Falling homeownership rates in England primarily among ethnic minorities

Analysis of the latest Census data by research and campaign group Positive Money illuminates growing inequalities in our housing system, finding that decreasing rates of homeownership and high rates of overcrowding are largely experienced by ethnic minorities. Since 2001, ethnic minority households have been around a quarter less likely to own their own homes than the national average. In this time, national homeownership rates have dropped 6.3%, driven by a 8.5% drop among ethnic minority households, compared to a 3.1% drop among White British households

— source positivemoney.org | 21 Apr 2023

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Rich countries export twice as much plastic waste to the developing world as previously thought

High-income countries have long sent their waste abroad to be thrown away or recycled — and an independent team of experts says they’re inundating the developing world with much more plastic than previously estimated.

According to a new analysis published last week, United Nations data on the global waste trade fails to account for “hidden” plastics in textiles, contaminated paper bales, and other categories, leading to a dramatic, 1.8-million-metric-ton annual underestimate of the amount of plastic that makes its way from the European Union, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States to poor countries. The authors highlight the public health and environmental risks that plastic exports pose in the developing world, where importers often dump or incinerate an unmanageable glut of plastic waste.

“Toxic chemicals from these plastics are poisoning communities,” said Therese Karlsson, a science and technical adviser for the nonprofit International Pollutant Elimination Network, or IPEN. IPEN helped coordinate the analysis along with an international team of researchers from Sweden, Turkey, and the U.S.

Many estimates of the scale of the plastic waste trade make use of a U.N. database that tracks different types of products through a “harmonized commodity description and coding

— source grist.org | Joseph Winters | Mar 13, 2023

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Wealth Inequality Spiraled Out of Control

Robert Reich

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New Report on Inequality and Extreme Wealth Proves the Need to Tax the Rich

Today, Oxfam released a comprehensive report, “Survival of the Richest,” outlining the state of wealth inequality globally and proposed potential solutions to this problem, namely, taxing the rich. This report comes on the opening day of the World Economic Forum’s retreat in Davos, Switzerland, where the ultra-wealthy and world leaders meet to discuss how to best solve the world’s problems.

Some stunning figures from the report include:

Since 2020, 63 percent of all new wealth has gone to the top 1 percent, leaving only 37 percent for the rest of the world combined.
Billionaire wealth has increased by $2.7 billion per day, while over 1.7 billion people live in countries where their wages, adjusted for inflation, have declined.
Three-quarters of the world’s governments are planning on making $7.8 trillion in cuts to public sector funding, like healthcare and education, over the next five years. This comes as marginal tax rates on the highest incomes fall, from 38% to 31% in Africa over the last 25 years, and from 51% to 27% in Latin America since the 1980s.
Only 4 percent of tax revenue worldwide comes from taxing wealth, while 44% comes from regressive consumption taxes.

In response, Morris Pearl, the Chair of the Patriotic Millionaires and a former managing director at BlackRock, Inc., released the following statement:

— source patrioticmillionaires.org | Jan 16, 2023

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#classwar

Top 10% Now Own 77% of American Wealth

As President Donald Trump and the Republican Party unveiled their “cruel joke” of a tax plan that would provide an enormous boon for the rich disguised as a “middle class miracle,” an analysis by the People’s Policy Project (3P) published Wednesday found that the top 10 percent of the income distribution now owns a “stunning” 77 percent of America’s wealth while those in the bottom ten percent are “net debtors,” owning -0.5 percent of the nation’s wealth.

“We do not live in a democracy. We live in an oligarchy.”
–Digital LeftIn response to the analysis, conducted by 3P president Matt Bruenig, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote on Twitter: “Meanwhile, the Walton family of Walmart has a net worth of $144 billion. This is what a rigged economy looks like.”

“We do not live in a democracy. We live in an oligarchy,” added the progressive group Digital Left.

— source | Jake Johnson | Sep 28, 2017

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Rising National Income But Declining Welfare of People

INDIA’S per capita income, representing the average income of an Indian citizen, has risen from INR 79,000 in 2013–14 to INR 1,71,000 in 2022–23 — an increase of 116 percent. Therefore, some claim that incomes have more than doubled in India since the present ruling dispensation took office. The catch is that: a) this includes the price increase during the period and hence does not represent the real increase in incomes, and b) the data for 2022–23 and two earlier years is provisional and subject to revision.

The real increase in per capita income, subject to the above caveat, is from INR 68,600 to INR 96,500 during the period, which is an increase of 40.8 percent. This is not bad. However, since these days everything is compared to the earlier United Progressive Alliance (UPA) period from 2004–05 to 2013–14, the numbers are not flattering. Including inflation, the increase during the UPA years was 204.5 percent, while the real increase was 50.3 percent. These are official figures from the Economic Survey, based on the data released by the National Statistical Office — the official agency that estimates and publishes data on national income and related macroeconomic variables.
Average hides the variation

Further, the average hides the extreme variations in incomes in India – across classes and regions. There is also a differential in the wages earned by men and women for the same

— source theleaflet.in | Arun Kumar | Mar 17, 2023

[unified civil code and all other pr created issues are just to hide the real politics of economics]

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Survival of the richest

Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest men, paid a ‘true tax rate’ of just over 3% from 2014 to 2018. Aber Christine, a market trader in Northern Uganda who sells rice, flour and soya, makes $80 a month in profit. She pays a tax rate of 40%.

We are living through an unprecedented moment of multiple crises. Tens of millions more people are facing hunger. Hundreds of millions more face impossible rises in the cost of basic goods or heating their homes. Climate breakdown is crippling economies and seeing droughts, cyclones and floods force people from their homes. Millions are still reeling from the continuing impact of COVID-19, which has already killed over 20 million people. Poverty has increased for the first time in 25 years. At the same time, these multiple crises all have winners. The very richest have become dramatically richer and corporate profits have hit record highs, driving an explosion of inequality.

Since 2020, the richest 1% have captured almost two-thirds of all new wealth – nearly twice as much money as the bottom 99% of the world’s population.
Billionaire fortunes are increasing by $2.7bn a day, even as inflation outpaces the wages of at least 1.7 billion workers, more than the population of India.
Food and energy companies more than doubled their profits in 2022, paying out $257bn to wealthy shareholders, while over 800 million people went to bed hungry.
Only 4 cents in every dollar of tax revenue comes from wealth taxes, and half the world’s billionaires live in countries with no inheritance tax on money they give to their children.
A tax of up to 5% on the world’s multi-millionaires and billionaires could raise $1.7 trillion a year, enough to lift 2 billion people out of poverty, and fund a global plan to end hunger.

— source ruralindiaonline.org | 16 Jan, 2023

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Teacher equity and maths identity

Who can do well in math? How you answer that question may depend on where you live. Whereas people in East Asian countries tend to believe that hard work can lead anyone to succeed at math, people in the United States are more likely to believe that people need natural talent in the subject to succeed. This perception means that students in the U.S. may be particularly susceptible to racial and gender stereotypes about who is and is not “good at math.”

“Americans don’t realize what strange stereotypes we have about math,” says Shifrer. “It really sets kids up for failure here.”

The fact that some high school students are more likely to give up on math than others has important implications for their individual futures and for the lack of diversity in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) careers.

“U.S. STEM spaces are not a meritocracy,” says Shifrer. “The cultural biases that we have around people’s identities, status characteristics like race and gender, and our cultural stereotypes about math and science and who belongs there play a key role in who enters these fields and does well in them. The more that educators and students are aware

— source Portland State University | Mar 3, 2023

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More wealth for the rich is a waste

the distribution of the new wealth that was generated in 2020 and 2021.

As the graph shows, 63% of new wealth went to the top 1%. You don’t have to be massively wealthy to be in the top 1%, but even that 1% share is skewed towards the very richest. Billionaire wealth increased dramatically.

The rest of the top ten percent did alright. The other 90% get diminishing shares, and if you look closely you’ll see that the poorest 10% went backwards. Those who most need the increase, for whom more is a matter of life and death, are failed by the global economy. Those who have more than they can ever realistically spend, and for whom more is pretty much meaningless, reap further abundance.

And really, the injustice is so extreme at the moment. Those capitalist arguments for the status quo ring more hollow with every passing year.

https://www.oxfam.org/en/research/survival-richest

— source earthbound.report | Jan 24, 2023

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#classwar

Pay disparity at JP Morgan

Katie Porter
Apr 10, 2019

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