Fast Fact

As much as 60 percent of the $107 billion in rebates being sent to individuals and families starting this week as part of the Bush administration's economic stimulus plan will be used to pay down debt, according to a survey by Goldman Sachs. Another survey by the University of Michigan and Reuters said that only three in 10 rebate recipients plan to spend their rebate checks.

Between 1960 and 2004, the average tax rate fell by nearly 14 percentage points for the top 1% of earners, while it has increased slightly (from 15.9% to 16.1%) for earners in the middle 20%.

Since the late 1990's, average incomes fell by 2.5% for those in the bottom fifth of the income scale and rose by just 1.3% for those in the middle fifth. Meanwhile, incomes climbed 9% for those in the top fifth.

Globally about 1 billion people still live in extreme poverty.

Nationwide, requests for food assistance in the past year are up 30 percent.

Nationwide, 1.5 million subprime adjustable-rate mortgages will reset to higher interest rates this year, putting many of those homeowners at risk of falling behind on their payments and losing their homes.

In South Korea and Germany, starting salaries for teachers are about 141% of per capita GDP, while the figure for the United States is only 81%; in fact, all countries in this sample pay their teachers a significantly higher relative wage as a starting salary compared to the United States.

Social Security's shortfall over the next 75 years is slightly less than the estimated cost over that period of extending the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts just for the top 1 percent of households.

With one day of Iraq War funding we could have sent 6,883 high school graduates to four fully funded years at
public universities.

The U.S. spends $10 billion every month on the Iraq war, a total of $500 billion so far.