Tag Archives: Wage

Jared Bernstein: A deeper dive into the weeds of the CBO household income data

Jared Bernstein

November 25, 2014

Yesterday, I published a report by myself and Ben Spielberg analyzing the Congressional Budget Office’s comprehensive data series on household income. Here we dive a bit deeper into some of the weeds, expanding on some of our findings.

One motivation for our report was to correct the record of those who claim that the trend of increasing income inequality is significantly reduced when accounting for government taxes and transfers. In fact, as we show, between 1979 and 2011, inequality measured by the Gini coefficient rose 24% based solely on market outcomes and by 22% based on CBO’s comprehensive, post-tax and transfer income data.

Continue reading Jared Bernstein: A deeper dive into the weeds of the CBO household income data

Labor Supply and the Poor: Some Facts That Might (or Might Not) Surprise You | Jared Bernstein | On the Economy

It is way too common in this town to run into people who think that poor people are poor because they don’t work. Influential Congressman Paul Ryan has referred to safety net benefits as “a hammock” that create “poverty trap” and a culture of non-work, a rap as old as poverty itself. Various critics of poverty programs argue that their benefit structure dis-incentivizes work and are increasingly calling for more work requirements.

I needed to look into the numbers of working poor persons for a project I’m doing and I found the results kind of interesting (h/t: AS and DT). I suspect everyone brings different priors to this question, but some might be surprised by these results. Continue reading Labor Supply and the Poor: Some Facts That Might (or Might Not) Surprise You | Jared Bernstein | On the Economy