US Wage Gap: Not Exactly A Free Market Construct....

(Common Dreams) Stan Sorscher reports ~ The Trillion Dollar Money Pump for the 1%

I saw the movie Inequality for All, where Robert Reich explains the depth and meaning of inequality in America. He paints a compelling picture.
Reich sets up the movie with a teaser: "Something happened in the mid-'70s."
Indeed "something did happen in the mid-'70s." For one thing, since then workers' wages as a fraction of the total economy have lagged by over a trillion dollars per year. If workers' wages had kept up with gains in productivity since the mid-70's, wages would be double what they are now. Most new income goes to the top 1 Percent.

Meanwhile, Delaware Alliance for Community Advance­ment's.Darlene Battle writes ~ End persistent poverty by ending corporate tax dodging

 Delaware families are barely treading water in the wake of the Great Recession – and some are drowning. Given the grim picture painted by the latest poverty and income statistics released this week by the Census Bu­reau, it’s es­sential that we maintain safety net programs and make the kind of public investments that spur economic growth. But that’s only possible if corpora­tions and the wealthy start to once again pay their fair share of taxes. I don’t need government statistics to tell me folks are hurting. As director of a social service agency in Wilmington, I witness the struggle: families huddled in homeless shelters, on the brink of being put out; young mothers trying to learn skills to better support their kids while cleaning offices at night. But we as a society aren’t offering the helping hand these families need and deserve. There’s already a two-year wait for subsidized housing (and the across-the­board federal budget cut known as the “sequester” will only make that wait longer).

Unemployment is still too high.

The government figures only reinforce what I experi­ence. Nationally, real house­hold income in 2012 (the latest year available) was still 8.3 percent below what it was in 2007, the year before the Great Recession began. In other words, the middle class took an economic punch five years ago and it still hasn’t recovered.

Meanwhile, there were just as many Americans living in poverty in 2012 as in 2011. The number of Americans older than 65 in poverty actually rose; 12 percent of Delawar­eans are in poverty.

We could boost families still trying to climb out of the Great Recession with targeted investments in housing, em­ployment, education, trans­portation, health care and other public goods and ser­vices. But first we need the revenue that would come from closing corporate tax loop­holes.

Corporate tax dodging has gotten entirely out of hand.

Famous companies like Gener­al Electric, Wells Fargo and Verizon have gone several recent years without paying any federal income tax at all, according to a report by a respected research group.

Corporate tax receipts, which 60 years ago made up a third of total federal revenue, now contribute just 10 percent, government figures show. It’s no wonder, since large, profit­able corporations on average pay only one-third of the offi­cial corporate tax rate, the Government Accountability Office has found.

There’s a direct connection between corporate tax dodging and cuts to services that give a leg up to working families. As just one example: the seques­ter cut to Head Start that’s forced thousands of low-in­come kids off that preschool program that keeps them healthy and ready to learn, could be restored if we only stopped giving special tax treatment to the owners of corporate jets.

The biggest corporate loop­holes are the ones that encour­age big companies to hide profits and ship jobs overseas, diminishing public resources as well as increasing unem­ployment. Right now, multina­tional firms don’t have to pay a penny in U.S. taxes on profits they make overseas (or claim to make there) until they bring the money home. This “de­ferral” rule will cost us almost $600 billion over the next dec­ade, according to Senate in­vestigators.

There’s a bill in the U.S.

Senate now that would clean up what are, next to deferral, some of the worst overseas corporate tax abuses. The “Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act” would curb the accounting tricks and shell games that allow corporations to duck taxes by shifting money around the globe. It would raise $223 billion over the next 10 years – money we could use to invest again in our families and communities.

Inequities in our tax pol­icies exacerbate income in­equality. Sens. Carper and Coons should endorse the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act and in general work to end corporate tax dodging as part of the ongoing tax reform efforts in Congress. Then maybe I’ll start to see more hope and progress among my clients, and the next income and pov­erty report will paint a bright­er picture.

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