FYI
News You Need, In Brief
The six heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune hold as much wealth as the entire bottom 30 percent of Americans. (Source: Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics, University of California at Berkeley)
News You Need, In Brief
Richest vs. the Rest of Us
The rich got richer during the last three decades and the very rich got very richer. The rest of us? Not so much. The wealthiest 1 percent of U.S. households saw their inflation-adjusted incomes skyrocket 275 percent from 1979 to 2007, while 90 percent of households grew just 18 percent during that time. That’s according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Similar findings by the Economic Policy Institute confirmed this troubling disparity in income growth.
Read more here:
http://www.epi.org/publication/data-income-gains-support-99ers/
Don’t Blame Unions
It’s the recession and housing bubble that caused state budget deficits, not public service workers or their unions. That’s the definitive finding released in a study by the University of California, Berkeley. Titled “The Wrong Target: Public Sector Unions and State Budget Deficits,” the study demolishes one of the myths that too many corporate-backed politicians and propagandists cling to: that public employees are to blame for the problems facing state governments. The report was based on Bureau of Labor statistics and analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
Read more here:
http://www.irle.berkeley.edu/research/state_budget_deficits_oct2011.pdf
Unions Boost the Middle Class
(Graph credit: Center for American Progress Action Fund)
A report by the Center for American Progress Action Fund finds that strong unions are “a critical factor in creating a middle class society” and “restoring the strength of unions would go a long way toward rebuilding the middle class.” In 1968, when 28 percent of workers were unionized, the share of income going to the nation’s middle class was 53 percent. In 2010, when union membership was less than 12 percent of all workers, the middle class received just 46 percent of all income. That’s 7 percentage points in the wrong direction.
Read more here:
http://www.americanprogressaction.org/issues/2011/09/madland_unions.html
Privatization Doesn’t Pay
Government contractors cost taxpayers more than federal public service workers to do the same work, according to a report by the Project on Government Oversight. Each year, the report notes, the federal government spends approximately $320 billion on contracts, whose workers are often paid “at rates far exceeding the cost of employing federal employees to perform comparable functions.” A look at the billing rates for 35 different categories of contractors doing more than 550 types of jobs revealed that the contractors get 1.83 times more than federal workers in total compensation.
Read more here:
http://www.pogo.org/pogo-files/reports/contract-oversight/bad-business/co-gp-20110913.html
http://www.nasra.org/resources/PublicPensionFactSheet110125.pdf
