Joel Mathis

American households right at the 99th percentile (that is, the cut-off for the top 1 percent) will earn about $506,553 in cash income this year, according to a Tax Policy Center analysis . The income curve is very steep at the high end, meaning that people just a few tenths of a percentile point above that make much, much more. A family at the 99.5th percentile, for example, makes $815,868; its neighbor at the 99.9th percentile makes more than double that, at $2,075,574 a year. The top 1 percent of American earners receive about a fifth of the country’s income, according to Thomas Picketty and Emmanuel Saez , two economists who study inequality. But as we’ve noted before, economic inequality isn’t just about what you make each year. It’s about how much wealth you have already accumulated, too. And inequality is far, far greater when you include wealth. According to an analysis of Federal Reserve data by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research organization, the top 1 percen

Taken at Philadelphia Museum of Art

That's what Bentley Rayburn suggests at National Review today: Congress should remember that we are still facing very real threats. Today, we are fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and fighting al-Qaeda across the globe using intelligence and special-operations forces backed up with Predator drones and other modern technologies. We’re also protecting the nascent democratic movements in Libya and elsewhere, expanding operations to hot spots like Yemen, and rotating home a fighting force worn down by a decade of repeated, extended combat deployments. Terror attacks are on the rise as the threat spreads around the globe — according to the National Counterterrorism Center, there were 2,534 terror attacks worldwide in 2010, nearly triple the 945 recorded five years ago. I found that last paragraph interesting, so I went to the National Counterterrorism Center website. I couldn't verify Rayburn's numbers, but I did find a couple of other very interesting charts in the NT

The former Bush Administration torture advocate thinks Obama is a wuss for actually trying to justify the assassination of an American citizen: It may be that the Obama administration thinks that U.S. citizens who join the enemy are entitled to special rules — like those that apply to the police, instead of those that apply to the military. But this would be wrong too. As I explained in the Wall Street Journal last week, ever since the Civil War, our national leaders and the Supreme Court have agreed that a citizen who joins the enemy must suffer the consequences of his belligerency, with the same status as that of an alien enemy. Think of the incentives that the strange Obama hybrid rule creates. Our al-Qaeda enemy will want to recruit American agents, who will benefit from criminal-justice rules that give them advantages in carrying out operations against us (like the right to remain silent, to Miranda and lawyers, to a speedy jury trial, etc.). Our troops and agents in the fie

WASHINGTON — In a grim sign of the enduring nature of the economic slump, household income declined more in the two years after the recession ended than it did during the recession itself, new research has found. Between June 2009, when the recession officially ended, and June 2011, inflation-adjusted median household income fell 6.7 percent, to $49,909, according to a study by two former Census Bureau officials. During the recession — from December 2007 to June 2009 — household income fell 3.2 percent. The finding helps explain why Americans’ attitudes toward the economy, the country’s direction and its political leaders have continued to sour even as the economy has been growing. Unhappiness and anger have come to dominate the political scene, including the early stages of the 2012 presidential campaign. via nytimes.com It's this kind of dynamic that helps create the "Occupy Wall Street" movement.

A MOTHER of four who was the director of her own elementary school and day care in Overbrook was a bystander killed by reckless gunfire Saturday night, police said. "She was an excellent person," said Homicide Lt. Mel Williams. "You have a real victim here." Hafeezah Nunrid-Din, 31, was heading to a car with her father on Malvern Avenue near 58th Street shortly before 8 p.m. when two young men ran past her and her dad, Williams said. Shortly after, gunshots rang out, according to police. It's believed the bullets were intended for the two men who ran past Nunrid-Din but instead, they hit her once in the left shoulder and once in the right side of her back, police said. via philly.com

Occupy Philly: Oct 9, 2011 from Joel Mathis on Vimeo . The Occupy Philly movement, as far as I can tell from my visit today, is dominated by neither fringe conspiracists nor the middle-class mainstream. Mostly, it seems to be made up of plucky twentysomethings who seem to have expected that the world they grew up in—the go-go 1990s and the "go shopping in the face of disaster" aughties—was the world they would inherit, and are cranky they didn't. Yes, there were Marxists and Socialists and anarchists scattered among the crowd. But the tired "dirty, smelly hippie" stereotype doesn't fit what I found. Much of the crowd was, to all appearances, Standard Urban Hipster—not exactly suburbanites, exactly, but not nearly so outré as to alienate the masses either. What it did seem to be, in fact, is a movement of privilege. The protesters were overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly literate—and Philadelphia, for all its greatness, isn't really either . Mo

I'm headed down to City Hall in Philadelphia later today for a firsthand look at the Occupy Philadelphia movement. So I decided to check out the local website , and was greeted with this headline. "Twelve families rule the world," eh? Google that phrase and you'll see that it's closely tied into conspiracy-minded nonsense that's a close cousin to anti-Semitic tropes that generally surface whenever protests against "bankers" get started. (Depending on how you search the phrase, the Wikipedia entry for the Rothschild family sometimes comes up fourth in the results. 'Nuff said.) And as much as I might be sympathetic to some of the movement's grievances , I'm not really interested in signing on for anti-Semitism or conspiracist nonsense. (To be fair, the Occupy Philly page also includes an essay from Chris Hedges , who warns against designating "Jews, Muslims" as enemies.) Understand: Conspiracy theories—whether the "12

I've not yet been down to see the Occupy Philadelphia protest, though I hope to do so before the weekend is out. But reporter Kia Gregory has been down there this morning, Tweeting her observations. This one particularly struck me: The Tea Party movement, you'll recall, began with Rick Santelli's famous rant against "losers" who'd fallen behind in their mortgage payments, defying the Obama-led government to do anything that might lessen the burden of those mortgages—because, after all, taxpayers shouldn't be on the hook for the unwise choices made by millions of individuals. Admittedly, I think one of the wisest choices I made during the middle of the last decade was to not buy a house—despite a fair amount of peer pressure to do so. On the surface, there was plenty of reason to do so: I (at the time) had a solid career, loved the community was in, and expected to stay there a long time. Still: Buying a house looked likely to put me $150,000 or more

Taken at Old Towne & Sanna's

Taken at Old Towne & Sanna's

California's four U.S. attorneys, declaring that marijuana dispensaries in the state are illicit, profiteering operations violating federal law, today announced multiple criminal complaints and forfeiture actions against medical pot stores, property owners and major cultivators. "We want to put to rest the notion that large marijuana businesses can shelter themselves under state law," said Melinda Haag, the top federal prosecutor in San Francisco who joined U.S attorneys from Sacramento, San Diego and Los Angeles in a Sacramento press conference. Haag said the voter-approved Compassionate Use Act, which legalized medical marijuana use in California in 1996, "has been hijacked by profiteers...using the cover to make enormous amounts of money" as California cities burgeon with marijuana storefronts purporting to serve suffering people. via blogs.sacbee.com

Back in my home state of Kansas, the Shawnee County District Attorney has decided to stop prosecuting domestic violence misdemeanors including domestic violence (see comments below) because of budget cuts. The city of Topeka—the county seat, and state capital—has responded with an ordinance to repeal its own domestic violence law so it doesn't get stuck with all the domestic violence cases. Seriously. I outsource my commentary to my friend Notorious PhD : Of the many things that counties and states have shoved off on municipalities (just as the federal governement offloads its responsibilities onto the states), why is it women* whose bodies are being put on the line? That was a rhetorical question. Poverty and frustration with long-term unemployment increases the incidence of domestic violence (especially male-on-female domestic violence). There are complex cultural reasons for it tied up with American notions of masculinity. But the point is that the same thing that is

In 1974 the top 0.1 percent of American families enjoyed 2.7 percent of all income in the country. By 2007 this same tiny slice of the population had increased its holdings to fully 12.3 percent—roughly five times as great a piece of the pie as it had enjoyed just three decades earlier. Half the U.S. population owns barely 2 percent of its wealth, putting the United States near Rwanda and Uganda and below such nations as pre-Arab Spring Tunisia and Egypt when measured by degrees of income inequality . Over one in five American children is living in poverty , and the number is rising. By the end of 2010, corporate profits rose by fully 15 percent of the economic pie—their biggest share of the economy since such statistics became available nearly 70 years earlier—while the share going to workers’ wages dropped to their lowest level in the same period and fell below 50 percent of national income for the first time. via americanprogress.org

But I am here today to tell you that I am guided by one overwhelming conviction and passion: This century must be an American Century. In an American Century, America has the strongest economy and the strongest military in the world. In an American Century, America leads the free world and the free world leads the entire world. via nationalreview.com Let's leave aside the question of whether that's really a sustainable vision or not, at least in the details. I guess my question is: Why is being No. 1 the goal? For all the talk—mostly from the right—about honoring the Founders and their vision, I don't really find much in the Federalists about trying to have the biggest military or trying to lead the entire world. What I *do* see is talk about trying to create a country of liberty and a government of responsibility. The Founders were revolutionary, but it strikes me that they were also rather modest: They wanted to create a country that worked well. And for the mos

If you go to any tea party event, you'll hear some crackpot stuff and see some people dressed up in crackpot costumes (tricorner hats etc.). By "crackpot," I mean stuff so outré that even movement conservatives know it's crazy and want nothing to do with it. Of course, it gets reported in the media occasionally, and when it does, snarky liberals have a field day with it. But does this scare off anyone on the right? It does not. They ignore it, or dismiss it, or try to explain it away, and then continue praising the overall movement. The fact that liberals have found some hook to deliver a blast of well-timed mockery just doesn't faze them. They know whose side they're on. So Krugman is right: liberals need to take the same attitude. Are there some crackpots at the Occupy Wall Street protests who will be gleefully quoted by Fox News? Sure. Are some of the organizers anarchists or socialists or whatnot? Sure. Is it sometimes hard to discern a real set of gr

PHILADELPHIA'S top cop has issued a memorandum to eliminate any confusion about a civilian's right to record, videotape or photograph officers in a public space. The two-page memo by Commissioner Charles Ramsey circulated throughout the department on Sept. 23, roughly two weeks after the Daily News reported on several incidents involving cops who had wrongly arrested bystanders for using their cellphones to record what they considered violent arrests and who later emerged from police custody with smashed phones and no footage. "It is not illegal to videotape a police officer," Ramsey said in a phone interview. "Cameras are everywhere. [Officers] need to conduct themselves in an appropriate manner. If someone wants to videotape, they have the right to do so." via philly.com But: "However, if an officer believes that the device contains evidence of a crime and fears that it may be destroyed, the officer can confiscate it without a warrant.&q

Though I'm not ethnically Mennonite, and though I'm lapsed, I was tribalistically pleased this morning to discover that one of this year's recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize, Leymah Gbowee, is a grad of Eastern Mennonite University . And the announcement took me all the way back to August, when discussion heated up about another Mennonite college—Goshen—and its decision not to play the "Star Spangled Banner" before games, citing its warlike nature . Reasonable people can disagree on that topic, I think, but all too often the negative reaction was simply smug : NBC Sports' Rick Chandler weighed in, saying: "I suppose we could have followed the example of the Mennonites and simply fled, giving the nation back to the British. But then we’d all be playing cricket." That quote has stuck in my craw for two months now. But what Chandler—what a lot of people—don't understand is that Mennonite pacifism isn't about "fleeing" conflict, nec