Weekend Reading

Yes, Wisconsin legislators haven’t passed a bill in 6 months

The 50 Richest Americans Are Worth as Much as the Poorest 165 Million

Face masks: what the data say

Every Black Woman Has Faced A Mike Pence

We Must Save Democracy From Conspiracies

Trump Is Killing the Economy Out of Spite

Donald Trump: Biden Better Take COVID-19 More Seriously or He Might Get It and Infect a Bunch of People

Why Wisconsin's largest business group endorses mask-wearing campaign while opposing Evers' mandate (because they're assholes)

‘Wisconsin is what happens when you politicize public health,’ Mayor Lori Lightfoot says

Economists are more like storytellers than scientists – don’t let the Nobel for ‘economic sciences’ fool you

Supercut Exposes Fox News’ Hypocrisy On Kamala Harris Debate Criticism

The “Bluelining” of Cities in Red States

Trump’s Covid Treatments Were Tested in Cells Derived From Fetal Tissue

Disdainful Mark Meadows Refuses Reporter Request To Put On His Face Mask

Do Trump’s Taxes Show He’s a Failure, a Cheat, or a Criminal?

Half of the 20 Metro Areas Worst-Hit by COVID Are All in One State

Mitch McConnell showed his true colors in a Kentucky Senate debate against Amy McGrath

Sheldon Whitehouse Made the Case That Amy Coney Barrett's Nomination Is a Bag Job

The U.S. was the world's best prepared nation to confront a pandemic. How did it spiral to 'almost inconceivable' failure?

Coronavirus Is Not A Great Leveler

The Suburban Mystique

The Suburban Mystique

For decades, the suburbs were seen as havens where people moved to escape the crowding, poverty, and problems of the inner city. Despite the pervasive stereotype, the suburbs were never universally affluent or white, and since the 2000s, as a majority of Americans have settled in suburbs, the “burbs” have become increasingly diverse, both economically and demographically. Poverty has concentrated increasingly in poor suburbs, surpassing low-income populations in urban and rural areas and upending assumptions about what it means to “move to opportunity.”

As Scott Allard points out in his book Places in Need, despite the fact that white Americans make up the majority of the U.S. poor, and that poverty now concentrates in suburbs, media and scholarly portrayals still disproportionately focus on the “urban poor,” and white people settle in white neighborhoods because they associate black residents with poverty.

Suburbs—where most Americans, impoverished or otherwise, live—are increasingly the locus of work-life conflict and economic insecurity.

And since suburban identity is culturally tied to a myth of the American dream, not to mention a long legacy of racism—a space where the affluent have historically segregated themselves from the black and poor—admitting there is a problem, and creating policies to help poor and middle-income struggling families, requires introspection and new political will.

Eight Men Own The Same Wealth As The Poorest Half Of The World

8 people have same wealth as world's poorest half

Income inequality is so now lopsided that eight men now own the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the world. 

A top corporate CEO earns as much in a year as 10,000 garment factory workers in Bangladesh. 

And the world's 10 biggest corporations together have revenue greater than the 180 poorest countries combined. 

These findings by Oxfam, from a report titled An economy for the 99%, was released Sunday as the globe's leaders and the business elite traveled to Davos, Switzerland, for this week's annual meeting of the World Economic Forum. The conference is partly aimed at eliminating extreme income inequality. 

The study found that the richest eight people on the planet have net wealth of $426 billion — equivalent to what's held by the bottom half of the world's population.

An Economy For The 99%

Yet the global inequality crisis continues unabated: 

• Since 2015, the richest 1% has owned more wealth than the rest of the planet. 

• Eight men now own the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the world. 

• Over the next 20 years, 500 people will hand over $2.1 trillion to their heirs – a sum larger than the GDP of India, a country of 1.3 billion people. 

• The incomes of the poorest 10% of people increased by less than $3 a year between 1988 and 2011, while the incomes of the richest 1% increased 182 times as much. 

• A FTSE-100 CEO earns as much in a year as 10,000 people in working in garment factories in Bangladesh.

• In the US, new research by economist Thomas Piketty shows that over the last 30 years the growth in the incomes of the bottom 50% has been zero, whereas incomes of the top 1% have grown 300%. 

• In Vietnam, the country‟s richest man earns more in a day than the poorest person earns in 10 years.

Let The Poor Eat Mexicans

The Colbert Report
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Republicans Punishing The Poor

Safety Net

Five Points Worth Remembering About Taxes & The Poor
Introduction To Unemployment Insurance
Myth Of The Exploding Safety Net
Nothing Courageous About Raising The Retirement Age
The Problems Facing Social Security

Kick 'Em While They're Down

Wisconsin One Of A Few States That Will Raise Taxes On The Poor.

Weekend Reading

Competition Hasn't Worked In Health Care
How Did Fannie & Freddie Become Symbols Of The Housing Bubble?
How Finance Vultures Feed Off The Poor
It's Time To Tax The Church
Questioning The Benefits Of Curbing Short Sales
Rethinking Debt
The Top 1 Percent Since 1990: Getting Richer
Uncertainty & The Welfare Economic Of Medical Care
We Have More Doctors Per Capita Than Ever Before
Why Rich People Don't Create Jobs

Poor in America

The Republicans and the Heritage Foundation feel America's poor aren't really poor.

If you have a refrigerator, air conditioning, or a coffee maker, you're not poor.

"If you still have the strength to brush the flies off your eyeballs, you're not really poor."

The Colbert Report
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Class Warfare

If you do drugs and you're poor we'll throw you into the streets. Actually you will just lose your unemployment benefits. But if that's your only income, you'll probably end up in the streets.

But, if you're wealthy and you received subsidies, giveaways, tax breaks, low-interest loans and a host of other handouts from taxpayers; and your casino-type speculation helped bring down the world economy; don't worry about punishment or an end to the giveaways. In fact, we'll find ways to make the poor and working-class citizens sacrifice even more so that you can have more handouts from taxpayers.

If you smoke a joint you will no longer receive your less-than-$300 weekly unemployment check. Yet, if a corporation's greed and speculation (partially funded by taxpayers) happens to collapse the economy, it's perfectly OK for that CEO to spend $1.2 million to redecorate his office, while continuing to receive taxpayer dollars. This dichotomy perfectly illustrates the inequity of our public policies.

American "democracy" at its finest.

Kick 'Em While They're Down

From the indispensable David Cay Johnston, "In 2009 almost 62 million workers, 41 percent of everyone who had a job that year, made less than $20,000. And 100.6 million workers, exactly two out of three people with jobs, made less than $40,000, the Medicare tax database shows. The Obama-GOP tax increase applied to everyone with a job that paid under $20,000 ($40,000 for married heterosexual couples). So while at least 90 percent of Americans are uninformed about this tax increase, you can now contribute to the factual basis of our national tax debate by pointing out to others that Obama and the GOP, along with a lot of congressional Democrats, enacted a bipartisan tax increase on the working poor in violation of their campaign pledges."