An estimated 100,000 Brazilians have taken to the streets to protest police violence and political corruption. The protests are being called the largest in a generation.

Lots of things happening here — some of them are reasonably clear.

I will be on Mark Thompson’s Make It Plain show on Sirius/XM – I’m actually on every Friday – and we tape early, so I can tell you that one of the things I’ll talk about is how Social Security’s long-term funding is an artifact of rampant US inequality. See, we have a payroll tax funding Social Security that gets capped at around $113,700 a year. That means that every dollar above that cap gets untaxed to pay for Social Security. When inequality widens, as it has, more and more compensation goes untaxed, draining the Social Security system of funds. Historically speaking, at least 90% of compensation gets captured by the Social Security system. Today that’s down to about 82%, the last I read.

So to the extent that Social Security needs to be fixed – and by “fixed” I don’t just mean brought into a 75-year balance, but made more adequate so less seniors slip into poverty – you need to raise that tax cap and capture more income. Sen. Mark Begich (D-AK) has an excellent piece of legislation that would do just this.

A few weeks ago, the Pennsylvania General Assembly fast-tracked a bill in the waning days of the legislative session to allow certain private companies to keep most of the state income taxes of new employees. News reports to follow indicated the new tax giveaway was designed to lure California-based software firm Oracle to State College.

Well, it turns out the CEO of Oracle, which will benefit from the largess of Pennsylvania taxpayers, recently bought his very own Hawaiian island, as CNN reported back in June.

Senate Democrats have liberated a report from the Congressional Research Service which Senate Republicans successfully got the nonpartisan research arm of Congress to retract. The report argued that there is no evidence that tax cuts for high-income earners boosts economic growth, which Republicans didn’t want out in the public sphere.

This week, ex-banker Charles Morris, who was featured in the documentary Inside Job, brings us compelling evidence that countries with a large financial sector create lesser economic growth than countries that have restrained that sector. While a well-functioning financial system is key to growth, there’s a balance that needs to be struck.

France has announced a massive redistributive tax program which would send the top tax rate soaring and increase taxes broadly on the top 10% of society.

Felix Salmon enters this debate with an excellent recap of a study showing labor’s long decline in America.

The great middle class, the group lauded in campaign ads by every politician in the country, is wasting away according to a Pew study. Using the broadest possible figures (between 67% and 200% of the national median income), the study shows that the middle class has declined to a bare majority of the population. Furthermore, those remaining in the middle class have suffered the worst decade in post-war history.

It’s clear that something happened in corporate boardrooms around the 1970s and through to today, where they decided to give their CEOs massive amounts of money through salary and stock options. And why is that? Well, the fact that the top marginal tax rate had been cut in half, so more of that compensation would actually go to the individual, has to have something to do with that.