By Harold Henderson
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As we would like others to see us. “Chicago is leading the way on every major issue facing urban America,” Dennis Britton, who heads the Community News Project being set up for the Democratic National Convention this summer, is quoted as saying in a recent news release from the Community Media Workshop: “housing, education, public safety, job creation, brownfield development and inner-city investment.” Well, Silver Shovel covers the last two, anyway.
The underworked American. Most people think they have less leisure time than before, but the best social-science evidence is that we have more than our parents and grandparents, notes Society (January/February). Both detailed time diaries and employer records show that individuals’ after-the-fact estimates of how much they work (on which Juliet Schor’s best-selling The Overworked American was largely based) are systematically biased upward: “Workers whose diaries show 40 hours per week of paid work estimate they worked 43 hours. Workers who actually worked 55 hours estimate 80 hours on the job. Perhaps it feels that way to the toiler. But it’s not true.”
Would a flat tax be more progressive in practice than the current IRS code? U. of I. law professor Ronald Rotunda says so in a university news release: “The current progressive income-tax code, which levies higher tax rates on the rich than on the poor, only makes tax shelters more attractive to wealthy taxpayers, who can easily afford to hire lawyers and accountants to shelter their income.” He cites IRS data from 1981, the last time the tax structure was flattened, when Ronald Reagan reduced the top bracket rate from 50 to 28 percent: the wealthiest 1 percent’s share of all federal taxes paid rose from 17.9 percent in 1981 to 25.6 percent in 1990, while the share of all federal taxes paid by the bottom half dropped from 7.4 percent in 1981 to 5.7 percent in 1990.
