Alvin’s cartoonsplainers

A “fun” piece of tax trivia — if there even is one — is that nearly half of Americans don’t pay federal income taxes. It’s something you’ll hear from conservative pundits, often to make the point that poor people aren’t paying their fair share in taxes.

The easy rebuttal is that there are several other taxes in the US — many of which put a bigger burden on poor people than rich people. But a recent analysis by economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, as presented in their book, found that poor people may be paying nearly the same portion of their income in taxes as rich people. In their New York Times op-ed, they called America’s system a “giant flat tax.”

In America, most children go to school based on where their family lives. So affluent parents often take the quality of schools into consideration when they make housing decisions.

It can be hard to determine the quality of a school, though. Parents can use test scores as an indicator, or they can do their own research within their own social networks. But eventually they find data through Google or the real estate website Zillow. And there, they’ll almost certainly run into a website called GreatSchools.org.

For most of his life, few people knew Thomas Hofeller’s name.

But for decades, Hofeller was the Republican Party’s most influential mapmaker. When it came time to redraw districts, Hofeller not only knew how to churn the data and work with the software — but he also knew exactly how this power could be used.

Americans hold an astounding amount of student debt: $1.6 trillion. It’s a number that has been increasing exponentially over the past several decades.

This is why Democratic presidential candidates Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have ambitious plans to cancel debt. Sanders wants to cancel all of it; Warren wants to cancel all debt for households earning under $100,000 a year — and, above that, phase out the amount of debt canceled until a household reaches $250,000.

Much of the conversation about school segregation in America is about how to lessen segregation within a school district, ensuring students of all races in the same district can study together in the same school.

That’s the kind of policy Joe Biden opposed in the 1970s, which he was called out for during the first Democratic presidential debates. These policies tried to ban federal courts from forcing districts to bus children from one neighborhood to another to desegregate schools.

A few months ago, an FBI investigation found that rich parents — including celebrities like Felicity Huffman — were cheating to get their kids into elite colleges.

It involved an elaborate scam to get higher SAT scores for their children.

The US Senate requires a supermajority to pass any bill — 60 votes. But technically, it’s not the actual bill that requires 60 votes. It’s the vote to end debate, which is required to get to the vote.

In the early days of the Senate, it only took a majority to end debate. But in 1805, a change was proposed. Vice President Aaron Burr was being ousted from politics after shooting and killing his rival, Alexander Hamilton, in a duel. In his farewell speech to the Senate, he laid out a handful of things he thought should change — and he specifically critiqued the rule that allowed a majority to end debate.

Can a sitting president be prosecuted in a criminal proceeding?

According to FBI special counsel Robert Mueller, the answer is “no.” In his first public remarks since the release of his report, he said on Wednesday that “the Constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting president of wrongdoing.”

In the past two decades, 128 communities have had a simple idea: to make their own school district.

For many of them, the underlying purpose was to draw a legal fence between their community and a poorer one. Because a large chunk of public education is funded using local property taxes, making your own district with your affluent neighbors means that you’re able to hoard resources — and not share tax dollars with poorer communities of color.

The US currently has seven tax brackets — and some Republicans, including Donald Trump and former House Speaker Paul Ryan — have said that they believe that’s too many.

It’s been a common talking point for Republicans in presidential elections. Along with Trump, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie. Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, and Rand Paul all expressed a desire to reduce the number of brackets. And they said it was because it would simplify the tax code.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, we didn’t have a full picture of what was happening behind the scenes.

It’s something that didn’t quite sink in as I kept track of the minutiae of FBI special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible Trump-Russia collusion over the past two years.

There’s one simple reason it’s so hard to visualize wealth inequality: The wealthiest people in the world are too wealthy.

Once you draw a bar representing the wealth of the superrich, it’s impossible to see the wealth of everyone else. It’s like trying to see both the Empire State Building and an ant in the same picture.

Racial segregation is usually discussed in the context of where we live, and for good reason.

Government policies forced people of color into poor, racially segregated neighborhoods, which were incredibly harmful to residents. And these neighborhoods ended up being the basis for how we form our social networks.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) recently proposed a wealth tax on the very rich as a way to curb wealth inequality. It’s a simple 2 percent tax on fortunes over $50 million, and a 3 percent tax on fortunes over $1 billion. Early polls suggest her proposal is very popular.

A wealth tax is different from most other taxes we pay. Usually, the government only taxes us when money changes hands — when we earn or spend money. But a wealth tax targets the huge fortunes that sit in wealthy people’s possession, whether it’s in the form of stocks or a yacht.

For decades, political scientists thought they knew how kids developed their political beliefs: They mimicked their parents.

After all, the data showed that most children end up having the same political leanings as their parents.

Ever since the 2016 election, Democrats have been having the same debate: Should their messaging be centered on race or class?

These themes appear in virtually every Democratic campaign speech, and for good reason: Somewhere in the murky overlap between race and class is a winning formula for the 2018 midterms, and perhaps even the 2020 presidential election.

A few years ago, hundreds of college administrators received a survey in the mail. It was designed to figure out what they believed it takes to succeed in college.

The survey listed 12 skills that colleges generally expect students to develop, but the administrators were asked to pick the five most important.

In March, the Trump administration added a question about citizenship to the upcoming 2020 Census.

Census Bureau research shows that this question could actually deter people from responding to the survey, which means it might cause an undercount of vulnerable populations.

I first heard about the “penalty” my junior year of high school. I was sitting in an SAT prep class because I had barely broken 1000 on my first practice SAT. During a snack break, another Asian kid in the class said to me, “You know we have to do better than even the white kids, right?”

I had never heard affirmative action framed that way — as a “bonus” for black and brown people and a “penalty” for white and especially Asian people.

Think about your elementary school.

If you attended an American public school, chances are you went to that school because your family lived in that school’s attendance zone. You probably didn’t think twice about it.

Every spring, millions of students graduate high school with every intention of attending college.

By the fall, an astounding portion of them never show up to college.

There’s a small town in Minnesota called Worthington. It’s a place that fascinates sociologists.

In the 1980s, Worthington was on its way to becoming a ghost town, like many other white, blue-collar communities.

In the late 2000s, some researchers had a novel idea: They would “crash” a few dozen high school reunions and interview more than 300 people.

The goal was to figure out why people returned to their rural hometowns after leaving for whatever reason.

The stars once seemed to be aligned for Sinclair Broadcast Group to expand its local TV empire.

Sinclair — known for forcing its 193 local TV stations to air pro-Trump segments and anti-media screeds — currently has a deal in place to purchase Tribune Media, which would extend its reach to about 72 percent of Americans. And until this week, it seemed Sinclair had the allies in the right places (read: the Trump administration’s Federal Communications Commission) to get this deal done.

Hillary Clinton has played no active role in our politics since she lost the 2016 presidential election. She has watched from the sidelines as Donald Trump writes one of the most scandal-plagued chapters of the American presidency.

But on Fox News, the character “Hillary Clinton” still plays a crucial part in the story.