From "Too Much" Magazine

Add another casualty — the cultural sector — to the toll that high levels of inequality exact from society. Two Polish sociologists, Tomasz Szlendak and Arkadiusz Karwacki, have published new research that compares levels of cultural activity across 22 European Union nations. In more equal societies, the two researchers note in the journal International Sociology, people attend more theatrical performances, visit more art museums, and read more books. What’s shoving time for culture aside in more unequal nations? Wider income gaps, Szlendak and Karwacki suspect, raise the profile of high-status material goods and shift people’s focus onto work-related activities that can help them afford these high-status goods — at the expense of less visible cultural activities . . .
This January, for the first time ever, over 50,000 people slept every night in New York City’s homeless shelters. The number of homeless families in New York overall has soared 18 percent since last year. Also soaring: the pay of Wall Street’s top private equity execs. At KKR, Henry Kravis and George Roberts pulled in $207.9 million in dividends alone last year. Their 2011 dividend total: $128.4 million. Making the windfalls even sweeter: The “fiscal cliff” tax deal enacted in January continues the preferential tax treatment of dividend income. On their 2012 tax return, that preferential treatment will save Kravis and Roberts alone over $40 million, nearly enough to restore state funding for a program ended in 2011 that subsidized rent for families leaving homeless shelters . . .
India’s top economic analyst suggested earlier this year that India’s rich ought to pay more in taxes. India’s rich promptly erupted. Higher tax rates, the Times of India intoned, would only “encourage tax evasion.” But tax evasion is already running wild in India, despite a tax rate that has maxed out since 1997 at a mere 30 percent, less than a third India’s top rate 40 years ago. Only 42,800 Indians today admit to making over $180,000 in U.S. dollars. Observers estimate India boasts at least ten times that many high-earners. The just-announced latest Indian budget raises the top tax rate on India’s rich only to 34 percent. Even so, the rich are still complaining — and threatening to exit India. They won’t be going anywhere, retorts finance minister P. Chidambaram. Where else but India, he asks, could a rich person “afford to employ” as many servants