Inequalities

Tag: taxes

  • Income Mobility and Geography: Important New Research

    Some new research by Raj Chetty, Emmanuel Saez, Nathaniel Hendren, and Patrick Kline finds that the likelihood of poor children moving up the income ladder in early adulthood varies dramatically by metro area in the United States. In places like Salt Lake City, Utah or Bakersfield, California, a child born in the bottom quintile has […]

  • Tax breaks for useful jobs

    A new paper says that the income tax rate in socially useful jobs should be lower than in socially useless ones – here, regular guest-poster Charlotte Cavaille gives this argument a once-over, as part of a pair of posts on tax. With the sharp growth of income inequalities well known to readers of this blog, researchers puzzle […]

  • Does truth matter?

    If you’re reading this blog, then you’re probably interested in ‘the truth’ – by which I mean that you’re interested in the way the world really is, rather than pretending it’s the way you want it to be. We tend to howl with rage whenever politicians lie to justify injustices, and there’s been a lot […]

  • Ending the Charitable Deduction is Part of the Solution

    To balance the budget, Republicans want to raise revenue by getting rid of tax loopholes instead of raising rates. If we are getting rid of loopholes, what about eliminating the income tax deduction on charitable contributions? Ending the charitable deduction is not a popular idea for either the left or the right to embrace. The […]

  • Attitudes to tax-dodging in Britain

    At the recent launch of Kate Bell & Declan Gaffney’s report on the ‘nothing for something’ benefits system, Richard Exell of the TUC asked if people had become more sympathetic to tax-dodging at the same time as they’ve become more hostile to people on benefits? In an unlikely attempt to impersonate a 21st-century academic, I managed to carve […]

  • The perfect tax system

    You might think that the days of the glorious, all-knowing economist are behind us, in the midst of savagely bleak times at least partly caused by economistic hubris. But clearly there’s still a space in our hearts to hear economists reaching truths unseen by others, at least for the salvation of baseball in the film […]

  • Get your sports team a tax lawyer

    Looking at the behaviour of elite sportsmen is a favourite hobby of economists – aside from many economists being sports geeks (I’m not in a position to call names here…), there’s a wealth of publicly available data just waiting to be explored. Which means that apparently frivolous bits of research can actually say something serious […]

  • Most American Households Have Tight Budgets

    Congressional Republicans who favor raising taxes on the rich to reduce the deficit are harder to find these days than salad at a state fair. One argument that is commonly made is that we cannot expect the rich to pay more until the more than half of all Americans that do not pay any income […]

  • Regulation, Taxes, and Freedom

    A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post about the Human Development Project, a project sponsored by the Social Science Research Council to develop indicators of individual wellbeing across U.S. states and demographic groups. The basic idea is to use available measures of education, health and mortality, and income to compare how much people […]

  • Revisiting American Inequality: Did the Poor Really Get Poorer?

    American income inequality is commonly told as a story of divergence: since the 1970s, the share of income going to the top of income distribution has skyrocketed, while the share of income going to the bottom of the income distribution has seen large declines. Even in absolute terms, there is evidence that incomes for low-wage […]