Vox Media: on Budget & Economy

Charles Schumer: Measure distribution of growth, not just overall GDP growth

But those gaps don't show up in official measurements like the GDP, which measures growth in the overall economy. Now Democratic Sens. Chuck Schumer and Martin Heinrich are trying to change that. The idea, they say, is to shed light on where economic prosperity is showing up across different income groups--and, potentially, where it's not.

Their new bill, the Measuring Real Income Growth Act, would require reporting how GDP growth is distributed along the income scale. The bureau that reports overall GDP would have to put together distributional measures of economic growth to be released with quarterly and annual GDP reports starting in 2020, laying out how growth shows up across each decile of earners and the top 1 percent.

Donald Trump: 1999: one-time wealth tax on top 1% to reduce national debt

Here's how the plan's architect described it: "By my calculations, 1 percent of Americans, who control 90% of the wealth in this country, would be affected by my plan. The other 99% of the people would get deep reductions in their federal income taxes."

His name? Donald Trump.

Trump's idea was that paying off the national debt would reduce federal interest rate costs, allowing for a middle-class tax cut. Instead, the debt volume has increased dramatically since 1999, but federal debt service payments as a share of GDP are actually lower than they were back then, since interest rates have fallen dramatically.

Martin Heinrich: Measure distribution of growth, not just overall GDP growth

But those gaps don't show up in official measurements like the GDP, which measures growth in the overall economy. Now Democratic Sens. Chuck Schumer and Martin Heinrich are trying to change that. The idea, they say, is to shed light on where economic prosperity is showing up across different income groups--and, potentially, where it's not.

Their new bill, the Measuring Real Income Growth Act, would require reporting how GDP growth is distributed along the income scale. The bureau that reports overall GDP would have to put together distributional measures of economic growth to be released with quarterly and annual GDP reports starting in 2020, laying out how growth shows up across each decile of earners and the top 1 percent.