Last night, the American Enterprise Institute’s Jim Pethokoukis, with whom I occasionally agree on matters of fiscal policy, took to Twitter to “clarify” the fiscal implications of many progressive priorities.

Basically, Pethokoukis is arguing that federal spending levels as high as some (slightly-caricatured version of) progressives have called for would require a broad-based tax hike on all Americans.

There’s plenty to dislike about this claim, but the most important issue is that no progressives I know are arguing for a specific federal spending level for all occasions. Instead, we want federal spending levels that are consistent with our policy priorities. So, for example, in times of weak aggregate demand, spending should temporarily rise to finance safety net programs, aid to state and local governments, and public investments to put people back to work. When the economy gets going again and we are near full employment, federal spending should then pull back. Over the longer run, spending levels should be sufficient to preserve the social insurance programs we have (which are not particularly generous), as well as finance needed public investments, vital safety net programs, and the efficient running of government. (So no phony savings like slashing the budget of the IRS.)

The liberal end game is 30% of GDP spending, financed by a VAT and other taxes.

— James Pethokoukis (@JimPethokoukis) October 6, 2014

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In Monday’s Wall Street Journal, Andrew Biggs and Sylvester Schieber cited these statistics from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD):

“Despite a supposedly stingy Social Security program and ineffective retirement-savings vehicles, the average U.S. retiree has an income equal to 92% of the average American income, handily outpacing the Scandinavian countries (81%), Germany (85%), Belgium (77%) and many others.”

Meanwhile, in its Global AgeWatch Index released Tuesday, HelpAge International ranked the United States #8 among the best countries to grow old in, ahead of France (#18) but trailing Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Canada, Germany, Netherlands, and Iceland (#1-7). Afghanistan (#96) was in last place.

It’s not hard to imagine how wealthy countries like Norway and the United States outrank poor and war-torn countries like Afghanistan. But the relative ranking of the wealthy countries comes as a surprise. How did the United States and other English-speaking countries like the United Kingdom and Australia, not known for their generous social insurance programs or employee benefits, come close to the Nordic cradle-to-grave welfare states and handily beat out France, with its famously generous pensions and high-quality affordable healthcare? Are older Americans really living in a retiree paradise?

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While the BLS reported positive overall jobs numbers for September, one notable downside of this morning’s release is that wages grew not at all in the last month. Average hourly earnings of all employees on nonfarm payrolls were little changed (a one cent decline) and average hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory employees on private nonfarm payrolls saw zero growth. That said, I’d caution reading too much into one month’s numbers because monthly changes can be volatile and longer term trends are more indicative of the overall health of the economy. The fact is that wage growth for both series has been hovering just above 2 percent over the last year.

As shown in the figure below, wage growth is far below the 3.5 percent rate consistent with the Federal Reserve Board’s inflation target of 2 percent. It’s clear that Fed policymakers should abandon notions of slowing the economy. (For a longer analysis of what to watch for in upcoming months on wage growth, see this explainer.)

Earlier this year, economist Thomas Piketty caused a stir with a book arguing that the future in advanced economies could see a relentless concentration of wealth among a small sliver of families, whose fortunes would increasingly dwarf those of the typical citizen. The last couple of weeks have seen the release of a couple of key barometers of wealth inequality in America, and combining them, it’s easy to see that this hypothesis of ever-concentrating wealth seems likely indeed. In the past month, the Federal Reserve released its triennial Survey of Consumer Finance (SCF) for 2013, while Forbes magazine released their annual list of the 400 wealthiest Americans.

The SFC is the most comprehensive and high-quality measure of Americans’ wealth up and down the distribution. It makes a special effort to sample very high wealth American households, but actually explicitly excludes listed members of the Forbes 400 (for reasons of confidentiality). The Forbes 400, as is well known, puts a dollar value on the net worth of the 400 wealthiest Americans. There is plenty of material in these releases to assess the current state of wealth inequality in America.

Take one example, that we’ve calculated before: comparing the family wealth of six of the wealthiest members of the Walton family (reported at just under $145 billion in 2013) with the number of American families that you could add together and still have their net worth come in less than the 6 Walton heirs: 52.5 million, or 42.9 percent of American families.

Some have objected to this statistic on the grounds that the negative net worth families (11.5 percent of all American families) somehow shouldn’t count in this calculation. So, try another statistic: how many families that held the median wealth would you need to add together to equal the holdings of the six Walton heirs: more than 1.7 million. The median wealthholder in the United States, remember, has more wealth than half of all American families and less wealth than half (around $81,200 in 2013).

So, what this statistic means is that you’d essentially need a large city’s worth of these typical American families to equal the wealth of the six Walton heirs. And this number has grown steadily over time, as the figure below shows. The falling wealth of the median family (driven largely by the housing bubble burst) and the steadily rising wealth at the very top—including the Walton heirs—have combined to make the gap between them larger and larger over time.

It’s become conventional wisdom that American corporate tax rates are the highest in the developed world, leaving American businesses at a competitive disadvantage—and that the only solution is fundamental tax reform (a phrase used by both Republicans and Democrats). Just yesterday, the Washington Post reported offhandedly that U.S. businesses “currently labor under the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world.” The fact is there are a lot of myths about the corporate tax code—myths that are repeated by corporations that stand to benefit from them. So, let’s look at the facts.

Myth: American corporations pay more in taxes than their competitors in any other country.

Fact: Any claim that the United States has the highest corporate tax rate in the world should be accompanied by a clarification that the rate American companies actually pay, on average, is comparable to what their foreign competitors pay.

Yes, the tax rates on the books (the “statutory” rates) in the United States are high relative to our international peers, but the U.S. corporate tax code has become so riddled with loopholes—and American corporations so adept at exploiting them—that the total amount of taxes actually paid by U.S. corporations (the “effective” corporate tax rate) is far less.

The Government Accountability Office found that large, profitable American corporations pay an effective rate of less than 13 percent in U.S. federal taxes; when state and foreign taxes are included, the rate only increases to 17 percent—a far cry from the statutory 39 percent. Meanwhile, the Congressional Research Service found that the effective rate here is nearly identical to the weighted average of corporate taxes in the world’s other most developed economies. (EPI’s Thomas Hungerford found the same thing.)

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