Tuesday, June 25, 2019

The One Percent Have Gotten $21T Richer Since 1989. The Bottom 50% Have Gotten Poorer.


Shades of Meaning


At the CircuitWest Showcase in Perth, Australia, I discussed with artists, producers, and presenters the issues around community engagement in a state (Western Australia) where, outside the capital, the cities and towns are small and far from each other, and the visits from touring artists are necessarily brief. – Doug Borwick


Tax professionals conversations livestream

GAO WatchBlog: “Doing your taxes can be complicated. So it’s no surprise that nearly 90% of taxpayers use either a paid preparer or tax software to prepare and file their taxes each year. In an age of data breaches and identity theft, how safe is your information after you provide it to one of those third parties? We take a look in today’s WatchBlog..The information that you provide to your paid preparer or tax software package is a potential goldmine for identity thieves because it contains a lot of personal, financial, or federal tax information. Fraudsters may steal this information and use it to collect a fraudulent tax refund or commit other types of crimes…”



How generous are other people in your profession?

Our exclusive tax interactive allows you to see how generous people are in your profession and whether you are giving more or less than average.


How a millionaire pays no income tax


He earns more than $1 million a year yet when it comes to tax time his taxable income is just $18,000 ...



The Australian who says he invented bitcoin keeps suing those who doubt him


He claims to be the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto - but for many in the crypto world, Australian Craig Wright is a comic book villain.






The One Percent Have Gotten $21T Richer Since 1989. The Bottom 50% Have Gotten Poorer. 



New York Magazine – The Intelligencer: “…The Federal Reserve just released some data that makes the state of this alignment easier to gauge. In its new Distributive Financial Accounts data series, the central bank offers a granular picture of how American capitalism has been distributing the gains of economic growth over the past three decades. Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project took the Fed’s data and calculated how much the respective net worth of America’s top one percent and its bottom 50 percent has changed since 1989.

He found that America’s superrich have grown about $21 trillion richer since Taylor Swift was born, while those in the bottom half of the wealth distribution have grown $900 billion poorer. Notably, this measure of wealth includes liabilities, such as student debt. And it does not include consumer goods, such as computers or refrigerators, as economists do not conventionally view such products as wealth assets. But if one did include the Fed’s data on the distribution of consumer goods, the wealth gap between the top one percent and bottom 50 would actually be even larger…”