|
Viewing Economics NEWS articles 376 through 414 of 414
- Several senators — millionaires, many of them — have reported earning substantial dividend income in 2004, benefiting greatly from President Bush’s tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, according to financial disclosure reports made available yesterday.
- CAFTA is a minefield, with many deadly bombs buried in its thick brush of text. Yet, have you heard any major network or newspaper cry out? I have heard George Bush's best patriotic voice on radio in sound bites from speeches telling us what a boon this is to America, Central America and Freedom. Oh yeah, at least kiss us before you screw us. The speeches are his idea of foreplay.
- David Cay Johnston, the invaluable New York Times reporter who specializes in our tax system, has come up with some staggering figures on what he calls "the hyper-rich," the wealthiest one-thousandth of the population, and their taxes.
- Edward S. Lampert made $1.02 billion, while his firm, ESL Investments, raked in a 69 percent return on investment, largely due to Lampert’s deal-making in the merger of Kmart and Sears. While thousands of Kmart and Sears workers have lost their jobs the price of Kmart stock soared after the merger.
- The corporate world has certainly been successful in indoctrinating North Americans in the mentality of full-blown capitalism, convincing us to accept its harsh divide between rich and poor.
- The US Labor Force: One Foot in the Third World
- The Department of Housing and Urban Development is leading the charge to deny assistance to the families who need it the most.
- Economic mobility - moving from one income group to another over a lifetime - has actually stopped rising in the United States, researchers say. Some recent studies suggest it has even declined over the last generation.
- Re-igniting the medical malpractice overhaul debate, a new study by Dartmouth College researchers suggests that huge jury awards and financial settlements for injured patients have not caused the explosive increase in doctors' insurance premiums. The researchers said a more likely explanation for the escalation is that malpractice insurance companies have raised doctors' premiums to compensate for falling investment returns.
- Intangible investment? Why didn't we think of that sooner! The trouble with the concept is that it produces intangible products, intangible profits, and intangible wages. Maybe the employees will get to enjoy an intangible sandwich someday.
- The child poverty rate in the US has steadily risen every year from 2000, according to several recent reports and press releases from public policy institutes and government agencies.
- Rejoice! The world is saved! The governments of Europe have agreed that by 2015 they will give 0.7% of their national income in foreign aid. Admittedly, that's 35 years after the target date they first set for themselves, and it's still less than they extract from the poor in debt repayments. - Here’s a basic moral value: taking someone’s money without their permission is stealing. Except in America, where, if you’re a corporation that takes away someone’s pension, it’s okay. With very little public outcry, we are letting corporate America dismantle the private defined-benefit pension system. At the same time, huge salary and pension benefits are lavished on executives. Remember, pensions are deferred compensation—people put off getting money in their paychecks today because of a promise that they would receive a specific amount of money (hence, the term “defined benefit”) many years later. It’s their money, not the companies’ money.
- Poverty has always been the critical component to create extreme wealth. It does not occur by accident. Poverty keeps labor cheap. Slave labor is just imposed poverty.
- A quarter of a century of day-in, day-out asset stripping sponsored by the IMF and the World Bank left millions of poor people poorer. Meanwhile, the unregulated capital flows — another tenet of the Washington Consensus — led to speculative booms and currency crashes that pushed hundreds of millions of people down into dollar-a-day poverty.
- Could the petroleum joyride - cheap, abundant oil that has sent the global economy whizzing along with the pedal to the metal and the AC blasting for decades - be coming to an end?
- "..the social class into which you are born matters a lot when it comes to where you stand on the American socioeconomic ladder. It matters more in the United States, the supposed land of upward mobility, than it does in Europe. The American Dream of "rags to riches" is less livable in America than it is in the aristocratic Old World that America rejected when its founding document proclaimed that "All Men Are Created Equal."
- Here’s my guess and magic wand: I believe the crisis is likely going to be the permanent economic crash of America. The big players in the American stock markets pulled out about 2 years ago. When the markets crash, and our nation is completely bankrupt and beholding to foreign creditors, our money will fall to nothing. We will lose mortgaged homes in the multi-millions, and all civil liberties will be suspended. Martial law will rule the day until we, the people, accept global governance, which will be ushered in - no ifs, ands, or buts - with the final crash of the United States.
- A 17-day protest march by 12,000 landless Brazilian peasants ended in violence as activists fought police and demanded faster government land resettlement to cut rural poverty.
- In Seattle, if you're earning the minimum wage, you have to work 90 hours a week to afford to rent an average two-bedroom unit, let alone buy one. That's just one of the most recent indicators to show housing is growing increasingly out of reach for many working families here.
- In a stark indication of the mounting attack on the social conditions of American workers, the average real wage in the US has begun to decline steeply for the first time in over a decade. The decline in wages is a product of increased inflation in recent months, combined with a persistently poor job market, even in the midst of a supposed economic recovery.
- Nearly 9.5 million people in south Asia and the Pacific are working as forced labor, which is a whopping 77 per cent of the global forced labor estimated at 12.3 million people, says a new International Labour Office (ILO) report.
- Forty four percent of Americans are overworked using at least one of three different measures, and those overworked employees have, on average, poorer health and higher rates of clinical depression, both of which help to drive up health care costs, as you'd expect.
- Substantial scientific evidence gained in the past decade has shown that various aspects of the built environment can have profound, directly measurable effects on both physical and mental health outcomes, particularly adding to the burden of illness among ethnic minority populations and low-income communities.
- There are at least four million homeless souls plying our streets and roads and alleyways. The administration admits to that many, so the number is probably higher. Four million onion eaters. Or maybe 35 million. In the United States, there are 34.9 million people who go hungry or are food insecure, an increase of 3.9 million people since 1999. 12.9 million of these are children. What this says is: not only has our government failed, but also that you and I have failed.
- Oil production could peak next year. The one thing that international bankers don't want to hear is that the second Great Depression may be round the corner. But last week, a group of ultra-conservative Swiss financiers asked a retired English petroleum geologist living in Ireland to tell them about the beginning of the end of the oil age
- Bigger tax breaks for wealth produces a system in which the middle class pays about the same as the rich. - Thousands of people rioted Sunday in a village in southeastern China, overturning police cars and driving away officers who had tried to stop elderly villagers from protesting against pollution from nearby factories
- Inflation has outpaced the rise in salaries for the first time in 14 years. And workers are paying a bigger share of the cost of their healthcare. - The world as we know it, and have known it since the 15th century, is reaching a dichotomous moment. This has been brought on by Capitalism, the dominant economic and development model to this point. Humanity is at a junction, where it can either choose a more sane and sustainable future for all, or it can choose the path of annihilating other nations in order to steal their resources until there are no resources left
- Latino immigrants - especially from Mexico, but also from Ecuador, Guatemala and elsewhere - have settled everywhere from Yonkers to Peekskill and Mount Kisco to Mamaroneck. The men continue to follow the established pattern of taking day-laborer jobs in construction and landscaping; the women are usually domestic workers. - The following are excerpts from a speech given by Hugo Chávez at Gigantinho Stadium during the 2005 World Social Forum. "One of these old guys, he was being ripped into pieces, pulled by horses from each arm and leg – Empires have always been brutal, there are no good or bad Empires, they are all aberrant, brutal, perverse, no matter what they wear or how they speak. When he felt he was about to die, he shouted "I die today but some day I’ll return and I’ll be millions". - Material Progression has Often Been Accompanied by Moral Regression .
- Some of America's wealthiest individuals have declined billions of dollars in tax cuts bestowed upon them by President George W. Bush's administration and have urged others among the country's richest and most famous to donate their federal tax cuts to campaigns against the Bush package, often described as "tax breaks for the rich." - Government specialists are busy measuring the growing lines at soup kitchens and food pantries across the nation. There were 25.5 million supplicants regularly lining up in 2002; they were joined by 1.1 million more the next year. And even more arrive as unemployment and other government programs run out.
- It was a good year for the global billionaires’ club. Their ranks grew to 691, up 17 percent from the previous year. However, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of impoverished Americans rose 3.7 percent in 2003. The number of children living in poverty rose 6.6 percent. So there are about 100 more billionaires, but 12 MILLION more americans living in poverty. Is that an economic success story?
- A new study that reveals the amazing wealth the super-rich hold in offshore tax havens - depriving governments of hundreds of billions of dollars - and the looming crackdown by the world's tax collectors
- The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) today released its 2005 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure—assigning a cumulative grade of D for the nation’s infrastructure. The condition of our nation’s roads, bridges, drinking water systems and other public works have shown little to no improvement since they were graded an overall D+ in 2001. ASCE estimates an investment need of $1.6 trillion over a five-year period from all levels of government and the private sector
- Personal incomes plummet 2.3 percent in January, sharpest drop in a decade; consumer spending is Flat.
|
