(Source: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, "Average Income in 2006 Up $60,000 for Top 1 Percent of Households, Just $430 for Bottom 90 Percent") After a discussion about federal tax policy and income inequality, Steven Pearlstein strikes the right chord on where the discussion on inequality should be focused. As much as the distributional consequences of the tax code matter, there's still the nagging problem of pre-tax income inequality. Despite major advances in worker productivity over the past 40 years, workers have seen only a sliver of that economic gain.

You can read Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2007 here. Good news for income, not so great news for poverty, and mixed news for health insurance coverage. Here are a few highlights copy and pasted from the report: Income:

• Real median household income increased 1.3 percent between 2006 and 2007, from $49,568 to $50,233 the third annual increase in real median household income.

Brad DeLong has a great post on the tradeoffs we face in bringing the long-term budget into balance.

The Department of Labor released its weekly unemployment insurance claims data this morning. Initial and continuing claims moved slightly downward, from 445,000 to 432,000 and from 3,379,000 to 3,362,000, respectively. The four-week moving average of initial claims, however, ticked up from 438,500 to 445,750.