Mark WeisbrotCrash Magazine, 21 ??????????, 2015U.S. News and World Report, 19 ??????????, 2015In EnglishEn español

Mark WeisbrotMDZ Diario de Mendoza, 25 de enero, 2015Crash Magazine, 21 de enero, 2015U.S. News & World Report, 16 de enero, 2015En inglés???? ???????? ??????

E.J. Dionne had a very nice piece in the Washington Post last Thursday on how the U.S. tax code is less progressive than most reporting indicates. Dionne’s main point is that by focusing on federal taxes, many journalists miss out on state and local taxes, which tend to tax the poor at higher rates than the rich:

“It is thus a public service that the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) has issued a report showing that, at the state and local level, government is indeed engaged in redistribution — but it’s redistribution from the poor and the middle class to the wealthy.

“The institute found that in 2015 the poorest fifth of Americans will pay, on average, 10.9 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes and the middle fifth will pay 9.4 percent. But the top 1 percent will pay states and localities only 5.4 percent of their incomes in taxes.”

Dionne attributes the regressive nature of state and local taxes to the types of taxes that these areas tend to impose. As he notes, states and localities often rely heavily on sales and excise taxes; according to the ITEP report, both taxes are quite regressive. Property taxes are also regressive, though state-level income taxes tend to be progressive.

But there’s another way in which state and local taxes tend to be regressive: they contribute to inequality between states.

Dean Baker
Truthout, January 19, 2015

Mark WeisbrotU.S. News & World Report, January 19, 2015

January 2015, Eileen Appelbaum

Denmark has long cold rainy winters where the sun only shows up briefly. It is understandable that someone can get pretty sour living in these conditions. But that is no reason for the Washington Post to run scurrilous screeds from Scandinavia that inaccurately impugn the region.

That is a reasonable description of Michael Booth's Sunday Outlook piece, which managed to get most of the important points wrong in a piece titled, "Stop the Scandimania: Nordic nations are not the utopia they are made out to be."

Going in order of importance, Booth somehow thinks that the McDonald's workers in Denmark getting paid $20 an hour pay 75 percent of their income in taxes. He better try to explain that one to the OECD. It puts the tax rate for the average worker at 26.7 percent. Booth is apparently adding in the 25 percent valued added tax, which would still leave us just over 45 percent (the 25 percent tax is applied on 73.3 percent of income left over after-tax). That's pretty far from 75 percent.

Booth then turns to mocking the employment record of the Scandinavian countries:

"last month the Times assured us that 'A Big Safety Net and Strong Job Market Can Coexist. Just Ask Scandinavia.' (*Cough* unemployment is 5.6 percent in the United States, vs. 8.1 percent in Sweden, 8.9 percent in Finland and 6.4 percent in Denmark.)"

According to the European Commission, the employment rate for people between the ages 20 and 64 is 73.3 percent in Finland, 79.8 percent in Sweden, and 75.6 percent in Denmark. All of which are above the 71.1 percent rate in the United States.

He then goes to Sweden, which he rightly attacks for its strong anti-immigrant movement, but then adds:

"This has distracted from the slowing economy, increasing state and household debt levels, and one of the highest youth unemployment rates in Europe."

Again, he'll have to explain his calculations to the folks who do this stuff for a living. The European Commission has a category for young people who are not working or in school or a training program. The share of young people in Sweden in this category about 7.5 percent, near the bottom of the European Union. As far as state indebtedness, the I.M.F. tells us the government has a deficit of about 2.0 of GDP and total debt equal to 42 percent of GDP, that less than 70 percent of the level in the United States.

Dean Baker
The Hankyoreh, February 2, 2015

(Updated January 20, 2015, 12:10 p.m. to include a response from the American Red Cross - see below.) Two years ago, we noted that the American Red Cross’ (ARC) annual update on its response to the Haiti earthquake raised a number of questions, and seemed

CEPR
15 Janvier, 2015

Last Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its December 2014 jobs report. Most media outlets have focused their reporting on the U-3 unemployment rate, which fell to 5.6 percent last month.

However, the U-3 unemployment rate is an imperfect measure of joblessness. In order to be counted as unemployed, a prospective worker must “have actively looked for work in the prior 4 weeks.” This means that if someone has been searching for work for a long period of time, but has become dissatisfied with their job prospects and hasn’t applied for any jobs over the previous month, he or she is no longer counted as “unemployed.”

Some have tried to correct for this bias by looking at labor force participation rates (LFPR); this is also misleading, mostly because labor force participation doesn’t distinguish between employment and unemployment. (A prospective worker is counted as being part of the labor force if he or she is either employed or unemployed and searching for work. This means that if 50 percent of a country’s citizens were employed and 30 percent were unemployed, its LFPR would be 80 percent; however, the LFPR would also be 80 percent if 75percent were employed and only 5 percent were unemployed. Obviously it’s important to distinguish between these two scenarios.)