Rep. Dina Titus (D-NV) and three other House Democrats introduced legislation last week that would expand school lunch programs for low-income children to weekends and holidays. Titus plans to roll out the legislation at a Thursday event with area business leaders in her Las Vegas district.

The Weekends Without Hunger Act, co-sponsored by Reps. Marsha Fudge (D-OH), Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), and Terri Sewell (D-AL), is aimed at providing more nutritional assistance to the children who need it most, according to a release from Titus’ office:

While school meals help keep children healthy and ready to learn during days that school is in session, there is currently no targeted Federal child nutrition program available to provide these children with food during the weekend or extended holidays when they do not have access to school meals. Vacation from school should not mean hunger for children.

Efforts to expand school nutrition programs have paled in comparison to efforts to cut them in recent years. House Republicans like Rep. Steve King (R-IA) have targeted the nutrition standards in school lunch programs, while House GOP budgets have repeatedly slashed the programs in the last three years. Last year’s House budget, for instance would have knocked 280,000 children off of the school lunch program.

The top 10 percent of Americans have experienced rapid income growth over the last 40 years, but the bottom 90 percent haven’t been so lucky. In fact, average income rose just $59 from 1966 to 2011 for the bottom 90 percent once those incomes were adjusted for inflation.

That’s according to a new study of tax data from David Cay Johnston, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his writing about tax policy. While the bottom 90 percent’s incomes rose just $59, the top 10 percent fared much better, he found:

In 2011 the average AGI of the vast majority fell to $30,437 per taxpayer, its lowest level since 1966 when measured in 2011 dollars. The vast majority averaged a mere $59 more in 2011 than in 1966. For the top 10 percent, by the same measures, average income rose by $116,071 to $254,864, an increase of 84 percent over 1966.

The difference in those gains has reduced the share of income the bottom 90 percent holds as well. That segment held two-thirds of all household income in 1966 but just 51.8 percent in 2011, Cay Johnston found. Other studies have had similar results. One study found that pay for chief executives increased 127 times faster than worker pay over the last 30 years, and official data has shown worker wages stagnating since the 1970s. That has led to a sharp increase in American income inequality, which now rivals rates from countries like the Ivory Coast and Pakistan.

The biggest driver in that disparity, Cay Johnston wrote, was not that the rich were working harder, “but the shift of income from labor to capital and changes in federal income, gift, and estate tax rules.” Indeed, the estate tax has been eased over recent decades and federal income taxes have become more favorable to the wealthy thanks to breaks for investment income. A recent study, in fact, found that the capital gains tax cut, which benefits the wealthy but does virtually nothing for everyone else, was “by far” the biggest driver in the growth of American income inequality. (HT: Huffington Post)

Amid all the budget talk in Washington last week, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul’s (R) was easy to lose in the shuffle. Paul’s budget failed miserably when put to a vote, but it did garner support from conservative groups and key Republican politicians, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

Republican budgets have a knack for giving massive tax cuts to the wealthy while slashing social services — including entitlement programs — and Paul’s managed to go even farther. The budget, Paul estimates, would balance in five years, and it provides generous tax cuts to the rich while saving more than $9 trillion by gutting entitlements and the social safety net. And while the lopsided vote may make it seem even too radical for Republicans, it contains many proposals GOP presidential candidates were pushing in the 2012 primary elections:

1. Privatizes Social Security and Medicare: Paul’s budget would raise the Social Security eligibility age and gives workers the option of private accounts, an idea that would demolish workers’ savings during economic downturns. An October 2008 retiree, for instance, would have lost $26,000 in a private Social Security account during the Great Recession, according to one study. Paul’s plan would also privatize Medicare, going a step farther than even Paul Ryan’s House Republican budget did and driving up the cost of health care for seniors even more.

2. Institutes a flat tax: Paul would replace the current progressive tax system with a flat tax rate, effectively providing the wealthiest Americans with a massive tax cut while raising taxes on many middle- and lower-class families. This is a feature of all flat tax plans, and Paul’s would cut the tax rate paid by more than half, slicing it from 35 percent to just 17 percent.

3. Eliminates investment taxes: Paul’s plan finds a way to grant the wealthy an even bigger tax cut by also eliminating all taxes on capital gains, dividends, and other investment income. Republicans like Paul are convinced that cutting capital gains tax rates boosts economic growth; however, evidence does not support that notion. Instead, studies have found that low tax rates on investment income are the biggest driver of growing American income inequality.

4. Abolishes the Dept. of Education: Paul would eliminate in total the departments of Education, Energy, Commerce, and Housing and Urban Development, ideas conservatives have long pushed. The Department of Education alone manages federal student loan programs, funding for low-income schools, programs to help special needs students, and many other services. Eliminating it, to say nothing of the other agencies, would risk that “poor, special education and minority students would be underserved by public schools even more than they already are.”

5. Cuts Medicaid and the safety net: Paul would block grant funding for Medicaid, food stamps, the children’s health insurance program, and other nutrition assistance programs, essentially gutting America’s social safety net. While Republicans — including Paul Ryan — love the idea of leaving such programs to the states, the reality is that such reforms leave the programs more susceptible to budget cuts. The 1996 welfare reform law block granted that program, which has done nothing but fail to help families in need since.

Ed. note: This is the first post in a TP Ideas symposium on Branko Milanovic’s The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality. The second installment is here and the third is here.

There are a number of different ways to think about inequality.  One is to look at inequality among members of a particular nation–say, the United States.  That is the way we are most used to thinking about inequality.  Another way is to look at inequality among the nations of the world–how much do average incomes vary across countries and how much is this relationship changing?  Still another is to look at inequality among all individuals in the world, irrespective of country.

In Branko Milanovic’s terrific book, The Haves and the Have Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality, he provides the raw materials for thinking about all these aspects of inequality and how they have varied across time and space.  Milanovic is lead economist with the World Bank’s research division and one of the world’s leading experts on inequality; his depth of knowledge on this subject is nothing short of magisterial.  Here are some of the key findings in his book:

Start with inequality among people in a nation.  The way this is typically measured is with the Gini coefficient which, in essence, compares the income of  every person in a nation to every other person in that nation and summarizes these relationships.  Put on a 0-100 point scale, the lowest score, 0 gini points, means a society where everyone receives the same income (perfect equality) and 100 points means all the income of the nation is received by one person (perfect inequality).  As originally theorized by economist Simon Kuznets, the conventional expectation has been that as societies developed they went through a necessary period of high inequality during the transition from agriculture to industry, followed by a period of decreasing inequality facilitated by state redistribution and public services like education.  That expectation has been confounded however by the last quarter century when inequality has risen substantially in most advanced societies, particularly the United States.  Right now, the US gini sits in the mid to high 40′s, which would be good for a Latin American nation, but is quite poor for a developed nation.

Inequality between nations is a less familiar story.  Here too developments do not comport well with conventional economic theory.  According to neoclassical theory globalization should have resulted in decreasing inter-country inequality over time as capital flows to low wage countries seeking profits and these same countries appropriate advanced technology produced elsewhere without paying the costs of technology development.  But that has not happened: through periods of globalization and deglobalization, inequality between countries has increased steadily since the industrial revolution and is now at an all-time high.

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A slew of Republican governors have proposed massive tax cuts that they say will help generate job and economic growth in their states, with some pushing for the abolition of income taxes altogether. That is a misguided approach, though, according to an analysis of past tax cuts from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The five states that implemented deep tax cuts during the 1990s experienced slower job growth over the next economic cycle than states that did not, and none of those states experienced income growth that exceeded inflation, CBPP found:

Similarly, the five states that enacted the deepest tax cuts during the boom years of the middle and late 1990s saw job growth over the next full economic cycle (2000-2007) of less than 0.3 percent per year, on average, compared to 1.0 percent for the other states (see graph). They also had slower income growth than the rest of the nation on average.

CBPP’s report also noted that of eight major reports that studied the effects of state-level tax cuts on economic growth, six found that the cuts did not spur growth. Another found inconsistent results and only one supported the idea.

Still, Republicans in Kansas, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Louisiana, and Nebraska are pushing massive tax cuts that largely benefit corporations and the wealthy under the banner of boosting economic growth. Those tax cuts will leave lower and middle class families with higher tax rates and fewer services on which they depend. What they won’t deliver, however, is a stronger state-level economy.

For all the talk among conservatives about the “bloated” size of government, public sector job losses have plagued America’s economic recovery from the Great Recession. And with the automatic budget cuts that took effect on March 1 beginning to take effect, those losses are only going to make efforts to fully escape the throes of the recession even harder.

Governments at the state, local, and federal level have cut 740,000 jobs since the beginning of the recession, according to Department of Labor data. So even as the private sector has added 5.2 million jobs in that time, the public sector is still in the red, as this chart from the Wall Street Journal illustrates:

The losses that occurred at the state and local level were due to crimped budgets because of the recession, but they were exacerbated by budget cuts at the federal level too. Hundreds of thousands of teachers, firefighters, police officers, and other government workers have lost jobs as federal aid to states has been reduced and as states have cut aid to localities. The last three years were the worst on record for public sector job losses.

That will only get worse as sequestration continues to go into effect. Government agencies will begin furloughing workers at the beginning of April, and though that won’t have the same effect as all-out job losses, it will still reduce pay for those workers. Reduced aid to states and localities will mean that schools and government offices leave jobs vacant and cut existing staff. Government spending has traditionally pulled America out of economic downturns, and had it maintained its pre-recession employment level, the nation’s 7.8 percent unemployment rate would be a full point lower. Instead, budget cuts that lead to public sector job losses have only made the road to recovery longer than it should have been.

Financial firms that specialize in risky high-speed trading are boosting their lobbying efforts against proposals to rein in the practice, a Wall Street Journal analysis of lobbying records found. Three Democratic lawmakers introduced legislation that would institute a small tax, known as a financial transactions tax, on high-frequency trades, which reap major profits for firms but add volatility to financial markets.

In response, high-speed trading firms have more than doubled their lobbying efforts, the Journal found:

That follows a steep increase in registered lobbying by high-speed trading firms. Such spending averaged $2.3 million in 2011 and 2012, more than double the average from 2008 to 2010, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal of data compiled by OpenSecrets.org, part of the Center for Responsive Politics.

Eleven European countries recently adopted a financial transactions tax; the United Kingdom already has a limited version of the tax that Labour Party lawmakers have looked into expanding. Sens. Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) in February reintroduced their plan to levy a 0.03 percent tax, which they say will raise $352 billion over the next decade, on high-speed trades. Such taxes aim to curb the explosion in high-frequency trading that has only grown since the financial crisis, as this chart from market analyst Nanex shows:

The financial industry argues that such a tax would limit growth potential, but as DeFazio told ThinkProgress last year, the U.S. had a financial transactions tax after World War II when it experienced its greatest period of economic growth. Many business leaders support the tax, including high-speed trading’s pioneer, who said last year that the growth in that trading “has absolutely no social value.”