A report set for release Tuesday contends that women of color have been ignored in the crafting of Detroit’s recovery — and that progress would be more swift were they…
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A report set for release Tuesday contends that women of color have been ignored in the crafting of Detroit’s recovery — and that progress would be more swift were they included.
“The surprise isn’t that women are doing amazing things and making contributions,” said Kimberly Freeman Brown, author of the report from the Institute for Policy Studies of Washington, D.C. What’s noteworthy, she said, is that “they’re absent from much of the narrative about Detroit’s comeback.”
“I Dream Detroit: The Voice and Vision of Women of Color on Detroit’s Future” found that 71 percent of survey respondents in the fall 2016 did not feel included in planning for the city’s future. More jarring on a practical level, only half of the nearly 500 women of color surveyed — 34 percent of whom hold at least one college degree — reported earning a living wage.
Funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, “I Dream Detroit” was compiled across 18 months of focus groups, interviews and analysis. The report from the progressive think tank includes a statistical breakout along with personal accounts from 20 of the women it refers to as “solutionaries,” a term borrowed from the late human rights activist Grace Lee Boggs.
The Republican tax plan is a lie. It’s being sold with the promise that the tax cut will create jobs and growth. In fact, the Republican tax cuts, if passed, will become the major obstacle to the very investments vital to generating good jobs and future economic growth.
Contrary to Donald Trump’s claims, the rich and big corporations will pocket the vast bulk of the tax cuts, not working people. The tax cuts won’t pay for themselves. They will increase the deficit. By 2027, one in four taxpayers will end up paying more. And for 80 percent of Americans, the tax cut they do get would be so small that it will go virtually unnoticed in most households. For example, the Tax Policy Center estimates that in 2027, the 27 million households with children and incomes under $75,000 will receive an average tax cut of all of $20 when the provisions are in full effect.
Americans get this. Fewer than one-third think they will end up paying less under the Republican plan, according to a new Politico/Morning Consult poll; about the same number think they’ll end up paying more. By a 41-28 margin, Americans know the rich will end up paying less, rather than more. Yet a plurality, 44 percent, thinks the tax cuts will have a “positive impact on the US economy,” while only 24 percent think the tax cuts will have a negative impact. The big lie still works.
The U.S. Census Bureau recently reported new data showing median incomes rising sharply in the San Francisco area. While many in the Bay Area latched onto the promising economic outlook, I was immediately struck by the glaring headline that was missed.
Black households, already far below the average median income in the Bay Area, were locked out of this explosion of wealth.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median income for the San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward metro area jumped by 9 percent from 2015 to 2016, while the median income for black households inched up just 2 percent.
The annual median income for black households in the region stands at $46,571, less than half the $106,919 for whites.
The income divide hinders black families’ ability to accumulate wealth. Right now, the ratio of the wealth divide between white households and black households is more than 10 to 1.
Open a newspaper—or, more likely, click on a Facebook article on your phone—and there will be a story telling you that income inequality is at the root of America’s problems: 0.1% of the US population is worth almost as much as the bottom 90%; CEO-to-worker pay ratios have increased thousand-fold since 1950; and wages have been stagnating for 35 years.
But while the wages we are paid are vital to the success and comfort of our lives, economic returns have been going increasingly to investors rather than wage earners. The real affliction America is suffering from isn’t income inequality: It’s asset inequality.
Since the Occupy protests of September of 2011, the subject of America’s large and growing income inequalities has become fodder for media stories, policy discussions, and a growing body of academic studies. Hardly a day goes by without some new research pointing out how dire the situation has become. The Institute for Policy Studies most recently stated that “America’s 20 wealthiest people—a group that could fit comfortably in one single Gulfstream G650 luxury jet—now own more wealth than the bottom half of the American population combined, a total of 152 million people in 57 million households.”
The effective estate tax rate for returns filed in 2016 decreased by 2 percentage points from the previous year, in part because of a bump in bequests to surviving spouses, IRS data shows.
Based on returns filed in 2016, 5,219 estates with a gross value of about $107.8 billion owed estate tax, according to Internal Revenue Service statistics released Oct. 10. Of that total, the amount of net estate tax paid was about $18.3 billion, which equates to an effective tax rate of about 17 percent. This is a 2 percentage point drop from the 2015 effective estate tax rate of about 19 percent.
Robert J. Lord, a tax attorney based in Arizona, pointed out that effective estate tax rates calculated using gross estate values can be misleading—and perhaps not as helpful as effective income tax rates—because a lot of estate planning involves reducing the size of the gross estate.
Additionally, deductions like the marital deduction can fluctuate from year to year based on whether a decedent is the first or second spouse in a married couple to die, Lord and Ronald D. Aucutt, a partner at McGuireWoods LLP and co-chair of the firm’s Private Wealth Services Group, told Bloomberg BNA.
I was struck by the news last week that former Equifax chief executive Richard Smith, who “retired” after a major data breach at the credit bureau was revealed, would get a pension worth more than $18 million.
Equifax said last month that 145.5 million customer credit files were compromised when hackers accessed the company’s computer system. Smith, 57, won’t get his 2017 bonus or a severance payment, but what does that matter? He’ll still reap a fortune in the aftermath of a security breach that could have an impact on consumers for years.
When it comes to Smith’s retirement payoff, it’s hard not to player-hate when you’re worried that in retirement the cost of your health care will bankrupt you before you die. Or that the years you’ve spent sacrificing — so that you could have enough money to live well in retirement — still wasn’t enough.
Riding a tide of tax cuts and rising profits over four decades, the captains of corporate America have shifted $1 trillion each year from the paychecks of middle class Americans into massive payoffs to Wall Street investors and to CEO and executive pay. And now they want you to believe, once again, that cutting corporate taxes will benefit average workers.
Matched against history, that’s a hollow claim bordering on economic fake news. Factually, it flies in the face of the performance over the past 40 years of American business, which has generated what Citibank called the greatest inequality of income in any major nation since 16th century Spain – that is, over the past 500 years.
In 2012, the Congressional Research Service published a report that bluntly debunked the pet conservative notion that lowering tax rates boosts economic growth. “The reduction in the top tax rates appears to be uncorrelated with saving, investment and productivity growth,” the congressional tax report concluded. Instead, it said, lower tax rates fuel economic inequality.
Adrian Bejan is a rebel with a cause and a good job.
He’s a cheerful and weird engineering professor at Duke University who wants us all to be free thinkers, to question convention and authority, and to connect the dots across topics. He himself has tried to do just that, inventing a physics principle, the “constructal law of evolution and organization,” which he says can be widely applied to life and society to better understand how the world works.
The constructal law describes a principle in natural design: flow systems, animate and inanimate—people, rivers, trees, branches, tectonic plates, traffic, markets, and more—all act the same, in one crucial way. In order to survive, all these systems must adapt to accommodate the currents that flow through them, and they all evolve following a vascular pattern.
WASHINGTON ― Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will use a major foreign policy address Thursday to set out his view of how politicians on the left should discuss the U.S role in the world and why voters at home should pay close attention to America’s actions abroad.
Even as the popular lawmaker built a national reputation and attracted millions of fans during his unsuccessful candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination last year, he frequently faced criticism for talking too little about how he would tackle global affairs as president. Now seen as a leader among liberals and a strong 2020 candidate, Sanders is poised to show that he can be a leader in the foreign policy conversation as well.
“He wants to start this debate, in some ways similar to Medicare-for-all, in which he really wanted to broaden the debate on what is possible… and say, here’s some basic progressive values that should guide our thinking about foreign policy,” an aide told HuffPost on Wednesday, referencing Sanders’s move earlier this month to propose expanding Medicare. The senator will focus on the value of international cooperation and less U.S. reliance on hard military power to pursue its goals around the world, rather than going into specific policy recommendations for hot spots like Syria, North Korea and elsewhere.
Developments in the health care policy world have demonstrated the power Sanders and his progressive movement now have over the Democratic Party. Sanders’s idea of government-provided health insurance for all Americans was viewed as a pipe dream even by the Democrats’ last presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, and he received no support from his colleagues when he introduced a similar bill in 2013. This year, he already has more than a third of the Senate Democratic caucus on board.
Pot is gaining acceptance legally and across society, but don’t expect the Drug Enforcement Administration to change when President Donald Trump announces his choice to run the agency, experts say. The government arm that runs the war on drugs has never been hip to hemp, but experts say a new DEA head won’t come in and change pot policy.
In fact, experts say the Trump administration’s stance on issues like drug arrests, legalization of marijuana and even the notorious wall along the Mexican border will steer things even further away from acceptance of the drug, even though 86 percent of Americans believe the plant should be legalized in some capacity, according to a recent poll.
It still isn’t clear who will replace Chuck Rosenberg, who was appointed to head the DEA in 2015 by President Barack Obama. His resignation comes two months after he pushed back on Trump’s comment that law enforcement officers were “too nice” when handling suspects professionally.
