TOO MUCH — Chronicles of Inequality

Reports

Socioeconomic inequalities in adolescent health 2002–2010
The Lancet, February 4, 2015
Frank Elgar, Timo-Kolja Pförtner, Irene Moor, Bart De Clercq, Gonneke Stevens, and Candace Currie

In this new study, researchers from Canada, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Scotland looked at the health records of about a half-million 11- to 15-year-olds over an eight-year span.

In the 34 North American and European nations examined, those adolescents living in countries with greater income inequality reported more psychological and physical symptoms of ill-health. The adolescents in more unequal nations also showed lower levels of “life satisfaction.”

“The many health and social problems that relate to income inequality and current global trends in rising income inequality,” notes lead researcher Frank Elgar from McGill University, “all lead to a grim prediction about future population health.”

The 100 Most Overpaid CEOs: Executive Compensation at S&P 500 Companies
As You Sow, February 13, 2015
Rosanna Landis Weaver

This ambitious new study from a California-based nonprofit working to make corporations more accountable took two different methodological approaches to identifying America’s most undeserving chief execs. Both ended up pointing to largely the same suits.

Some names and companies on the As You Sow most-overpaid CEO list — like Oracle software’s Larry Ellison — will be familiar to many Americans. Others won’t.

The most overpaid top exec turns out to be Anthony Petrello of the under-the-radar energy giant Nabors Industries. He pulled down an incredibly undeserved $68.2 million in fiscal 2013.

But the CEO pay problem, this new research emphasizes, goes far beyond a few rotten apples. Overall CEO pay, the study notes, has grown 937 percent over the last 35 years.

Have a 401(k)? You most likely have your retirement future, As You Sow points out, invested in a company with an overpaid CEO.

Tax Fairness: An Answer to State Budget Problems
Keystone Research Center and Good Jobs First, February 2015
Greg LeRoy and Stephen Herzenberg

America’s 1 percenters are currently paying just 5.4 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes. Americans in the middle 20 percent of income earners — the statistical middle class — are paying almost twice as much of their incomes, 9.5 percent, in those same taxes.

So what if we evened those rates off? If our top 1 percent paid state and local taxes at the same rate as middle-class taxpayers, states and localities would collect an extra $88.5 billion in revenue. If all the top 20 percent paid at the middle-class rate, the extra would total $200.5 billion.

What could all these billions do? Just $30.5 billion of that $200.5 billion would be enough annually to fully fund the endangered pensions of all the nation’s state and local employees, from teachers to first responders.

And the $170 million remaining would be more than enough to cover the long overdue maintenance of America’s infrastructure. The American Society of Civil Engineers puts the annual tab for restoring our roads and bridges, electric grids, airports, seaports, and more at $157 billion.

Also new last month: The American Psychological Association’s annual stress survey finds a growing stress gap between America’s haves and have nots . . . Another growing divide: the college completion gap between students from low- and high-income families, reports a new study of the last 45 years from the Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy and the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education . . . Since 1983, Center for American Progress researchers detail in The Effect of Rising Inequality on Social Security, the growing share of the nation’s income flowing to the nation’s top-earners has cost the Social Security Trust Fund $1.1 trillion . . . In the Roosevelt Institute’s new Disgorge the Cash: The Disconnect Between Corporate Borrowing and Investment, J.W. Mason shows how today’s CEOs are borrowing simply to reward shareholders like themselves.