Here is the 2015 update. It separates the various components of income, tax, and transfer programs across quantiles, providing a deeper picture of how they have changed. One thing that jumps out is the category that makes a difference in … Continue reading
David Henderson has comprehensive federal tax brackets (before whatever it is Congress may pass before 2017 ends) by income, courtesy of the CBO. These include payroll taxes, as well as estimated tax incidence of corporate taxes. Here’s the description … Continue reading
Using Tax Data to Measure Long Term Trends in Income Inequality makes further adjustments for the 1986 tax reform and corporate income. Unsurprisingly, this significantly reduces the increases in income inequality. Continue reading
Perry Metzger has an amusing post about Piketty and the “Shoe Event Horizon” from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: On Frogstar B, for a time shoe production increased faster than the rate of overall economic growth. As a result, … Continue reading
The public debate about inequality and income growth sometimes seems entirely focused on intra-country differences, and ignores the global trend of decreasing inequality. In my reading on the subject I came across this graph, used in more than one article … Continue reading
In prior posts I’ve noted that some of the measured inequality trend is actually an artifact of where income is reported. Particularly after the 1986 tax reform, income has moved steadily from corporate returns to individual returns, exaggerating the growth … Continue reading
Suggests what you might call the textbook result: The hike in the minimum wage thus appears to have raised the wage for low-skilled workers but made it harder for them to find jobs. Full paper here. From the summary: …because we … Continue reading
Gary Burtless brings us changes in real after-tax income for various quantiles, since 1979 and 2000. Unsurprisingly, the incomes of the wealthy have a much higher beta to the economy than the poor. Yet people keep presenting that as a … Continue reading
Poverty and global inequality are falling. (and perhaps faster than traditional studies indicate) I’ve made this point a few times. The best summary was on Vox EU. In an article called Parametric estimations of the world distribution of income. World … Continue reading