ICYMI: A Few Positives

Sometimes the news seems too awful to read, which might mean missing a couple of positives in the past week’s news. Among those positives? The IRS going after millionaire tax cheats, slowing inflation, continuing job growth and increasing wages.

The IRS collected $1 billion from millionaires who have been evading taxes for years. The collections came from a targeted collection effort aimed at 1,600 taxpayers with incomes of more than a million dollars a year, who owed back taxes of more than $250,000 each. The Biden administration crackdown was funded by a modernization initiative that also improves customer service. Trump, of course, pledges to slash the funding and starve the IRS, while also giving tax breaks to upper-income taxpayers. 

Inflation is down, slowing to an annual rate of three percent in June. From May to June, the cost of cereals, bakery products, fruits and vegetables, electricity, gasoline, air fares, and new and used cars actually fell. 

Total nonfarm payroll employment increased again, rising by 206,000 in June. Unemployment inched up to 4.1 percent, after the longest stretch of four-percent-or-below unemployment since the 1960s—29 months in all. The economy has gained back all of the 9.3 million jobs lost during the pandemic, and added over 6 million more during the past three and a half years. 

Wages continued to grow faster than inflation, more than making up for ground lost to inflation in 2021-22.