"Words that make actions speak louder."
Despite the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, top corporate executives are still taking home staggeringly more than their counterparts a generation ago. Millions of Americans last year lost their jobs, their homes, and their retirement security. American CEOs last year lost some pocket change — and some of them didn’t even lose that. […]
The good folks at the Indiana University Center on Philanthropy would like us to know that we can gain “new insights” aplenty from the just-published second edition of their ongoing landmark research on the charitable giving of America’s rich. The first edition of this research — the largest survey of wealthy Americans about charity “ever […]
Not everyone in the international hedge fund industry is making millions. Not everyone in the hedge fund industry right now even has a job. Amid the worst global economic meltdown since the Great Depression, hedge funds are hemorrhaging positions. An estimated 20,000 will be gone by year’s end. But the hedge fund industry still does […]
Of all the people in the United States, 99.99 percent have never perused the pages of the Statistics of Income Bulletin, a research journal the IRS publishes four times a year. For the power suits on Wall Street, that’s a good thing. If more Americans ever really digested the sort of statistics that appear regularly […]
How much has the uproar over the bonuses at AIG impacted America’s political discourse? This much: We now have elected leaders on Capitol Hill, for the first time since World War II, openly talking about slapping a 100 percent top tax rate on the income that’s cascading into rich people’s pockets. On Tuesday, Rep. Steve […]
Forbes magazine, our globe’s premier scorekeeper for the games rich people play, last week delivered its latest annual tally of the world’s billion-dollar fortunes, the first since the world economy went into meltdown mode. The Forbes verdict: We’re seeing some mighty bad times for billionaires. “Like the rest of us,” intones Forbes, “the richest people […]
America’s most financially fortunate, the cagier critics of President Obama are claiming, can sidestep any hike in the tax rate on high incomes. But history tells a different story. Last fall, in the Presidential campaign, candidate Barack Obama promised to raise taxes on the rich and "spread the wealth." Candidate John McCain, figuring that Obama […]
Every three years, researchers from the Federal Reserve Board fan out all across the United States to figure out just how well America’s families are doing financially. The researchers knock on about 4,500 doors — and conduct incredibly detailed interviews that probe every facet of what families make and what families own. Eventually, the data […]
Huge rewards for ‘talented’ people are supposed to leave all our lives much better than before. But they don’t — not in sports or any of the rest of life either. Everything you really need to know about life, a fun best-seller posited a few years back, you learn in kindergarten. Like share everything and […]
Our new White House has begun a counterattack against America’s grand divide between the rich and everyone else. But we face, new stats from the IRS make dramatically plain, a steeply uphill battle. Last Thursday, the day after President Obama announced a $500,000 cap on executive pay at bailed-out banking giants, the banking industry’s trade […]