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+16 +1
What Families Need to Get By: EPI’s 2015 Family Budget Calculator
The income level necessary for families to secure an adequate but modest living standard is an important economic yardstick. While poverty thresholds help to evaluate what it takes for families to live free of serious economic deprivation, EPI's Family Budget Calculator offers a broader measure of economic welfare.
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+27 +1
State-Level Data Show Incomes Continue to Stagnate in Households Across the Map
Thursday’s release of state income data from the American Community Survey (ACS) showed that the gradual improvement in state economies from 2013 to 2014 brought little change in overall economic conditions for households in most states. The ACS data showed a slight increase in median household income for the United States overall and similar modest increases in household incomes in a majority of states—although only a handful of these increases were statistically significant.
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+23 +1
1 in 5 Louisiana residents lived in poverty last year: census data
Louisiana had the third-highest rate of poverty in the country for 2014, at 19.8 percent, falling behind only New Mexico and Mississippi.
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+19 +1
One Map Shows How Many Hours You Need to Work Minimum Wage to Rent an Apartment in Any State
The rent is too damn high.
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+29 +1
Why These Workers Are Going On Strike When The Pope Visits D.C.
As the Pope arrives in D.C., he'll be greeted by low-wage workers walking off their jobs.
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+20 +1
Why We Must End Upward Pre-Distributions To The Rich
You often hear inequality has widened because globalization and technological change have made most people less competitive, while making the best educated more competitive. There’s some truth to this. The tasks most people used to do can now be done more cheaply by lower-paid workers abroad or by computer-driven machines.
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+25 +1
The Hypocrisy of ‘Helping’ the Poor
EVERY so often, you hear grotesquely wealthy American chief executives announce in sanctimonious tones the intention to use their accumulated hundreds of millions, or billions, “to lift people out of poverty.” Sometimes they are referring to Africans, but sometimes they are referring to Americans. And here’s the funny thing about that: In most cases, they have made their fortunes by impoverishing whole American communities, having outsourced their manufacturing to China or India, Vietnam...
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+25 +1
More Jobs, But Still No Raises
Strong U.S. job growth still isn’t having the effect that Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen has long been waiting for: better raises for workers. Until that happens, there's little reason for the Fed to start worrying about inflation -- or pulling back too much on its efforts to support the economic recovery.
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+29 +1
It’s Getting Harder To Move Beyond A Minimum-Wage Job
Minimum-wage jobs are meant to be the first rung on a career ladder, a chance for entry-level workers to prove themselves before earning a promotion or moving on to other, better-paying jobs. But a growing number of Americans are getting stuck on that first rung for years, if they ever move up at all.
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+28 +1
Searching for Worker Voices at the White House
A recent labor summit highlighted the administration's uneven record on workers' rights.
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+35 +1
A Tale of Two Retirements: One for CEOs and One for the Rest of Us
While the availability of pension plans for most Americans has dwindled in the last 30 years, more than half of Fortune 500 CEOs receive company-sponsored pension plans. Their firms are allowed to deduct the cost of these plans from their taxes, even if they have cut worker pensions or never offered them at all.
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+19 +1
Five Tax Fallacies Invented by the 1%
We hear these claims often, even though they're entirely false. An analysis of the facts should make that clear.1. The Rich Pay Almost All the Taxes That's simply not true. The percentage of total taxes paid by the very rich (the top 1%) is approximately the same as the percentage paid by middle class Americans (the 4th quintile, average income $68,700).
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+16 +1
Quiet Desperation and American Fascism
We are in a race between credible leaders on the one hand, and demagogues and mass alienation on the other.
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+52 +1
When You’re Poor, Life’s Little Annoyances Actually Ruin Your Life
It is impossible to be good with money when you don’t have any. Full stop. If I’m saving my spare five bucks a week, in the best-case scenario I will have saved $260 a year. For those of you that think in quarters: $65 per quarter in savings. If you deny yourself even small luxuries, that’s the fortune you’ll amass. Of course you will never manage to actually save it; you’ll get sick at least one day and miss work and dip into it for rent. Gas will spike and you’ll need it to get to work.
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+8 +1
10 Moral Crises That Have Resulted From Unfettered, Free Market Capitalism
On the free market it is legal and customary to violate the dignity of our fellow human beings.
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+29 +1
Thinking Harder about Political Correctness
The best response to the right's indictment of PC culture is a more robust solution to persistent inequality.
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+14 +1
National Association of Manufacturers’ criticisms of the Obama overtime proposal all miss their mark
Last September, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) filed comments in opposition to the Labor Department’s proposed rule on overtime pay for salaried workers, which would raise the salary threshold under which all workers are eligible for overtime pay from $23,660 to $50,440. NAM’s chief criticism boils down to this: “The Labor Department set the salary level threshold for exemption too high.” The evidence NAM presents to support that criticism, however, is inaccurate...
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+21 +1
With public sector unions on the rocks, middle class may take another hit
The decline of union coverage is responsible for about 35 percent of the drop in the share of the workforce that falls within the middle class, the researchers found.
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+30 +1
City and metropolitan inequality on the rise, driven by declining incomes
To understand the state of local inequality today, this analysis updates and extends previous Brookings analyses of income inequality in cities. Like those earlier analyses, it focuses on the difference between incomes near the top of the distribution and those closer to the bottom of the distribution. This analysis examines each of the 100 largest U.S. metro areas, and the largest city in each of those metro areas, using new data from the 2014 American Community Survey.
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+22 +1
Mandatory arbitration unfairly tilts the legal system in favor of corporations and employers
Employees are much less likely to win in mandatory arbitration than in federal court: employees in mandatory arbitration win only about a fifth of the time (21.4 percent), whereas they win over one-third (36.4 percent) of the time in federal courts.
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