If the Occupy movement has one primary concern, I’m guessing it would be that the expansion of income inequality has had a massive amount of negative consequences for the country. It has created a near-permanent underclass and robbed them of their voice in the political sphere. The overclass, meanwhile, the 1%, has an inordinate amount [...]

I’m supposed to feel sorry for the banker who might have to pull his kids out of private school: Schiff, 46, is facing another kind of jam this year: Paid a lower bonus, he said the $350,000 he earns, enough to put him in the country’s top 1 percent by income, doesn’t cover his family’s [...]

I’m loath to dive into the numbers of the Administration’s FY 2013 budget, because it won’t be used as anyone’s baseline, and to the extent that it will, that was baked into the cake by the debt limit deal. If you want the hard numbers, the surprisingly best source I’ve found comes from the Guardian. [...]

We’ve been talking about income inequality lately, and tied into that is the idea of upward mobility. The United States, in the myths of cock-eyed optimists everywhere, remains the land of opportunity, where everyone can get a fair shot at greatness. But that America hasn’t existed for a while. In fact, as Jason DeParle reports, [...]

The Congressional Research Service declined a vacation in favor of whipping up a report on the major causes of inequality, which Jared Bernstein summarizes here. The report does find that income inequality is in part a function of the Bush tax cuts, and I’m unsure how it accounts for the higher salaries granted to executives [...]

Looks like I gave Doug Schoen way too much credit in criticizing him about his poll of Occupy Wall Street. His MO was to marginalize the protest movement in familiar terms, as a “radical” left-wing group supporting some amalgam of godless communism and hippie free love-ism for America. All of the actual policies that his [...]

Today sees the rise of two key studies that reveal some fundamental truths about how an economy works, which are best looked at together. First, the CBO studied the question of how full employment would reduce the deficit. “Full employment” is defined here as a projection of what would happen if there wasn’t an “underutilization [...]