The wealthiest NYC dweller is the guy who looks stoned on the right. His name? David Koch, co-heir of Koch Industries, climate change denier and major co-funder of the faux-grassroots Tea Party.

Yes, this is the guy that is funding a "little people's movement" that demands we don't tax the wealthy. This is that guy.

This past election season, Senator Hillary Clinton proved that a woman can run for president. She astonished thousands of people -- men and women -- who never believed that a woman could get so close to becoming Commander in Chief in their lifetimes.

Although Senator Clinton broke through the glass ceiling, women across the country are still struggling for equality. When you look at the numbers, the inequalities that exist between men and women are staggering. Women earn 80% of what their male counterparts earn right out of school, and in 2007, women were paid 77 cents for every dollar that men were paid. This wage gap costs the average female full-time employee between $700,000 and $2 million over the course of her career. And it's not just wages where women are falling behind -- the numbers on healthcare, education, poverty and reproductive freedom tell the same story.  read more »

Do you remember when Rudolph Giuliani didn’t know the price of milk? Well, it may be time to ask again. Milk prices have jumped – 15 cents a quart in the supermarkets near me. Have politicians noticed? (In the most concrete sense of course, they know since milk prices are regulated)

One way to think about the fiscal impact on families of Bush years is to imagine how our national economic (income) pie is shared, according to the Economic Policy Institute. When economists write of pie, I imagine pie charts; but in this case it’s an interesting bar graph. The EPI’s Laurence Mishel tells us that in 2001-2005 period the very richest among us (top 1%) have seen their share of the pie increase while bottom-half and middle income people are getting less. This clearly written (for an economist) squib and chart are definitely worth a click if only to confirm that it’s not your imagination: almost all of us are worse off than we were in 2001 (to unearth a Ronald Reagan slogan). See also this excellent Alternet article and this essay by James Parrott on how inequality plays out in NYC.

One reason, as it turns out, the rich are different from you and me is that they pay taxes at a much lower rate than the rest of us.  read more »