To improve workers’ skills, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren call for free college for all. To raise wages, many call for a rapid increase in the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour as well as resurgent unionism. And Andrew Yang continues to call for “universal basic income” in response to potentially large-scale job displacement […]

America’s soaring inequality has a new engine: its regressive tax system. Over the past half century, even as their wealth rose to previously unseen heights, the richest Americans watched their tax rates collapse. For the working classes over the same period, as wages stagnated, work conditions deteriorated and debts ballooned, tax rates increased. Stop to […]

Matt Bruenig, founder of the left-wing think tank People’s Policy Project, broke down the Federal Reserve’s newly released “Distributive Financial Accounts” data series and found that, overall, “the top one percent owns nearly $30 trillion of assets while the bottom half owns less than nothing, meaning they have more debts than they have assets.” The […]

Ever since Bernie Sanders’s insurgent run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, a specter has haunted left-liberal debate: the specter of “class reductionism.” Left-identitarians and centrist liberals have used this oversimplified charge not merely to dismiss Sanders but also to cast suspicion on the broad array of universally redistributive policies associated with him and […]

Most everyone who’s interested in global inequality has come across the famous elephant graph, originally developed by Branko Milanovic and Christoph Lakner using World Bank data. The graph charts the change in income that the world’s population have experienced over time, from the very poorest to the richest 1%. The elephant graph has been used […]