Business political capacity and the top-heavy rise in income inequality: How large an impact?

Politics and Society

Volumn 38, Issue 2, 2010, Pages 255-265

  Kenworthy, Lane ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA   (United States)

Author keywords

Business; Economy; Executive pay; Finance; Inequality; Politics; Taxes; Technology

Indexed keywords

EID: 77952590891     PISSN: 00323292     EISSN: 15527514     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0032329210365049     Document Type: Article

References (41)

1. I don't address the fourth arena: industrial relations. This has a peculiar analytical status in the article in that the argument applies to neither step in the hypothesized causal chain. It is an attempt, instead, to explain the rise in business's (relative) political capacity.
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4. "Special Report on Executive Pay".
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6. Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, "Winner-Take-All Politics: Public Policy, Political Organization, and the Precipitous Rise of Top Incomes in the United States," Politics & Society 38 (2010): 152-204.
7. David Vogel, Fluctuating Fortunes: The Political Power of Business in America (New York: Basic Books, 1989).
8. Lane Kenworthy, In Search of National Economic Success (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995), chap. 1.
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12. Reich, Supercapitalism.
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18. Jarque, "CEO Compensation," figure 2.
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20. "Special Report on Executive Pay."
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26. Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, "Winner-Take-All Politics: Public Policy, Political Organization, and the Precipitous Rise of Top Incomes in the United States," Politics & Society 38 (2010): 152-204.
27. Thomas Philippon and Ariell Reshef, "Wages and Human Capital in the U.S. Financial Industry: 1909-2006" (Working Paper 14644, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2009), available at www.nber.org.
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33. Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, "How Progressive Is the U.S. Federal Tax System?" Journal of Economic Perspectives 21, no. 1 (2007): 3-24.
34. Lane Kenworthy, "How Much Do Presidents Influence Income Inequality?" Challenge 53 (2010): 90-112, figure 11.
35. Hacker and Pierson mention some pre-Reagan tax cuts, such as a reduction in the capital gains rate enacted in the late 1970s. And their Figure 5, using data from Piketty and Saez, suggests large declines in the effective tax rates for the richest 0.01 percent and 0.1 percent in the late 1970s. However, that graph shows no decline in the rate for the richest 1 percent prior to the early 1980s. This means the effective rate on those in the top 1 percent but below the top 0.1 percent must have increased. So the tax changes in the late 1970s seem to have resulted in redistribution within the top 1 percent.
36. Isaac William Martin, The Permanent Tax Revolt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 128-32.
37. Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan (New York: Harper Collins, 2008), chap. 5.
38. Cathie Jo Martin, "Business Influence and State Power: The Case of U.S. Corporate Tax Policy," Politics & Society 17 (1989): 189-223.
39. Martin, The Permanent Tax Revolt, chap. 6.
40. Thomas B. Edsall, Building Red America (New York: Basic Books, 2006).
41. Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Off Center (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), chap. 2.