Yesterday, I wrote about a report put out by The Chronicle of Philanthropy disaggregating the amount of charitable giving according to various criteria. In its discussion of the report, NPR said that poor people tended to give a larger proportion of their income to charity, and tried to explain why this might be so. [Read more…]
Much of the mainstream media analysis of the Paul Ryan selection as the Republican vice-presidential candidate has been predictable. Ryan is hailed as a ‘serious’ thinker with a ‘bold’ vision for tackling America’s allegedly biggest problem, the budget deficit. They say that his pick signals the start of a serious debate on economic policy. [Read more…]
I wrote two weeks ago about the small Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights that I live in being faced with either voting for a city income tax increase or losing services. Yesterday the voters in the city easily passed (by a margin of 64% to 36%) the measure to raise the city income tax from 1.75% to 2.25%, an increase of almost 30%. [Read more…]
As the November election approaches, there will a lot of noise about taxes and the so-called ‘Buffett rule‘, named after Warren Buffett who has been saying that it was wrong that rich people like him should pay taxes at a lower rate than people who earn much less, like his secretary for example. This will intensify as the end of the year approaches and the Bush tax cuts are set to expire. [Read more…]
I live in the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights. It is a fairly small residential community of about 5 square miles and 30,000 people. It has long been proud of the quality of life and services offered to its residents, and of its public school system which both our daughters attended throughout the K-12 years. In order to maintain this without a significant commercial base means that we have one of the highest tax rates in the state. [Read more…]
The Nobel prize-winning economist talks about how the US economy, if not already broken, is on its way to becoming so because of the rapidly rising inequality that is becoming entrenched and hereditary as the rich put in place laws that preserve their privileges. He dates the beginning of decline to 1980 when the divergence between the very rich and the rest of us began. [Read more…]
Mitt Romney’s candidacy has opened up a whole new discussion about offshore tax shelters. I had assumed that this was something that was quite complicated to set up, and thus only wealthy people with armies of expensive accountants and lawyers could take advantage of them. [Read more…]
Princeton University professor of politics Martin Gilens has a new book Affluence & Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America that spells out something that many of us instinctively sense, that America is a one-party state in which the rich get their own way, while the rest are shut out to an extent that threatens democracy itself. [Read more…]
The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) was the massive $700 billion dollar bailout that was rushed through government with almost no public discussion in the fall of 2008, when everyone was being panicked by alarms that there was the danger of a massive meltdown of the financial system. [Read more…]
The saga over Mitt Romney’s finances keeps getting more complex. The latest involves his Individual Retirement Account.
The IRA was introduced as a means to encourage people to save for their retirement by putting away some money each year that was tax-deductible (up to a certain income level) and where the accrued interest was tax-exempt. The idea was that when you started withdrawing the money in your retirement, your tax rate would be lower because you were now in a lower income bracket. For most people, it is their IRA, coupled with the Social Security income, that they depend upon in their later years. [Read more…]