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Category Archive for 'Inequality'

We’re staying at a condo right now here in the People’s Republic of the Berkshires. It occurs to me that the rich folks who built second homes here might be environmental Heros rather than demons, at least a little. How? These condos use a lot of lumber that was grown for the purpose of building […]

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Equality

Don’t try this at home … I’m blogging while driving. I apologize for grammatical and spelling errors. In recent days I’ve run across a lot of sympathetic Scandinavian navel gazing. The gist is that countries like Finland pay higher taxes, have less “freedom” (whatever that means), are better educated, more “secure” and are happier. Let’s […]

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Friday Fun Facts

Our university President earns well over 35 times the salary of the cleaning staff in my building. And that ignores benefits and other perqs that are not part of compensation (such as having control of the pulpit). We can’t stand for that kind of inequality. Where has our sense of fairness and decency gone? And […]

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Earlier this Spring we examined how one aspect of our tax code (our current debates are like two people fighting over the last egg salad sandwich on the titanic) is anti-family and anti-women. For all of the rhetoric we hear out there about “equal pay for equal work” the idea that you can ever achieve […]

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There are many reasons to be concerned about poverty, even here in rich America. While I am almost sure that living on low income itself is not ipso facto that hard to do, it does correlate well with other things that are hard to do. For example, I intentionally make myself poor when I go backpacking for […]

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Clearly there are issues with the way we measure income inequality in the US. But any way that I can measure it, I still see that there seems to be an actual increase in it. This is NOT a post on whether you should be concerned about that. It is, rather, a simple methodological post. […]

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The formal environmental movement is a movement of the 1% (OK, perhaps the 20% is fairer). Famously the average income of members of members of the Sierra Club and other environmental organizations is closer to the top 10% of the income distribution than to the middle or bottom of the distribution. I’ll post data on […]

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We’ve bantered on this site about replacing a seemingly “bad” tax, that on working (social security), with a less bad tax (on “bads”) such as one on carbon. I’d like to remind readers about some lesser appreciated “badness” of social security. Since I’m posting from my mobile phone using Siri I apologize in advance for […]

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Wegmans versus Washington, DC

Here I am sitting in Wegmans in Penfield, NY: I want to thank PJ Hill for reminding me of something. As I look down at the customers here, I see quite a few affluent people. There is a lady below me ordering what looks like a $100 cake and I just saw someone walk out […]

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What is totally lost in debates about changes in income inequality and living standards over the past 40 years is … well … most everything that is relevant. How often have you heard that since 1980 the typical (median) person is no better off? How often have you heard that the rich are getting richer […]

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