inequality

As the United States struggles to recover from the recession of 2007-2009, loud voices are calling for cuts in state and local taxes to spur economic growth. In particular, advocates argue that cuts in personal income taxes will promote growth and development. But what is the evidence for this idea? Objective scholarly research on the economic effects of state and local expenditures and taxes is often neglected or misrepresented by tax cut proponents.

Evidence from my own studies and those of many others suggests that adjustments in state and local taxes and spending can, at most, spark marginal gains in economic performance. Across the United States in recent decades, states and localities have adopted more similar tax and spending policies, leaving less room for improvement. Crucially, there is no evidence that tax cuts pay for themselves by boosting future growth and tax collections. For public officials, there is no escape from carefully considering how various balances of taxes and spending affect both government budgets and surrounding economies. The truth is that certain kinds of tax reductions may have little effect on economic growth – even as they drain government coffers of revenues needed for crucial economic and social goals.
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School is often challenging and frustrating for African American males. Too often, they fall behind their peers, get poor grades, and fail to take advanced courses – or even graduate from high school. They are also more likely to be expelled or disciplined for various offenses, including quite minor ones. Failures or bad experiences in school can put young black males on the road to failure and even imprisonment later in life.

Teachers play a crucial role in helping African American males succeed – they can be pivotal to breaking cycles of frustration and failure. Research suggests that by the time students enter high school, they will spend more time with teachers than with parents. Because teachers weigh so heavily in student psychosocial development, they can boost African American boys and male teens. Yet teachers will not realize their potential to help unless they learn to better understand the perspectives and behaviors of African American males and respond to them in ways that foster positive developmental outcomes. Teachers must develop self-conscious cultural understandings and skills to guide and inspire African American males in their classrooms. more...

As we mark the 50^th anniversary of the War on Poverty, it is a good time to ask how well the safety net for America’s poor families with children is holding up. New or expanded efforts to aid the poor were launched in the 1960s, some of which have since persisted and evolved, while others have been fundamentally revamped. What does research tell us about the effectiveness of the original and revised efforts – in the key areas of food programs, cash help, and support for low-income working families? more...

Starting with the 1960s War on Poverty, job training programs – now called “workforce development” – were deployed to improve the skills of poor youth and adults and help them find employment. After a modest beginning, workforce development got a big infusion of federal funding in the 1970s; but support declined after 1980.

Did the original training programs fall short of expectations? More importantly, what do the best current data and analyses show about job training as a tool for reducing poverty in the future? more...

By 1980, the wages earned by African-American women and white women came close to being equal, but since then the gap has nearly tripled. Meanwhile, average wages for African-American men stagnated, and wage inequalities between black and white men remained stubbornly high. In this same period, membership in U.S. labor unions has plummeted – from one in every three private sector workers enrolled in a union in the mid-1950s to just one in twenty today. So it is natural to ask whether such sharp union decline helps to explain racial economic gaps today.

Our research uses 40 years of nationally representative data and a technique sometimes called “counterfactual analysis” to discover what wage trends among blacks and whites, men and women, would have looked like if union membership in the private sector of the U.S. economy had not declined so sharply. The short answer is that union decline has made racial gaps worse, especially among women. more...

Do Americans care that income gaps between the rich and everyone else are growing by leaps and bounds? When citizens do care, what do they want done about it? Across the political spectrum, debates about these questions have raged with new force since the Occupy Wall Street movement took to the streets in 2011 and the 2012 elections highlighted the issue. To read daily coverage, though, is to hear little more than superficial or partisan assertions. We can do better by tracking public attitudes over many years, which show us both that Americans care about inequality and are very much aware of its negative consequences for all but a sliver at the top. more...

Democracy comes in many different forms, because communities and nations can devise various rules to shape elections and the processes of government decision-making. The specific rules chosen matter a great deal – especially the rules adopted for voting and elections. After all, who gets to vote, how, and when determine citizen access in a democracy – and decisions about such matters influence the balance of power in government and what public officials are likely to decide about war and peace, taxes and the economy, education, and social benefits. The outcomes of fights over the rules for elections can determine who has a seat at the table of government at all, and whose interests will matter or be ignored. more...

In many ways, America’s 2012 elections brought government as usual. As an incumbent president was reelected, his party gained nine House seats and two Senate seats – and women continued to be greatly under-represented in Congress.

Only twenty women are found among the 100 U.S. Senators, and 13 of these are the first women to represent their state. Women hold only 77 seats in the House, fewer than 18%. Four U.S. states have never sent a woman to Congress: Delaware, Iowa, Mississippi and Vermont. The U.S. ranks 77^th among the world’s nations in women’s representation in the lower legislative chamber – right behind Sao Tome and Principe and just ahead of Madagascar. Not counting ties, the U.S. actually ranks 92^nd.

Before the 2012 elections, USA Today had predicted another “Year of the Woman” given an “upward trend of female candidates for Congress.” What actually happened is better characterized as a relatively good year for Democratic women amidst continuing female under-representation. Although neither major U.S. party has nominated sufficient numbers of women for Congress, Republicans nominate fewer and when GOP women are nominated, they very often lose. The difference between the percentage of women in Democratic Congressional delegations and the percentage of women in GOP Congressional delegations hovered between 7% and 11% from 1993 to 2002, but now it has grown to a remarkable 19.5 %. more...

Low-income parents and parents of color have long demanded well-funded schools to provide their children with the same level of education as that provided for wealthy white children. Often the answer to their pleas is “no,” as educators, politicians, policy makers – even many people in the general public – claim that “money doesn’t matter” for school quality.

But the facts say otherwise, as spelled out in reports from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Center for American Progress, and other organizations that have compiled local school data from across the United States. In Massachusetts specifically, the top ten school districts whose students score highest on the Standard Aptitude Test spend an average of $16,010 per pupil, while the schools whose students score lowest spend an average of $13,799 per pupil. That’s a difference for each student of more than $2000 a year – approximately the same gap in school spending per pupil that separates U.S. states ranked in the top fifth versus the lowest fifth in terms of student performance on tests. The funding gaps between top-performing schools and states and the lowest performers are not a coincidence. Money matters. more...

Not long ago, the U.S. Census Bureau delivered very bad news about poverty in the United States. In 2010, 15.1% of Americans had incomes below the poverty line—set at $22,113 for a family of four—and the poverty rate for 2011 will be even higher. For older people who remember that poverty fell to 11.1% back in 1973, it may seem puzzling that things have gotten so much worse. Rising poverty is not a recent development either. Things were getting worse well before the Great Recession of December 2007 through June 2009. Given the way the U.S. economy works in our era, sluggish growth, high levels of joblessness, and persistently high poverty are likely to persist for years—unless our political leaders change course and do more to help the poor and near-poor. more...