We live in an era when labor is losing ground to capital. Traditionally, labor income accounted for about 70 percent of national income and capital about 30 percent. Now they’re very nearly even, with labor’s share down to about 57 percent in the United States, according to a 2019 paper by McKinsey. Capital is gobbling up more dollars even as its taxes go down; in 2018, the Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman reported in their book The Triumph of Injustice, the average effective tax rate on capital was, for the first time in U.S. history, lower than the average effective tax rate on labor. This is a twenty-first-century phenomenon. Income inequality has been rising since the late 1970s, but the decline in labor’s share and the corresponding rise in capital’s share started about 20 years ago. Before 2000, we knew that rising income inequality was a problem, but we could comfort ourselves that this was driven by a divergence in labor income. We were not becoming a nation of coupon-clipping Bertie Woosters. We can’t tell ourselves that anymore. Since 2000, according to a May 2018 paper by Thomas Piketty, Saez, and Zucman, the main driver of income inequality has been rising capital income. We are becoming a nation of coupon-clipping Bertie Woosters. Or perhaps I should say a nation of Basil Fawlty–style rentiers—people who earn money solely through the rising value of their property. (For these purposes, please ignore that Basil Fawlty works the front desk of the hotel he owns.) Real estate, it turns out, plays an outsize role in capital displacing labor income, accounting for fully 15 percent of the rise in its share of national income since the start of this century, according to the McKinsey report. Only wholesale and retail (looking at you, Jeff Bezos) outpaced real estate. It used to be that people owned houses. Now their houses own them. The latest data point of interest is a recent study by Zillow of growth in the housing market in 2021. It probably doesn’t surprise you that home prices rose faster than income. Employers are in a panic because average hourly wages rose 4.7 percent in 2021, but that’s chump change compared to the 19.6 percent rise in the value of a typical house. Still, that’s an old story. What Zillow reported was new: In 2021, houses earned more money than people. In 2021 the median rise in home values was $52,667; the median wage for a full-time worker was about $50,000. As The Wall Street Journal put it: “Homes Earned More for Owners Than Their Jobs.” That’s never happened before in the U.S.

‘It's a foolish and pointless policy being done at a poor time, and being handled without real guarantee of our safety.’

Former Baltimore Police Sergeant Keith Gladstone admitted on Tuesday to stealing money, cocaine and a gun during his testimony as a witness for the U.S. government in a case against one of his previous subordinates.

Jurors in Nancy Crampton Brophy's murder trial are unlikely to hear about her 2011 essay, in which she wrote that she thinks a lot about murder because she’s a romantic suspense writer.

i’d live to slap this motherfucker right in the chops

Ubisoft is promising "future drops" in other games.

The required minimum amount of direct “nursing” care that nursing home residents receive will drop by 20%, according to legislation that Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law Wednesday. DeSantis signed HB 1239, along with 41 other bills, into law Wednesday evening. The legislation will take effect July 1. In signing the bill, the Governor brushed aside criticism from advocates for the elderly who said it puts nursing home residents at risk.

A Brooklyn bar that was quickly becoming a mainstay for the LGBTQ community after being in business for just a few months is now closed after police said someone used a canister of gasoline to set it on fire.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva said he is launching a criminal investigation to find out who leaked security video of an incident in which a deputy knelt on the head of a handcuffed inmate for more than three minutes. The Times published video last month of the March 2021 incident and detailed efforts by department officials to keep it under wraps. Department officials had worried at the time about the negative publicity that could come from a deputy kneeling on a handcuffed man’s head, “given its nature and its similarities to widely publicized George Floyd use of force,” according to an internal report by a commander critical of the cover-up. First Amendment experts were troubled by the move to target people for releasing police misconduct records, saying the threat of prosecution sends a chilling message to whistleblowers. “If the sheriff really did try to prosecute somebody for theft, under these circumstances, to me [it] would be: ‘Dude, you’re in L.A. County. Don’t you have more serious crimes to worry about than somebody leaking a video? And aren’t you really doing this because it’s embarrassing you?’” said Karl Olson, a lawyer who specializes in 1st Amendment and public records cases.

Gwyneth Paltrow, Mila Kunis and other celebs push NFTs as a way for women to get rich.

The regulation, which was welcomed by industry groups, limited the role of states in enforcing the Clean Water Act. The Supreme Court on Wednesday reinstated an environmental regulation from the Trump administration that restricted the role states play in enforcing the Clean Water Act. The court’s brief, unsigned order gave no reasons, which is typical when the justices act on an emergency application. Four justices dissented, saying the majority had used a case on what critics call the court’s shadow docket to issue a significant ruling without adequate consideration. Writing for the dissenters, Justice Elena Kagan said the court should have allowed the appeal to proceed in the ordinary course. “The applicants have given us no good reason to think that in the remaining time needed to decide the appeal, they will suffer irreparable harm,” she wrote. “By nonetheless granting relief, the court goes astray.” She added: “That renders the court’s emergency docket not for emergencies at all. The docket becomes only another place for merits determinations — except made without full briefing and argument.” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor joined Justice Kagan’s dissent. The Clean Water Act envisions a role for states in issuing permits for discharges into the nation’s waters. Industry groups have long been frustrated by what the application called incongruities and ambiguities in an earlier regulation, in place for 50 years, which they said had allowed states to drag out and effectively veto projects on grounds other than the consideration of water quality. The groups welcomed the new regulation, adopted in 2020, which narrowed the criteria for state certification, tightened deadlines and stopped states from imposing what they called “project-killing conditions.”

We knew the murderer/squatter Jamison Bachman as a bedtime-story terror called Jammie

The Substackers are pissed

The summer of Morbius is inexplicably upon us, and director Daniel Espinosa has some explaining to do

Allies and critics alike have questioned where the organization’s money has gone.

Police found five fetuses in the home of an anti-abortion activist last week. Turns out they had 115.

From ducks to dolphins, females have developed sex organs that help them deter undesirable suitors and derive pleasure from non-reproductive behavior

The Sam Altman–founded crypto startup has said it aims to alleviate global poverty, but so far it has angered the very people it claims to be helping.

The women-only motorcycle club offers skills learning, solidarity, and support that echoes pre-colonial networks.

By his count, it is actually 37 more languages, with at least 24 he speaks well enough to carry on lengthy conversations. He can read and write in eight alphabets and scripts. He can tell stories in Italian and Finnish and American Sign Language. He’s teaching himself Indigenous languages, from Mexico’s Nahuatl to Montana’s Salish. The quality of his accents in Dutch and Catalan dazzle people from the Netherlands and Spain. In a city where diplomats and embassies abound, where interpreters can command six-figure salaries at the State Department or the International Monetary Fund, where language proficiency is résumé rocket fuel, Vaughn was a savant with a secret.