Update (April 12, 2021): The assets of America’s billionaires have soared in value a good deal more since this article originally published. As of April 12, 2021, combined billionaire net worth was more than $1.6 trillion more than it was on March 18, 2020, when...
As Americans reflect on the first Martin Luther King Jr. Day of the Trump administration and prepare for the fiftieth anniversary of his assassination, it’s as good a time as any to measure our world against the one Dr. King dared us to imagine. In the months leading...
Turns out Americans have too rosy a view of racial equality in the country. In a new paper published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a group of Yale psychologists has found that people in the US vastly overestimate the progress made...
President Barack Obama has called runaway income inequality the “defining issue of our time.” The disparity between exploding corporate profits and stagnating paychecks fueled Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign and continues to grow. Currently,...
It’s well known that America’s wealthiest have been getting richer at the expense of the middle class. But the trend looks even starker when you look at the racial aspects. According to a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies, the combined...
According to a report released this week by the Center for Effective Government and the Institute for Policy Studies, just 100 CEOs have retirement accounts that total $4.6 billion—that’s more than the retirement assets of 41 percent of Americans, or 116 million...
These are dark days for coal. In July, the industry hit a milestone when a major power company announced plans to shutter several coal-fired power plants in Iowa: More than 200 coal plants have been scheduled for closure since 2010, meaning nearly one-fifth of the US...
American companies have around $2.1 trillion in untaxed profits stashed overseas, according to a new report by the Center for Effective Government and the Institute for Policy Studies. About half of that amount is held by 26 large companies like Apple, GE, and...
This statistic provides a pretty compelling snapshot of the severity of our income gap: In 2014, Wall Street’s bonus pool was roughly double the combined earnings of all Americans working full-time jobs at minimum wage. That sobering tidbit came from a new...
The “Inequality Report Card,” published today by the Institute for Policy Studies, looks at how lawmakers voted on dozens of bills that would, among other things, raise taxes on the wealthy, restrict the use of offshore tax havens, increase the minimum...