The Religion & Culture Web Forum
Commentary Footnotes
January 2006
Footnotes for
The Widening Gap: Economic Inequality as a Religious Issue
by Franklin I. Gamwell (University of Chicago)
1 Between 2000 and 2003, the portion of the federal revenue coming from progressive taxes (personal and corporate income taxes) fell from 61% to 53%, and the portion from regressive taxes (excise/custom taxes and contributions to social insurance) rose from 40% to 47%. Unless otherwise noted statistics are taken from Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and John Schmitt, The State of Working America, 2000/2001 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001) and Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and Heather Boushey, The State of Working America, 2002/2003 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).
2 This level of executive pay is a distinctly American phenomenon. U.S. CEOs make three times as much as their counterparts abroad.
3 Mishel, Lawrence, et. al., The State of Working America, 2000/2001, 69.
4 While the top 10% enjoyed 45% of household income in 2001, the same people owned 71% of the nation’s wealth.
5 In addition, the absolute income of the tenth percentile is lower in the United States than in all but two of these countries (Australia and the United Kingdom).
6 Mishel, Lawrence, et. al., The State of Working America, 2002/2003, 396.
8 The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defense (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944), 48.
9 Kevin Philips, Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich (New York: Broadway Books, 2002), 167.
10 I have no intent to deny that large economic corporations are typically forceful in promoting public policies by which they are directly subsidized. There is no reason why power must act in accord with the ideology by which it is nonetheless sustained.
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