Reports
Hanscom High Flyers: Private Jet Excess Doesn’t Justify Airport Expansion
Authors: Chuck Collins, Kalena Thomhave, Omar Ocampo, Jiajin Wu
Date published: October 1, 2023
This report analyzes a proposal to expand Hanscom Field airport to accommodate a 300 percent increase in private jet services. Based on a comprehensive analysis of private flights traveling to and from Hanscom Field over an 18-month period, we find that the expansion would primarily serve the wealthiest travelers in the region, many of whom frequently take short-hop flights to recreational and luxury destinations.
Executive Excess 2023
Author: Sarah Anderson
Date published: August 24, 2023
This 29th annual Executive Excess report takes an in-depth look at the 100 S&P 500 corporations that had the lowest median worker pay levels in 2022, a group we’ve dubbed the “Low-Wage 100.” For each of these firms, we report the total compensation and personal stock holdings of CEOs, the CEO-worker pay gap, and the overall outlays for stock buybacks.
We also reveal how taxpayers are enriching ― through federal contracts ― the majority of the Low-Wage 100. And we conclude with the most comprehensive available policy menu for achieving a fair corporate compensation system.
Still a Dream: Over 500 Years to Black Economic Equality
Authors: Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, Chuck Collins, Omar Ocampo, Sally Sim
Date published: August 16, 2023
Sixty years after the famed March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his landmark “I Have a Dream” speech, African Americans are on a path where it will take 500 more years to reach economic equality.
Our country has taken significant steps towards racial equity since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ‘60s. But growing income and wealth inequality over the last four decades has supercharged historic racial wealth disparities, slowing and even reversing many of those gains.
Sixty years without substantially narrowing the Black-white wealth divide is a policy failure. But just as federal policy helped create the racial wealth gap, it can also help close it. In this report, we look in detail at the state of that divide and recommend policy reforms that would substantially narrow it within one to two generations.
A Tale of Two Retirements: Why CEOs Get Bigger Retirement Subsidies Than the Rest of Us
Authors: Sarah Anderson and Scott Klinger
Date published: May 2023
Ordinary employees with access to 401(k) plans face strict limits on the amounts they can set aside, tax-free, for their golden years. Most senior executives of large corporations, on the other hand, have unlimited tax-deferred compensation accounts. Often called “top hat” plans, these special perks for executives are growing rapidly.
This joint report with Jobs With Justice explains that double standard, highlights the large low-wage corporations where the retirement divide is starkest, and lays out how to make the system fairer for the workers who make these companies so valuable in the first place.
High Flyers 2023: How Ultra-Rich Private Jet Travel Costs the Rest of Us and Burns Up the Planet
Authors: Chuck Collins, Omar Ocampo, Kalena Thomhave
Date published: May 1, 2023
Private jets have rightfully earned their reputation as symbols of excess. As society’s wealth has concentrated in fewer hands over the last several decades, there has been an explosion in private jet purchases and travel.
This expensive, carbon-intensive form of travel is bad for both the earth and the taxpayers who subsidize it for the ultra-rich. In this joint report with the Patriotic Millionaires, we assess the environmental, economic, and security risks of private jet travel — and lay out tax reforms to offset them.
Wielding the Power of the Public Purse Against Extreme CEO-Worker Pay Gaps
Authors: Sarah Anderson and Brian Wakamo
Date published: August 17, 2022
This policy brief focuses on the 74 low-wage U.S. corporations that received more than $1 million in federal contracts from FY2019 to May 1, 2022. Together, they held $37.2 billion in contracts during this period.
The gap between CEO and median pay at these contractors increased from an average of 483 to 1 in 2020 to 599 to 1 in 2021. Only four of the firms had ratios of less than 100 to 1. Their average CEO compensation rose from $7.7 million in 2020 to $13.0 million last year, while median pay averaged $26,838 in 2021, up from $23,107 in 2020.
Seventeen of the firms repurchased their own shares in 2021, with expenditures totaling $4.6 billion. Stock buybacks siphon artificially inflates the value of a company’s shares — and the value of their CEO’s stock-based pay.
Executive Excess 2022
Authors: Sarah Anderson, Sam Pizzigati, Brian Wakamo
Date published: June 2022
This 28th edition of our annual flagship CEO pay report reveals how low-wage corporations have continued to pump up CEO pay during the pandemic while workers are struggling with rising costs.
The report zeroes in on the 300 publicly held U.S. corporations that reported the lowest median worker wages in 2020. At over a third of these firms, median worker pay either fell or failed to rise above the 4.7 percent average U.S. inflation rate in 2021. By contrast, CEO pay at these firms soared 31 percent to an average of $10.6 million. This stunning increase drove the average gap between CEO and median worker pay at these companies to 670-to-1, up from 604-to-1 in 2020.
Of the 106 companies in our sample where median worker pay did not keep pace with inflation, 67 blew a combined total of $43.7 billion on stock buybacks. This financial maneuver inflates executive stock-based pay and drains capital from worker raises, R&D, and other productivity-boosting investments.
Silver Spoon Oligarchs: How America’s 50 Largest Inherited-Wealth Dynasties Accelerate Inequality
Authors: Chuck Collins, Joe Fitzgerald, Helen Flannery, Omar Ocampo, Sophia Paslaski, & Kalena Thomhave
Date Published: June 2021
While media attention focuses on first-generation billionaires, we neglect to look at the troubling growth of dynastic families and the changes in tax policies that will enable the children of today’s billionaires to become tomorrow’s oligarchs.
This report tracks the 50 wealthiest families from 1983 to 2020 using data from Forbes. IPS researchers found that by 2020, the 50 families had amassed $1.2 trillion in assets. For the 27 families on the Forbes 400 list in 1983, their combined wealth had grown by 1,007 percent, from $80.2 billion to $903.2 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars, and for the five wealthiest dynastic families, their wealth increased by a median 2,484 percent during 37 years.
As this report argues, In a healthy democratic society with a functioning tax system, wealth disperses over decades as people have children, pay their taxes, and give to charity. But with a weak tax system on wealth, we are now seeing wealth accelerate over generations, leading to consolidated wealth and power.
Executive Excess 2021: Pandemic Pay Plunder
In 2008, executives chasing after huge paydays crashed the U.S.economy. That crisis left millions of Americans homeless and jobless. In the wake of that disaster, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle called for strict caps on CEO compensation at bailed out firms. But Wall Street banks and major corporations blocked those restrictions, arguing they couldn’t possibly retain and attract “top talent” if they couldn’t offer mega-million-dollar paychecks.
Today we’re living through a period of even greater national suffering. Over the course of the pandemic, our frontline workers have repeatedly proven how absolutely essential their work remains, to both our economy and our health. And yet, as we document in this 27th annual Institute for Policy Studies Executive Excess report, corporate boards are performing cartwheels to protect huge paychecks at the top of our corporate hierarchies.
Cashing in on Our Homes: Billionaire Landlords Profit as Millions Face Eviction
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to light what we have always known: Our homes are vital to our safety, health, and well-being. But a handful of billionaires and corporate landlords have seen the pandemic as an opportunity to cash in on these hard times.
Instead of more billionaire bailouts, we need to make sure all families can stay safely in our homes. And we must start to rebuild housing systems in this country using innovative strategies that center Black and Brown families and make it clear that our homes are for people, not profit.
While the pandemic has devastated Black and Brown communities, a small handful of wealthy, white billionaire landlords are cashing in to the tune of millions. In this report, produced by Bargaining for the Common Good, the Institute for Policy Studies, and the Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund, we lay out clearly who’s winning, who’s losing, and what to do about it.
Pandemic Super Bowl 2021: Billionaires Win, We Lose
Authors: Chuck Collins, Omar Ocampo, Frank Clemente, Arianna Fano, and Will Rice
Date Published: February 2021
On the eve of the 2021 Super Bowl, and after 10-plus months of the pandemic, 64 billionaire owners of major league sports franchises—including the AFC champion Kansas City Chiefs’ Hunt family and the NFC champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ Glazer family—have enjoyed a $98.5 billion rise in their collective net worth, a 30 percent increase, even as millions of fans have fallen ill, lost jobs, neared eviction, gone hungry and died due to the coronavirus.
This report is a joint effort by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF).
Billionaire Wealth vs. Community Health: Protecting Essential Workers from Pandemic Profiteers
Authors: Chuck Collins, Omar Ocampo, Bianca Agustin, Jonathan Heller, and Sara Myklebust
Date Published: November 2020
A handful of billionaires and corporations have seen their wealth surge to record levels, in part as a result of their monopoly status and opportunism during the pandemic.
Meanwhile, private equity firms have bought up essential businesses in the health care, grocery, and pet care industries, only to aggressively cut costs, skimp on worker safety, and load companies up with debt to boost their own profits.
This report focuses on a list of 12 emblematic bad actors. We call them the Delinquent Dozen — corporations that should do significantly more to protect their workers as their owners and executives continue to reap billions.
This report was produced by Bargaining for the Common Good, the Institute for Policy Studies, and United for Respect. Published in partnership with Action Center on Race and the Economy, Americans for Financial Reform, Jobs with Justice, New York Communities for Change, Step Up Louisiana, and Working Washington.
Gilded Giving 2020: How Wealth Inequality Distorts Philanthropy and Imperils Democracy
Authors: Helen Flannery and Chuck Collins
Date Published: July 2020
Over the last two decades, charitable giving has been on a steady upward trajectory. But this growth has masked a troubling trend: Charity is becoming increasingly undemocratic, with organizations relying more on larger donations from a smaller number of wealthy donors, while receiving shrinking amounts of revenue from donors at lower-and middle-income levels.
What’s more, a growing share of these high-end donations go not to the organizations that actually perform charitable work, but to tax-privileged private foundations and donor-advised funds that pay only a small percentage of their assets to support this work.
Gilded Giving 2020 puts forward several possible implications of these conditions and suggests some solutions.
White Supremacy is the Pre-existing Condition: Eight Solutions to Ensure Economic Recovery Reduces the Racial Wealth Divide
Authors: Chuck Collins, Omar Ocampo, Dedrick Asante Muhammad, and Darrick Hamilton
Date Published: June 2020
The racial wealth divide is where the past shows up in the present. The glaring gap in wealth reflects the multigenerational history of white supremacy in the United States and the systematic denial of wealth-building opportunities to Black people. Chattel slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, and predatory loans are reflected in the wide disparities in bank accounts, homeownership, financial wealth, and overall well-being between white people and Black and Latino people in the United States.
In our new report, White Supremacy is the Pre-existing Condition, we found that the concentration of wealth has surged during the pandemic, further exacerbating an already extreme racial wealth divide.
Billionaire Bonanza 2020: Wealth Windfalls, Tumbling Taxes, and Pandemic Profiteers
Authors: Chuck Collins, Omar Ocampo, and Sophia Paslaski
Date Published: April 2020
As the pandemic-fueled U.S. unemployment rate approaches 15 percent, America’s billionaire class is experiencing a wealth surge. Between March 18 and April 10, as the U.S. employment rate approached 15 percent, the combined wealth of America’s billionaires increased by $282 billion — nearly a 10 percent increase. After a brief decline, the combined wealth of U.S. billionaires is greater than their 2019 levels. Eight of these billionaires — the “pandemic profiteers” — have seen their net worth surge by over $ 1 billion. Our report looks at several longer term trends and makes a number of recommendations to ensure that this pandemic doesn’t lead to a further concentration of billionaire wealth and power.
How Congress Manufactured a Postal Crisis — And How to Fix it
Authors: Sarah Anderson, Scott Klinger, and Brian Wakamo
Date Published: February 2020
This report looks at the onerous prefunding mandate for retiree health benefits that threatens the ability of the U.S. Postal Service to continue to provide good jobs and universal service in every U.S. community. Through this extraordinary mandate, Congress created a financial “crisis” that has been used to justify harmful service cuts and even calls for postal privatization. As the report shows, no employer in the country — governmental or in the private sector — comes close to the USPS’s funding level of retiree health benefits.
Executive Excess 2019: Making Corporations Pay for Big Pay Gaps
Authors: Sarah Anderson and Sam Pizzigati
Date Published: September 2019
This report reveals staggering stats on the gap between CEO and worker pay and estimates just how much revenue tax penalties on companies with extreme CEO-worker pay divides could raise. The report finds that at the 50 publicly traded U.S. corporations with the widest pay gaps in 2018, the typical employee would have to work at least 1,000 years — an entire millennium — to earn what their CEO made in just one. Among S&P 500 firms, nearly 80 percent paid their CEO more than 100 times their median worker pay in 2018. If these firms had to pay a corporate income tax penalty, the federal government would have collected as much as $17.2 billion in additional 2018 federal taxes.
Who is Buying Seattle? The Perils of the Luxury Real Estate Boom
Authors: Chuck Collins
Date Published: October 2019
This report takes a preliminary peek at the challenges posed by Seattle’s luxury boom by looking at a snapshot of luxury condominiums and their ownership and occupancy trends. We look at eight fully sold luxury buildings to see what we can learn. From this, we encourage the city and policymakers to monitor the thousands of new luxury units in the pipeline and consider increased transparency requirements around ownership. We identified, for example, five new luxury-building projects with 1,664 units in development, most coming on market at much higher prices.
Ten Solutions to Bridge the Racial Wealth Divide
Authors: Chuck Collins, Darrick Hamilton, Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, Josh Hoxie
Date Published: April 15, 2019
In this report, we offer 10 bold solutions broken into three categories: Programs, Power and Process. These solutions are designed to strike at the structural underpinnings holding the racial wealth divide in place while inspiring activists, organizers, academics, journalists, legislators and others to think boldly about taking on this incredibly important challenge. This summary outlines the 10 solutions, gives a snapshot of the latest racial wealth divide data, and offers a warning against false solutions.
Dreams Deferred: How Enriching the 1% Widens the Racial Wealth Divide
Authors: Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, Chuck Collins, Josh Hoxie, Sabrina Terry
Date Published: January 14, 2019
This report looks at the trends in household wealth among Black, Latino and White households over the past three decades. It relies on data from the Federal Reserve Board’s most recent triannual Survey of Consumer Finances. The Racial Wealth Divide Over the past three decades, a polarizing racial wealth divide has grown between White households and households of color. Since the early 1980s, median wealth among Black and Latino families has been stuck at less than $10,000. Meanwhile, White household median wealth grew from $105,300 to $140,500, adjusting for inflation.
Who Would Pay the Biggest Price for Postal Privatization?
Authors: Sarah Anderson, Scott Klinger, and Brian Wakamo
Date Published: December 2018
This report find that UPS and FedEx charge retail customers additional fees for package delivery to the homes of 70 million Americans who live just outside major cities and in small towns and rural areas. These higher delivery rates are just a taste of what would come if the Trump administration succeeds in privatizing the U.S. Postal Service.
Gilded Giving 2018: Top-Heavy Philanthropy and Its Risks to the Independent Sector
Authors: Chuck Collins, Helen Flannery, and Josh Hoxie
Date Published: November 18, 2018
What are the risks to the autonomy of the independent nonprofit sector—not to mention our democracy—when a growing amount of philanthropic power is held in fewer hands? Our report takes a close look at the impact of increasing economic inequality on the philanthropic sector.
Billionaire Bonanza 2018: Inherited Wealth Dynasties in the 21st-Century U.S.
Authors: Chuck Collins and Josh Hoxie
Date Published: October 30, 2018
Wealth in the United States is concentrating into fewer and fewer hands, a trend we tracked in two previous Billionaire Bonanza reports in 2015 and 2017. This year’s edition, Billionaire Bonanza 2018: Inherited Wealth Dynasties in the 21st-Century U.S., focuses primarily on “dynastic” wealth that has passed from one generation to another within families. Our analysis is based on the Forbes magazine list of the 400 wealthiest individuals in the United States and the Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances.
Towering Excess: The Perils of the Luxury Real Estate Boom for Bostonians
Authors: Chuck Collins, Emma de Goede
Date Published: September 10, 2018
This report examines 12 existing luxury condominium buildings, with 1,805 units, with average values over $3 million, finding that many of these condominiums are not for existing Bostonians. We examine how Boston could better protect the public interest and, in the process, capture more of the current luxury real estate wealth flow to support affordable housing for Boston residents. We focus here on residential condominium ownership as a form of “wealth storage” and examine twelve of the highest-priced and presently occupied luxury housing developments constructed in Boston over the last decade.
Executive Excess: How Taxpayers Subsidize Giant Corporate Pay Gaps
Author: Sarah Anderson
Date Published: August 28, 2018
This report analyzes CEO-worker pay gaps at top federal contractors and subsidy recipients, finding that more than two thirds of the top 50 federal contractors and corporate subsidy recipients paid their CEO more than 100 times their median worker pay in 2017.
Warehousing Wealth: Donor-Advised Charity Funds Sequestering Billions in the Face of Growing Inequality
Authors: Chuck Collins, Helen Flannery, Josh Hoxie
Date Published: July 25, 2018
At a time of staggering inequality, wealthy individuals are using donor-advised funds, or DAFs, to claim substantial tax benefits, while often failing to move funds in a timely manor to independent nonprofits addressing urgent social needs. Of particular concern are the growing number of DAFs founded by for-profit Wall Street financial corporations that provide incentives for the warehousing of wealth. This report, Warehousing Wealth: Donor-Advised Charity Funds Sequestering Billions in the Face of Growing Inequality, documents the dramatic expansion of DAFs and the risks an unregulated DAF system poses to the public interest and the charitable sector.
Restoring Opportunity in California
Authors: Chuck Collins, Jessicah Pierre, Josh Hoxie
Date Published: May 8, 2018
This report details the transition from a debt free public higher education system to one that leaves hundreds of thousands of students deep in debt year after year. It also details the corresponding tax cut given to the wealthiest Californians, the lost revenue of which could have been used to pre-empt the growing student debt crisis.
CEO-Worker Pay Ratios in the Banking Industry
Authors: Sarah Anderson, Bartlett Naylor
Date Published: April 26, 2018
Using the first-ever pay ratio disclosures to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, this report by the Institute for Policy Studies and Public Citizen reveals that pay disparities between CEOs and workers still are out of control at many of America’s national and regional banks.
High Flyers 2017
Authors: Chuck Collins and Josh Hoxie
Date Published: November 29, 2017
The private jet lobby – and their super-wealthy passengers – have created a parallel universe of perks and privileges that would shock most commercial passengers if they knew about them. In both tax policy and homeland security, the high flyers have used their power to create one set of rules for themselves and another set of rules for the rest of us. Our report, High Flyers 2017, looks at the vaulted status of private jets in our tax code and the impact of the Trump tax cuts on the private jet set.
Billionaire Bonanza 2017: The Forbes 400 and the Rest of Us
Author: Chuck Collins and Josh Hoxie
Date Published: November 8, 2017
Wealth inequality in the United States has stretched to obscene levels to the point now where just three people own more wealth than the bottom half of the United States combined.
The Road to Zero Wealth: How the Racial Wealth Divide is Hollowing Out America’s Middle Class
Authors: Chuck Collins, Dedrick Asante-Muhammed, Emanuel Nieves, Josh Hoxie
Date Published: September 11, 2017
In this report, we look at the racial wealth divide at the median over the next four and eight years, as well as to 2043, when the country’s population is predicted to become majority non-white. We also look to wealth rather than income to reconsider what it means to be middle class. In finding an ever-accelerating gap, we consider what it means for the American middle class and we explore what policy interventions could reverse the trends we see today. We find that without a serious change in course, the country is heading towards a racial and economic apartheid state.
Reversing Inequality: Unleashing the Transformative Potential of an Equitable Economy
Author: Chuck Collins
Date Published: August 7, 2017
What would it take to really reverse inequality? Let’s go beyond false solutions to understand the systemic drivers and the challenges of concentrated wealth and power.
Report: The CEO Pay Tax Break in the Republican Health Care Proposal
Author: Sarah Anderson
Date Published: March 21, 2017
The cost of removing Obamacare limits on the tax deductibility of executive compensation, based on pay data at the top 5 insurers.
The Wall Street Bonus Pool and Low Wage Workers
Author: Sarah Anderson
Date Published: March 15, 2017
The 2016 bonus pool held enough dollars to lift the pay of all of the country's more than 3 million servers up to $15 an hour.
A Tale of Two Retirements
Author: Sarah Anderson, Scott Klinger
Date Published: December 15, 2016
As working families face rising retirement insecurity, CEOs enjoy platinum pensions.
Gilded Giving
Author: Chuck Collins, Helen Flannery, Josh Hoxie
Date Published: November 16, 2016
Top-Heavy Philanthropy in an Age of Extreme Inequality
Executive Excess 2016: The Wall Street CEO Bonus Loophole
Author: Sam Pizzigati, Sarah Anderson
Date Published: August 31, 2016
This 23rd annual report reveals how taxpayers are subsidizing financial crisis windfalls.
The Ever-Growing Gap
Author: Chuck Collins, Dedrick Asante-Muhammed, Emanuel Nieves, Josh Hoxie
Date Published: August 8, 2016
Without Change, African-American and Latino Families Won't Match White Wealth for Centuries
Utilities Pay Up
Author: Janet Redman, Sarah Anderson, Scott Klinger
Date Published: July 19, 2016
How ending tax dodging by America's electric utilities can help fund a job-creating, clean energy transition.
Off the Deep End: The Wall Street Bonus Pool and Low-Wage Workers
Author: Sarah Anderson
Date Published: March 8, 2016
The financial industry’s 2015 bonuses were double the combined earnings of all Americans who work full-time at the federal minimum wage.
CEO Stock(ing) Stuffers
Author: Sarah Anderson, Scott Klinger
Date Published: December 22, 2015
Loophole allowed 10 companies to shave $180 million off their taxes for CEO pay last year.
Billionaire Bonanza: The Forbes 400 and the Rest of Us
Author: Chuck Collins, Josh Hoxie
Date Published: December 1, 2015
Wealthiest 20 people own more wealth than half the American population
A Tale of Two Retirements
Author: Sarah Anderson, Scott Klinger
Date: October 28, 2015
One hundred CEOs have as much in retirement assets as 41 percent of American families.
Executive Excess 2015: Money to Burn
Author: Chuck Collins, Sam Pizzigati, Sarah Anderson
Date: September 2, 2015
This 22nd annual report reveals how CEO pay is accelerating climate change.
Burning Our Bridges
Author: Sarah Anderson, Scott Klinger
Date: April 1, 2015
President Obama and some members of Congress think the easiest way to fund infrastructure is by granting corporations a large tax cut on their untaxed offshore profits.
Off the Deep End: The Wall Street Bonus Pool and Low-Wage Workers
Author: Sarah Anderson
Date: March 11, 2015
The financial industry’s 2014 bonuses were double the combined earnings of all Americans who work full-time at the federal minimum wage.
Fleecing Uncle Sam
Author: Sarah Anderson, Scott Klinger
Date: November 18, 2014
A growing number of corporations spend more on executive compensation than federal income taxes.