Taxing the rich won’t change how the market is structured to cause more before-tax income to go to the top

New Data Gives Insight into Workers in Frontline Industries





This health care emergency has raised the importance of workers who are often under appreciated. CEPR’s new data analysis shows that a disproportionate number of these workers are also low-income, lack insurance, and are women. Hye Jin Rho, Hayley Brown, and Shawn Fremstad provide a picture of workers in occupations like grocery store clerk, nurse, cleaner, warehouse worker, and bus driver that are found mostly in six industry groups.




“US sanctions against other governments are aiding the virus’s spread abroad.”

“Though the US has remained steadfast in its opposition to an [Special Drawing Rights] allocation” by the IMF to assist low- and middle-income countries amidst the pandemic-inducted global economic downturn, “the policy has received widespread support — even from financial sector actors,” Jake Johnston writes.

“While the wealthy will have resources to stay at home and survive, it will be the most vulnerable, forced to continue working just to live, who will bear the brunt of COVID-19. That will be true in terms of health outcomes as well as economic outcomes, and policy responses should be formulated with that consideration at the forefront.” Read Jake Johnston on how the coronavirus pandemic is expected to affect LAC economies, and read Alex Main on the pandemic’s deadly impact in Brazil, where “many observers believe that the pandemic will exact a particularly terrible human and economic toll in the country’s poor favelas, where around 11 million people live.”

“US sanctions against other governments are aiding the virus’s spread abroad. They’ve already likely contributed to many unnecessary deaths in Iran, and Venezuela’s experience with the pandemic may also be much more deadly due to these punitive measures,” Dan Beeton and MADRE's Diana Duarte write at MarketWatch.
“Eileen Appelbaum, an economist, had been following the saga, and thought she knew who might be behind the ads.”

The New Yorker article on how private equity profits from hospitals profiles the financial detective work by Eileen Appelbaum and frequent collaborator, Rosemary Batt. They had a hunch that private equity was behind a dark-money lobbying campaign to derail legislation to stop surprise medical billing. Spoiler alert: they were right.

Appelbaum and Batt also collaborated on two recent op-eds. This one reveals how emergency funds earmarked for hospitals to treat COVID-19 patients are syphoned off by private equity-owners of hospitals, particularly regional and rural hospital chains. This one reveals the role private equity-owned hospital staffing firms played when a doctor was fired for going public with concerns about his emergency room safety practices.

Economic indicators are starting to reflect the effects of the pandemic. A sharp drop in prices drove down the Consumer Price Index, and employment took an unexpectedly hard hit, explains Dean Baker. But the nation’s stubbornly resilient wealth gap stands strong. Baker explains in this Boston Review forum why simply taxing the rich won’t change “how the market is structured to cause more before-tax income to go to the top.”