1.) Executive Pay - Many corporate CEOs now earn more than 300 times the pay of average workers, up from 30 times a generation ago. As economist Lawrence Misshel has noted, executive pay accounts for roughly 40 percent of the income growth enjoyed by America's top 1 and 0.1 percent from 1977 to 2005. Executive pay over $1 million doesn't constitute a "legitimate business expense" -- meaning that corporations can't deduct any pay over $1 million from their income. But corporations can deduct any pay that represents a reward for "performance." (Source: "Outrageous Fortunes," The Nation, March 7, 2016).
One way to downsize CEO pay overall,would be to deny corporations with egregiously overpaid CEOs easy access to lucrative procurement contracts.
2.) Capital Gains Tax Break - "Wealthy Americans pay just $23.80 in federal income tax on every $100 of their 'capital gains' income. Ordinary income, by contrast, faces a federal tax rate that can go as high as 39.6 percent. In other words, for every $1 million of wheeling-and-dealing income that billionaires claim, the capital-gains tax preference shears about $160,0000 off their tax bill." (Source: "Tax for Tots," The Nation, March 7, 2016).
3.) The Debt Sentence - "Student debt now tops $1.3 trillion, and the burden weighs heaviest on black and Latino students. Young, low-income African-American families are twice as likely to have student debt as their white counterparts." (Source: "End the debt sentence," The Nation, March 7, 2016).
4.) Tax Havens - "Since 1980, the volume of U.S. equities held by tax-haven investors has more than quadrupled. America's richest individuals now have at least $1.2 trillion stashed offshore." (Source: "Off the Grid," The Nation, March 7, 2016).
5.) Savings of Major Corporate CEOs - A recent Center for Effective Government and Institute for Policy Studies report showed that 100 major corporate CEOs have individual savings equal to 41 percent of American families. In contrast to the very comfortable lives of these major CEOs, nearly 70 percent of Americans over age 65 will need at least three years of long-term care. Many can't afford it. (Source: "Crack a Few Nest Eggs," The Nation, March 7, 2016).
6.) Black Workers' Pay Shortfalls - "Overall, 42 percent of US workers make less than $15 per hour -- but according to the National Employment Law Project, 54 percent of African-American workers earn less than that." "Between 1983 and 2007, the Center for Economic and Policy Research reports that the share of black workers represented by a union fell by 16 percent. The decline for white workers was only about half that: 8.7 percent." "Recent polling shows that about 87 percent of low-wage black workers approve of labor unions, a level of support almost 20 percent higher than among white workers." (Source: "Black Workers Matter," The Nation, March 7, 2016).
7.) Wealth Generators - "According to a recent Institute for Policy Studies report, the billionaires on the Forbes 400 list now own about as much wealth as the entire African-American population, plus more than a third of the US Latino population combined." (Source: The Wealth Generator," The Nation, March 7, 2016).
8.) Game Changers - "Our nation's 20 richest individuals -- a group small enough to fit in a single Gulfstream jet -- have more wealth than the bottom half of the entire US population." (Source: "Game Changers," The Nation, March 7, 2016).
9.) The Billionaire Loophole - [Private-equity firms] "are not compensated for building new ventures from scratch, with the risk that entails, but for managing the investments of wealthy individuals and pension funds, and other institutional clients. Even if no profits are realized, private-equity firms get paid: under the '2 and 20' compensation structure, they receive a two-per-cent fee annually on assets under management, in addition to a twenty-per-cent cut of profits beyond a given benchmark, The I.R.S. characterizes the managers' cut of the profits as carried interest, taxing it as though it were capital gains made through the sale of a person's own investments. For most of the past fifteen years, long-term capital gains have been taxed at fifteen per cent, compared with the thirty-five per cent for ordinary income in the top bracket."
Victor Fleischer, a tax-law professor, has argued that the loophole contributes significantly to income inequality by inflating what he calls the 'alpha income' of financiers in the top one per cent of the one per cent. "The easiest way to close the loophole would be to equalize the rates on capital gains and regular income, as was done in 1986." "The tax code supports this view, making charitable giving tax-deductible. By 2013, the mount written off by all taxpayers was more that forty billion dollars annually. The wealthy benefit the most, because they are deducting income that would otherwise be taxed at the highest personal rate." (Source: Alec MacGillis, "The Billionaires' Loophole," The New Yorker, March 14, 2016).
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