...electoral politics and the 2012 presidential election have become almost exclusively defined by the 1 percent. Or, to be more precise, the .0000063 percent. Those are the 196 individual donors who have provided nearly 80 percent of the money raised by super PACs in 2011 by giving $100,000 or more each.
The 1986 tax reform eliminated the gap between the ordinary and capital gains rates. The gap began to widen again during President Bill Clinton’s second term, but the Bush tax cuts of 2003 blew it wide open by slicing the top rate on dividends and long-term capital gains from 28 percent to 15 percent.
Every year we gaze enviously at the lists of the richest people in world.
Wondering what it would be like to have that sort of cash. But where
would you sit on one of those lists? Here's your chance to find out.
Does Palm Springs really need more than 120 golf resorts? Does Scottsdale, Arizona, need 174? With about 28.6 million golfers over the age of six in the United States, and about 19,000 courses, we've got a golf course for every 1,500 golfers. It seems excessive no matter how you look at it. And unlike, say, power plants, which use a ton of water in the name of keeping cities alive, golf courses eat up vast amounts of resources simply to provide wealthy people with a leisure activity.
The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live.
The Human Development Index is a metric that measures the life expectancy, education, and standard of living in an area. It's usually used to sort the world into "developing countries," like Bangladesh and Burundi, and "developed countries" like the United States and Western Europe.
But this interactive infographic actually uses the Human Development Index to show differences between the states here in America. The highest on the list are Connecticut, Massachusetts, and other states in the northeast. The lowest are the Appalachian states.
