US pays far more for health care than other countries

 

https://twitter.com/historyinmemes/status/1708648647812898886?t=-ixYKDlukC3fowkpa0olGw&s=19

Biden's $15 minimum wage for federal contractors blocked by US judge

 

https://www.reuters.com/legal/bidens-15-minimum-wage-federal-contractors-blocked-by-us-judge-2023-09-27/

Daniel Wiessner

September 27, 202311:49 AM EDT

- A federal judge in Texas has ruled that President Joe Biden lacked the power to order U.S. government contractors to pay workers a minimum wage of $15 an hour, and blocked the plan from being enforced in three states.

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Tipton, an appointee of Republican former President Donald Trump, blocked the Biden administration from enforcing the $15 minimum wage in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, states that last year filed a lawsuit challenging the executive order. State agencies often receive federal contracts.

The judge paused his decision for seven days to allow the Biden administration to file an appeal.

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Extreme heat is affecting oil refineries in Texas, pushing up gas prices

 

https://spectrumnews1.com/ca/la-west/environment/2023/07/27/extreme-heat-is-hobbling-oil-refineries-in-texas--pushing-up-gas-prices

By Susan Carpenter

PUBLISHED 2:23 PM PT Jul. 28, 20

If you’re paying more at the pump, extreme heat is partially to blame.

Multiple days of temperatures exceeding 100 degrees in the Southern states are affecting oil refineries in Texas and Louisiana, diminishing gas supplies and increasing prices.

Nationally, gas prices are up 13 cents compared with a week ago, according to the price-tracking website GasBuddy.

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By Susan Carpenter Dallas

PUBLISHED 2:23 PM PT Jul. 28, 2023

Climate change is already making parts of America uninsurable

 

https://www.vox.com/climate/23746045/state-farm-california-climate-change-insurance-wildfire-florida-flood

By Umair Irfan  Updated Jun 5, 2023, 12:18pm EDT

Decades of suppressing natural fires have allowed fuel for wildfires to accumulate to dangerously high levels. Humans are also heating up the planet, lifting sea levels, amplifying downpours, and exacerbating the conditions for massive blazes.

So when disasters do occur, they cause extraordinary damage to lives, livelihoods, and property. These threats have led insurance companies to drop existing policies or stop issuing new coverage. "It’s not just the risk of loss but the magnitude of loss when a California house burns down,” said Dave Jones, who served as California’s insurance commissioner from 2011 until 2018. “That trend has only gotten worse over time.”

State Farm isn’t the first insurance company to cut back in California, and states like Louisiana and Florida have also seen insurers decline coverage due to mounting catastrophic losses. “We’re steadily marching toward an uninsurable future, not just in California but throughout the United States,” said Jones, who now leads the Climate Risk Initiative at the University of California Berkeley School of Law.

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 If insurers priced their policies in line with growing risks, they’ll soon be too expensive for all but the wealthiest people, leaving the most vulnerable with no protection. If rates are capped too low, insurers may not have enough money to cover all their claims or stay in business. In California, some insurance companies ended up leaving the market or dropping their customers altogether.

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New GOP bills would hand richest 1% over $28 billion in tax cuts next year

 

https://www.rawstory.com/new-gop-bills-would-hand-richest-1-over-28-billion-in-tax-cuts-next-year/

 

Jake Johnson, Common Dreams
June 12, 2023, 1:01 PM ET

Tax cut legislation that House Republicans are set to consider this week after pushing the global economy to the brink of disaster would deliver more than $28 billion to the richest 1% of Americans next year—and just $1.4 billion to the poorest fifth of the country.

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That's according to a new analysis of the legislation by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), which estimated Sunday that the poorest fifth of Americans would receive an average tax break of just $40 next year under the three new Republican bills, one of which is titled the Tax Cuts for Working Families Act.

By contrast, ITEP showed, people in the top 1% of the income distribution would see an average tax cut of $16,550 under the legislation.

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More people means less power for workers

 

This is why the super rich power elite want people to have more children. If there are more people than jobs, workers have to take whatever they get.

 

https://www.context.news/big-tech/gigs-scams-ghost-work-india-tech-sectors-dark-side?utm_source=pocket-newtab

  Gigs, scams, ghost work: India tech sector's dark side

Sumit Khanna,Rina Chandran
Published: March 21, 2023

With few jobs, India's youth are turning to the gig economy, scam call centres and AI microwork for low wages and few protections

• India poised to be most populous country in April
• Lack of jobs [for the number of people] pushing youth into gig work, scam call centres
• Low-paid work, erosion of labour rights the norm

.....

India is poised to become the world's most populous country in April, overtaking China with more than 1.43 billion people, according to estimates by the United Nations.

It also has among the youngest populations, with more than 40% under 25 years. Yet the pace of economic growth is not enough to accommodate some 12 million people joining the workforce each year.

So educated youth - once touted as a demographic dividend - are forced to turn to the gig economy delivering food and groceries, to scam call centres, online microwork, and other low-paid jobs, analysts say.

.....

India is one of the largest and fastest-growing markets for the so-called gig economy, with nearly 8 million workers in 2020-21, and forecast to expand to 24 million workers by 2029-30, according to government think-tank Niti Aayog.

But workers earn low wages and have few protections.

"The government, the industry and employers pitch gig work as the future of work, glorifying it as something that is desirable," said Rikta Krishnaswamy, a coordinator at the All India Gig Workers' Union.

"But what we are really seeing is an erosion of hard-won labour rights. With increased digitisation, gig work is only going to get bigger and worse - especially with data annotation and labelling for AI."

.....

The richest 1 percent dodge taxes on more than one-fifth of their income, study shows

I suggest reading the whole article.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/03/26/wealthy-tax-evasion/

 

By Christopher Ingraham
March 26, 2021 at 7:08 a.m. EDT 

The richest Americans are hiding more than 20 percent of their earnings from the Internal Revenue Service, according to a comprehensive new estimate of tax evasion, with the top 1 percent of earners accounting for more than a third of all unpaid federal taxes.

That’s costing the federal government roughly $175 billion a year in revenue, according to the findings by a team of economists from academia and the IRS.

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The researchers say that years of IRS funding cuts, combined with the increased sophistication of tax evasion tactics available to the rich, have made shirking tax obligations easier than ever. And they say that these estimates probably understate the true extent of tax evasion at the top of the income spectrum.

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But the new study finds that even the IRS’s standard corrections underestimate the true extent of tax evasion among the rich.

The researchers were able to demonstrate this after the IRS and Justice Department initiated a crackdown on tax evasion in 2008. That effort led to the creation of the Offshore Voluntary Disclosure Program, which allowed taxpayers to disclose previously hidden offshore assets and pay a penalty in exchange for immunity from prosecution. According to the IRS, tens of thousands of taxpayers took advantage of the program before it shut down in 2018.

Hundreds of those taxpayers, as it turns out, had also been randomly audited before the creation of the program. The researchers matched those audits with the subsequent disclosures, and found that IRS auditors missed the offshore assets roughly 93 percent of the time.

These riches sheltered overseas, moreover, were concentrated almost exclusively among the very top earners.

The study also uncovered evidence of widespread underreporting of income among proprietors of pass-through businesses, whose revenue is taxed on their owners’ returns. “Up to 35% of the income earned at the top is not comprehensively examined in the context of random audits,” the authors found.

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Since 2010, total funding for the IRS fell by about 20 percent, according to recent congressional testimony by IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig. The number of enforcement staff employed by the agency fell 30 percent over the same period.

Those staffing cuts have, in turn, driven a sharp drop in audit rates, especially for wealthy taxpayers. In the mid-2010s, close to 30 percent of the returns of the richest 0.01 percent of taxpayers — those earning at least $10 million a year — were typically audited. By 2019, that number had fallen to well under 10 percent.

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