Income Inequality

It's probably no coincidence that Hollywood has decided to turn F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 classic, The Great Gatsby, into a new movie (released Friday). The book famously depicts the lavish living and fancy galas of high-income earners in America's Roaring 1920s. Fast forward 90 years to another era of income ...

The latest fun figure about our country's growing income inequality: The average big company CEO earns 354 times that of the average rank-and-file worker. That statistic comes courtesy of the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of trade unions in the country, which has been tracking this ratio since 1996, ...

In a stirring Bloomberg BusinessWeek article, Leslie Patton tells the story of one McDonald's employee. His name is Tyree Johnson. The 44-year-old has worked at the fast food chain for two decades, yet still makes just $8.25 an hour, and doesn't get 40 hours a week of work. So Johnson has jobs at two Chicago ...

America bills itself as a land of opportunity, and the slogan still may be true in so many ways in 2012. But many see a persistent and growing inequality in both the labor force and standard of living. The gap between the "two Americas" has been an issue on the left for years, and was a catalyst for the ...

New York state Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver plans to propose a minimum wage hike on Monday, which would lift the state's wage floor to $8.50 from $7.25 an hour. California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri and New Jersey are also considering minimum wage increases, and ...

Three years ago, if you were to ask Americans what the strongest social conflicts were in this country, the divide between immigrants and native born Americans would have ranked at the top. But today, hostilities between the rich and the poor has taken that spot, beating out both racial and immigration-related ...

The One Percent is the villain of the moment, but it's a mostly faceless one. We can imagine Bernie Madoff, Rupert Murdoch, those guys from Enron, and a smattering of Goldman Sachs execs sitting around a mahogany table smoking cigars and ashing on your mortgage papers. But really, it's hard to know who the ...