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Via Counterparties, I see that the White House has released an animated version of a chart created recently by Alan Krueger, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers:

The Great Gatsby Curve illustrates the connection between concentration of wealth in one generation and the ability of those in the next generation to move up the economic ladder compared to their parents....The curve shows that children from poor families are less likely to improve their economic status as adults in countries where income inequality was higher — meaning wealth was concentrated in fewer hands — around the time those children were growing up.

In a nutshell, children of poor families have a hard time moving up in the world in countries with lots of income inequality:

So why does this matter for the United States? The U.S. has had a sharp rise in inequality since the 1980s. In fact, on the eve of the Great Recession, income inequality in the U.S. was as sharp as it had been at any period since the time of "The Great Gatsby."

I know I've declared jihad on animated GIFs, but this one is actually sort of useful. It only takes a minute to unfold, and it demonstrates the problem pretty dramatically. Krueger's full speech from last year is here.

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Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

With less than a week before New York State lawmakers go home for the summer, Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) unveiled his own bill on Tuesday to curb Albany's streak of political corruption scandals and battle the state's big-money politics. Cuomo's bill would make it easier to convict someone for bribing public officials and ban anyone convicted of public corruption from ever again working in government. It would expand the state's voter registration period, beef up the enforcement of election laws, and let 16- and 17-year-olds pre-register to vote.

But it is the third piece of Cuomo's bill that campaign reformer types care about most. That piece calls for a public financing system for all New York State elections in which small donations up to $175 would be matched $6 to $1 with public money. The intent here is clear: Nudge candidates running for state Assembly and Senate to collect more two- and three-figure donations as opposed to courting wealthy donors who can legally give five- and six-figure donations under New York's lax election laws. "Governor Cuomo's proposal builds upon a small-donor matching fund system that has proven effective in New York City," says Michael Malbin, the director of the nonpartisan Campaign Finance Institute. "CFI's research shows the incentives work to get candidates to make low-dollar donors the financial backbones of their campaigns."

Foes of super-PACs and big-money politics see public financing as the best fix to today's money-soaked political system. And since a divided Congress won't take up public financing, public financing supporters believe the states give them the best shot at new reforms. Fair Elections for New York, a coalition of unions, good-government groups, and more, have invested heavily in passing a statewide public financing bill in New York, which they see as the marquee fight in the today's political money wars. "If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere," was how Nick Nyhart, president of the reform group Public Campaign, put it last year.

By introducing his own bill, Cuomo is signaling to resistant Republican lawmakers that he wants public financing before the current session ends. The governor is also showing his liberal allies that he's still entrenched in this fight, at least publicly.

Yet the prospects for reform in New York are not good. The Democratic-controlled state Assembly has already passed a public financing bill like Cuomo's, but the state Senate is run by a motley coalition of Republicans and so-called independent Democrats, and Senate Republicans have no interest in public financing. Despite several analyses showing a modest price tag for public financing of statewide elections, state Sen. Dean Skelos, the Senate GOP's leader, said he'd rather invest the money in "education, infrastructure, job creation, child care—there are a lot of areas that we can use that money for."

Even Cuomo questioned whether major corruption or campaign reforms could pass before the legislature adjourns next week. Calling his bill "needed" and "overdue," he added: "I would not say that I see an especially easy glide path to passage for this bill."

The action around public financing isn't just in New York. On Wednesday morning, 10 leaders of liberal groups pressed top Democratic lawmakers, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), to unite behind a national public financing bill for Congressional elections. Read their full letter here.

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Housing prices nationwide are up, but in most areas we haven't seen scary kinds of increases. It's a different story here in Southern California, though, where home prices have risen 25 percent in the past year:

"We're deep into uncharted territory," DataQuick President John Walsh said, citing "razor-thin" inventory, pent-up demand, low interest rates and all-cash purchases by investors and wealthy individuals. "How this all plays out is educated guesswork at this point."

....Extremely low inventory and mortgage rates have ignited those bidding wars and helped turn the housing market into an economic bright spot — both in the Southland and nationwide. Investors have also played a major role in the recovery that began last year, buying run-down, lower-cost properties to fix up and rent out.

Is this a bellwether for the future—and for the rest of the country? Maybe not. Richard Green, director of USC's Lusk Center for Real Estate, thinks prices will ease later in the year for a simple reason: "Ultimately, people don't have the income," he says. That's cheery news, isn't it?

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A surveillance photo of Zawahri entering the Santa Monica College library. Santa Monica Police/ZUMA

Update, June 12, 9:25 p.m. PDT: Citing unnamed law enforcement officials, the Los Angeles Times reported late Wednesday that the semiautomatic rifle used in the Santa Monica rampage appears to have been assembled from various parts, possibly to circumvent California's laws prohibiting such weapons. Whether the killer built the weapon himself or obtained it whole is unclear. The rifle "appeared to be modified so that it could fire more rounds," according to the LA Times. In fact, it's relatively easy to make your own assault rifle, as reporter Bryan Schatz demonstrated recently while investigating a "build party"—in southern California—for this Mother Jones story.

More details have emerged about John Zawahri, who murdered five people and wounded several others in a gun rampage on Friday before police shot him dead on the campus of Santa Monica College. He is the kind of mass killer we've come to see all too often in recent years, from his gender and age to the type of weapons he used to his mental-health history. With our in-depth investigation of 62 mass shootings over the last 30 years we identified strong patterns among the killers, and Zawahri fits several of them:

Shooter's identity: Zawahri, an American-born son of Lebanese immigrants, was an adult male, age 23. All but one of the killers in the cases we analyzed were male, most of them young adult to middle-age.

Weapons used: Zawahri committed the killings using an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle and high-capacity magazines. According to the LA Times, investigators say he carried nearly 40 magazines capable of holding 30 bullets each. Some were in a duffel bag along with a handgun; he also wore ammunition strapped to his chest and thighs. Zawahri fired about 100 rounds during an approximately 15-minute rampage and was carrying more than 1,000 rounds with him, according to law enforcement officials. As our study showed, more than half of all mass shooters had assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and many were armed with multiple guns:

The data we gathered also shows that most mass shooters—nearly 80 percent of them—obtained their weapons legally. We don't yet know how Zawahri got his guns; law enforcement officials say they're in the process of tracing them. But it's possible he obtained them using the internet: As early as 2006, according to the LA Times, word had spread among Zawahri's high school classmates and teachers that he'd spent time surfing for assault weapons online. It remains very easy to buy guns on the internet, a key issue addressed by the legislation mandating broader background checks that died in the Senate in April.

Mental-health problems: Zawahri had shown troubling signs years ago, according to the LA Times. In 2006, a teacher learned of Zawahri's interest in assault weapons—as well as violent threats he'd voiced about specific classmates—and reported Zawahri to school authorities, who informed the police. Soon after, Zawahri was admitted to UCLA's psychiatric ward for a brief period. In the 62 cases we studied, a majority of the killers had mental health problems, with many showing signs of it prior to their attacks.

There's another pattern that Zawahri fits: Like the young male killers in Newtown, Aurora, and Columbine before him, he was apparently into video games. According to the LA Times, his school transcripts show that he was "sporadically" enrolled in an entertainment technology program in 2009 and 2010, taking courses in animation and video game development. But as Erik Kain cautions in an in-depth explainer on violent video games published on our site today, that fact may ultimately tell us nothing about what caused Zawahri to bring horror to Santa Monica late last week.

This post has been updated. Also see our full award-winning special report on mass shootings in America.

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