be interesting, there is evidence pointing in multiple directions. You will never find a case where literally every research result supports either liberal or conservative orthodoxy.

2. Drum’s Second Law: There’s literature on a lot of things, but with some surprising gaps. Furthermore, in many cases the literature is so contradictory and ambiguous as to be almost useless in practical terms.

3. Drum’s Third Law: Really? Isn’t there a correlation between real interest rates and future inflationary expectations? In general, don’t low real interest rates make capital investment more likely by lowering hurdle rates? Or am I just being naive here?

In any case, you can take your choice. Or mix and match!

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Drum vs. Cowen: Three Laws

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3 Tax Day Charts to Boost Your Blood Pressure

by CherieTrost Posted on April 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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As another Tax Day arrives, here are three charts that may not ease the pain of paying the taxman, but may help put it in perspective.

The top 1 percent of earners are expected to pay nearly half of all 2014 federal income taxes, while the lowest 80 percent will pay 15 percent. However, according to the IRS, the top 400 taxpayers by income saw their total real income grow 338 percent between 1992 and 2012, while their average tax rate dropped more than 35 percent.

And while federal income tax rates go up with income, when you account for state and local taxes, the effective tax rate faced by each income group starts to look less progressive, according to Citizens for Tax Justice. And, as Vox‘s Dylan Matthews points out, the tax burden for roughly 65 percent of American families comes from payroll taxes along with state and local taxes.

In the last 60 years, the share of federal tax revenue from individual tax income has remained relatively stable. Meanwhile, the share from payroll taxes has steadily increased while corporate taxes’ share has declined. While companies complain about steep taxes, consider that major US companies have stashed billions in profits overseas, beyond the reach of the IRS.

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3 Tax Day Charts to Boost Your Blood Pressure

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The Total Cost of Gun Violence, in 90 Seconds

by Chastit9208 Posted on April 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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The Total Cost of Gun Violence, in 90 Seconds

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Total Cost of Gun Violence, in 90 Seconds