While billionaires brag about tax evasion, the highest tax burden as a percentage of income falls on the poorest Americans. The lowest 20 percent of taxpayers pay a tax rate more than 50 percent higher than the top 1 percent of households. This should come as no surprise after the Panama Papers bombshell of 2016…
Donald Trump’s nomination of conservative jurist Amy Coney Barret to the increasingly partisan Supreme Court has spared a deep confirmation battle. Many are contesting whether Americans’ having a stake in the decision requires waiting until the presidential election. Nonetheless, the Senate Judiciary Committee will begin hearings on October 12th. What would a potential confirmation of…
“We’ve won the war. Now you have to lead us out of it,” General Ulysses S. Grant in Lincoln (2012) encapsulates the Reconstruction Era’s limitations and failure to truly unite and rebuild post-Civil War America even a decade after. The Reconstruction Era was characterized by a fragmented country with a gridlocked Congress, violent, southern paramilitary…
The Iraq war is often cited as one of the worst intelligence failures in modern foreign policy history. The conflict claimed the lives of over 250,000 people under the false pretense that Iraq had obtained weapons of mass destruction (Matthews). Historians and foreign policy experts contest whether the framing of the intelligence resulted in war,…
Stock buybacks used to be illegal, once considered a form of stock manipulation until 1982 when the SEC passed rule 10b-18 legalizing the practice under Reagan’s failed trickle-down agenda. Over the past 10 years, companies on the S&P 500 have put $5.4 trillion into purchasing their own shares instead of investing in the economy and…
Can electoralism ever produce a transfer of power to the working-class in a two-party system, or are corrupt political parties that will never allow change into power, elections dominated by corporate interests, and voter suppression the problems? According to the theory of democratization, the wealthy autocrat class only willingly surrenders power in times of extreme…
“We are only as safe as the least insured person in America,” Bernie Sanders, in one tweet, succinctly captured the individualist United States’ failed safety net amidst a coronavirus pandemic with now 10,502 cases occurring while 27 million are uninsured and the working-class grocers, delivery drivers and caretakers are on the front-lines as emergency workers…
The Federal Reserve loaned $1.5 trillion to the financial system yesterday– $500 billion into short-term bank funding — and misguided critics believe the Fed exchanging cash for securities to increase liquidity and prevent a bank run is a government “bailout” and tantamount to “corporate welfare.” However, monetary policy is completely independent of fiscal policy (the…
If the federal minimum wage had kept up with the 657% increase in inflation and 176% rise in worker productivity over the past 50 years, it would be $21.72. It peaked in 1968 at $11.18 when the cost of a four-year public university was $329.00, according to National Center for Education Statistics, a manufacturing job…
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