A Bright New Tomorrow

Here are a few items of bright economic news, courtesy of that horrible rag, The New York Times:

"Over the last 30 years, the trend has been to pare back income tax rates on the rich, federally and in the state. Since the mid-1970s, the state has cut its top tax rate from 15.375 percent to 6.85 percent. The top income tax rate in New Jersey is 8.97 percent, and in Connecticut it is 5 percent, according to data from the Fiscal Policy Institute, a liberal research group.

That said, the richest 1 percent of New Yorkers paid more than 40 percent of the income tax in 2007, up from about 30 percent in 1996, according to state data, though that figure is declining as the financial crisis makes the rich less so."

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"For the first time since the Depression, the American economy has added virtually no jobs in the private sector over a 10-year period. The total number of jobs has grown a bit, but that is only because of government hiring."

"After the recession ends, job growth is likely to resume." [The article's thesis is that there hasn't been any job growth, so I don’t know what they’re trying to say here.]

"But few expect that manufacturing will reverse its long decline as a major employer in the United States."

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"Over the last decade the financial sector was the fastest-growing part of the economy, with two-thirds of growth in gross domestic product attributable to incomes of workers in finance."

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"Indeed, the increasingly anemic job market follows six years of economic expansion that delivered robust corporate profits but scant job growth. The last recession, in 2001, was followed by a so-called jobless recovery. As the economy resumed growing, payrolls continued to shrink."

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"Forty-four percent of employees live paycheck to paycheck, according to a survey conducted by MetLife in late 2007, and 48 percent of American households have less than $5,000 in liquid assets according to Edward Wolff, an economist specializing in the study of poverty and income distribution at New York University."

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Sources:
Hakim, D. (2009, January 20). In Albany, higher taxes for the rich expected. The New York Times. Retrieved July 10, 2010, from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/21/nyregion/21millionaire.html

Norris, F. (2009, August 7). Job growth lacking in the private sector. The New York Times. Retrieved August 8, 2009, from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/08/business/economy/08charts.html

Bowley, G. (2009, October 16). Bailout helps fuel a new era of Wall Street wealth. The New York Times. Retrieved July 10, 2010, from
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/17/business/economy/17wall.html

Goodman, P. (2008, March 2). As U.S. jobs get harder to find, upward mobility falters. The New York Times. Retrieved July 10, 2010, from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/business/worldbusiness/02iht-jobs.4.10620835.html

Scelfo, J. (2008, October 22). After the house is gone. The New York Times. Retrieved July 10, 2010, from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/23/garden/23foreclosure.html