A new report, "Changing Patterns in the Relative Economic Performance of Immigrants to Great Britain and the United States, 1980-2000," finds that the gap in earnings between U.S. born and immigrant workers increased significantly between 1980 and 2000. The paper uses data from the 1980, 1990, and 2000 Censuses to look at changes in the pace of the economic assimilation of immigrants. The executive summary states that the evidence suggested "that immigrants lagged farther behind US-born workers in 2000, than they had in the 1990 and 1980."

The report found that in 2000, male immigrants earned 18.4 percent less per hour on average than U.S. born workers. For females, that figure was 10.7 percent less. This is a vast difference from 1980, when male and female immigrant workers earned an average of 9.3 and 3.4 percent less, respectively. As this Common Dreams article on the report points out, part of this growing gap is due to a decline in educational attainment among immigrants during the period. But really what it illustrates, overall, is the fact that wage growth has not kept pace with productivity over the last few decades. This is true of billions of wage earners, not just immigrants.

As we've said time and again, one of the main reasons why the Bush tax cuts are so egregious -- besides the fact that they are draining the Treasury of revenues and causing important federal programs to get squeezed -- is the that the beneficiaries of these tax cuts are overwhelmingly the very richest people in our society. As this well-written article puts it, "things will get even worse if the Bush administration gets its way. That’s because one key part of the Bush administration’s tax cuts--eliminating the estate tax--hasn’t gone into effect yet." This is an excellent point; estate tax repeal would only further slant tax cut benefits towards the wealthiest.

The article includes a number of other great points and facts on taxes; I've included a few of them below.

• Those in the top 1 percent income bracket are expected to get an average tax cut of $39,000 in 2006--or 52 times more than households at the middle of the income ladder. Those with incomes over $1 million will receive an average tax cut of more than $111,000.
  
• Because of lowered tax rates on investment income, taxpayers with annual incomes more than $10 million paid about the same share of their income in income taxes as those making $200,000 to $500,000.
  
• The 181,000 Americans with annual incomes of $1 million or more--about one-tenth of 1 percent of all taxpayers--reaped 43 percent of all the savings on investment taxes in 2003, about $41,400 per person.
  
• In contrast, the 71 percent of tax filers with incomes less than $50,000 saved $10 each from the capital gains and dividend tax cuts, adding only 2 percent to their $425 average tax reduction in 2003.

Former Clinton economic advisor and current Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Gene Sperling takes a closer look at economic inequality in America in his most recent column for Bloomberg News.

Sperling unpacks the recent statements by Secretary of Treasury John Snow that income inequality has actually shrunk under President Bush and explains why a closer look at the numbers shows it is difficult to back up such a claim.

Bloomberg News: A Disappointing Decade for Inequality