When most workers look at their pay stubs, they can see that the Social Security payroll tax rate is 12.4 percent – with the employee and employer each paying 6.2 percent. But many workers do not know that any annual wages above $106,800 are not taxed by Social Security. In other words, a...

The Social Security payroll tax cap is the earnings level above which no further Social Security taxes are collected. The cap is currently at $110,100, though legislation has been introduced in Congress to apply the Social Security payroll tax to earnings above $250,000 (but not between the...

A series of earlier CEPR reports documented a substantial decline over the last three decades in the share of “good jobs” in the U.S. economy. This fall-off in job quality took place despite a large increase in the educational attainment and age of the workforce, as well as the productivity...

Over the past three decades, the “human capital” of the employed black workforce has increased enormously. In 1979, only one-in-ten (10.4 percent) black workers had a four-year college degree or more. By 2011, more than one in four (26.2 percent) had a college education or more. Over the...

The U.S. workforce is substantially older and better-educated than it was at the end of the 1970s. The typical worker in 2010 was seven years older than in 1979. In 2010, over one-third of US workers had a four-year college degree or more, up from just one-fifth in 1979. Given that older and...

The decline in the economy’s ability to create good jobs is related to deterioration in the bargaining power of workers, especially those at the middle and the bottom of the pay scale. The restructuring of the U.S. labor market – including the decline in the inflation-adjusted value of the...