Weekly Economic Snapshot 5/1 - 5/5

Economic Facts for this Week

• Matt Fiedler of the Brookings Institution writes that the new AHCA amendment could “seriously jeopardize both financial security and access to care for people with serious illnesses.”
• Many wealthy people do not ever have to pay capital gains because they never sell their assets. Much of what the estate tax reaches is capital gains on unsold assets that have never been taxed: among estates with over $100 million in assets, 55 percent is likely unrealized capital gains (and thus untaxed).
• The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that Trump’s one-page tax “plan” could cost $5.5 trillion over the next decade.
• Despite what Attorney General Jeff Sessions said, the Tax Policy Center shows that there is no evidence that cutting down on improper tax credits to “mostly Mexicans” could pay for the wall (both because the disputed amounts are too small and because the tax credits do not appear to be improperly issued).

Chart of the Week

The chart above shows that corporate profits as a share of the economy have risen 55 percent since 1952, while corporate income tax revenues have fallen by 68 percent.

ICYMI

• The Joint Economic Committee Democrats released two reports on how President Trump has broken his promises to working families and rural communities.
• Instead of giving a multimillion dollar tax break to the 5,000 estates that face the estate tax each year, 27 million families could get a tax cut of $10,000 over the next decade.
• A higher minimum wage reduces poverty: new research finds that a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage reduces the nonelderly poverty rate by about 5 percent.
• According to Brookings, only eight out of the 30 largest metro areas that have become more prosperous had inclusive growth.
• New research from the St. Louis Federal Reserve suggests that less than one-fifth of the black-white wealth gap is explained by personal decisions that individuals make like how much education to get. Instead, discrimination is likely playing a large role.

Coming This Week

• Monday 8:30am: Personal Income and Outlays for March 2017 (including the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of inflation) - https://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/national/pi/pinewsrelease.htm
• Thursday 8:30am: U.S. International Trade in Goods and Service for March 2017 - https://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/international/trade/tradnewsrelease.htm
• Friday 8:30am: Employment Situation for April 2017 (Jobs Numbers) - https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm