Our Inequality Weekly

Our indispensable guide to the latest on our unequal world, delivered every Wednesday to your inbox.

I started off last week watching the total eclipse from the "Northeast Kingdom" of Vermont — an unforgettable experience, despite a terrible traffic jam.

The next day I was in Washington, D.C. for a conference hosted by the Patriotic Millionaires, a group of high-net-worth individuals committed to reducing inequality by, among other things, paying their fair share in taxes.

I was a speaker at the conference, an event ambitiously titled “How to Fix Everything.” I also heard from advocates and experts at the forefront of issues ranging from taxing the rich and raising the wage floor to limiting the influence of our wealthiest on our democracy. A recording of the conference, which was live streamed by 1.7 million viewers, can be found here.

As Patriotic Millionaires founder Erica Payne said: “It will be hard to fix America, but it’s not that complicated.” It all comes down to reversing the grotesque concentration of wealth and power that we attempt to chronicle for you everyday at Inequality.org and in this newsletter.

Here at Inequality.org we’re constantly advocating for raising tax rates on — and closing loopholes for — our nation's wealthiest. But increasing tax revenue from our richest won’t help us much unless those dollars are going to programs that make the lives of the vast majority of us significantly better and more secure.

The National Priorities Project, a venture of the same Institute for Policy Studies that hosts Inequality.org, recently released an analysis of where our tax dollars went in 2023. The results are concerning — the average tax payer payed over $5,000 toward militarism, including nearly $1,800 to private defense contractors.

Instead of funding already wealthy corporate execs and shareholders, that money could be going to programs like food stamps or child tax credits, underfunded efforts that keep Americans afloat in difficult times.

Making our tax system more equitable has to go hand-in-hand with reforming how our government chooses to use its vast resources. We can have a better future.

Welcome to April, also known as tax month. This time of year we pay particularly close attention to who’s pulling down the big bucks in the United States. The hottest new figure along that line out so far this month: 813, the number of American billionaires as per the latest annual figures from Forbes.

Our own Omar Ocampo has just taken a closer look at how that total stacks up against previous years. His read: Our rich just keep getting fabulously richer.

We're also keeping a close eye on this year’s corporate tax payments. Our recent report, co-published with Americans for Tax Fairness, identifies 35 U.S. corporations that actually pay their top execs more than they pay in federal taxes.

On the brighter side, this year may very well turn out to be the last one that many of us are compelled to use for-profit tax preparation systems like TurboTax. The IRS is piloting its own direct filing system in a dozen states and could be extending the service to more Americans in our next federal tax cycle.

One last note before your dive into the content of this week's newsletter: This Friday is the deadline for applying for one of the new Institute for Policy Studies Henry Wallace Fellowship grants. Interested in joining our team this summer? Learn more about the program and applying here.

This March marks four years since the World Health Organization declared Covid a global pandemic. Things have certainly changed since then. We rarely see masks anymore in crowded spaces, and those massive Covid-era investments in the American social safety net have all but expired. But one other pandemic-era dynamic — the concentration of America’s wealth — has just kept accelerating.

Our own Chuck Collins and Omar Ocampo have been tracking that concentration closely over the last four years. The United States, they point out, now hosts 737 billionaires worth a combined $5.529 trillion. For those of you keeping score at home, that tidy sum falls just a few billion shy of the $6.1 trillion the entire United States government spent in 2023.

It’s not all doom and gloom though! One positive Covid-era change — the surge in labor organizing — has yet to fade. Union density remains far below its peak in the middle of the last century, but successful organizing campaigns at Starbucks, energetic strikes in Hollywood, and landmark new contracts for U.S. autoworkers show that today’s labor movement still has plenty of juice.

Major moments like pandemics remind us that social structures and trends that seem set in stone can be more pliable than we assume. Our challenge: to make sure that the changes that stick end up being the ones that lead us to a more equitable society, not the ones that deepen existing harms.

An important part of Inequality.org’s mission is to get information about ever growing wealth disparities in front of as many eyeballs as possible. Lately we’ve been having some major successes on that front.

Over the past week, dozens of news outlets, from national media like USA Today and Fortune to local newspapers like the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and the Ohio Capital Journal, have covered our new report exposing companies that pay their top executives more than they pay in federal income taxes.

The impact of all these stories? Let’s just say that our nation’s PR flacks at corporations dodging taxes and overpaying CEOs did not have a great week.

Our charity reform work is also garnering major new media attention. The Boston Globe recently published a front-page “above the fold” investigation into “donor-advised funds” that relied heavily on our research.

Getting good media coverage obviously only gets us so far. The fight for greater equality takes much more than high-profile acknowledgements that things have gone wrong. That fight takes the inspired advocacy of egalitarians at every level, and this week, as always, we have plenty of examples to share.

In his State of the Union address last week, President Biden responded to widespread public outrage over wealth concentration by pledging to force big corporations pay their fair share of taxes. Today, we’re releasing a blockbuster report showing just how outrageously unfair our current tax system has become.

Our key finding: Dozens of large and profitable U.S. corporations are actually paying their top executives more than they’re paying in federal income taxes.

“Tax avoidance and excessive executive pay aren’t unrelated,” Inequality.org co-editor Sarah Anderson explains in a Boston Globe story about the report. “Executives have incentives to push for tax cuts because they can reap the windfall.”

Issued jointly with Americans for Tax Fairness, our new report has also garnered coverage today in USA Today, CBS News, and The Guardian.

We have more from Anderson below on how to tackle the intertwined problems of corporate tax dodging and excessive CEO pay.

President Joe Biden will deliver his third State of the Union address tomorrow night, with political analysts expecting the president to use this prime-time opportunity to contrast what his administration has accomplished with the White House record of Donald Trump, his nearly certain opponent in next fall’s election.

Here at Inequality.org, we’re hoping Biden will reaffirm his commitment to policies that aim to rein in our runaway wealth concentration, measures like minimum tax rates on billionaire incomes and restrictions on stock-buyback profiteering.

We’d also like to see Biden use his State of the Union guest list to highlight those Americans fighting at the front lines of our inequality crisis. What a message the president could send by inviting into the First Lady’s box champions for economic justice like a worker from the organizing effort at Alabama’s non-union Mercedes plant or an activist involved in the landmark new Starbucks bargaining pact.

And how about adding to that guest list some of the advocates driving the wealth tax campaigns now underway in several states, creative efforts that mirror the president’s own billionaire tax proposal.

In this week’s issue, meanwhile, we have plenty more on ongoing creative efforts to narrow our nation’s maldistribution of income and wealth — and the latest about exciting new polling on the need to reform our charitable giving structure.

If talk of a government shutdown makes you feel like it’s Groundhog Day, you’re not alone. This Friday will mark the first in a new pair of deadlines for federal appropriations bills. Absent a deal, crucial agencies and programs will begin to go dark. What would even a partial shutdown mean for the average American?

The federal departments of Veterans Affairs, Transportation, Agriculture, and Housing and Urban Development, for starters, would all run out of funding. Shutting down these departments would shutter veteran outreach offices and bring travel delays, discontinue crucial food support programs and leave families missing housing loans.

And any shutdowns, of course, would leave massive numbers of federal workers and their families without paychecks.

None of this pain has to be — and wouldn’t be if we taxed our rich at meaningful rates. And if we did that taxing, we could as a nation start meeting all our public needs, including, as we note below, the need for a vibrant public media presence.

The giant bank holding company Capital One has just announced its intentions to acquire Discover Financial. The $35-billion deal, if approved, would create a new behemoth in the credit card industry.

Providing credit card services has proved extremely lucrative for Capital One and the other dozen largest companies in the field. A recent Consumer Financial Protection Bureau report found that these firms consistently charge higher interest rates than smaller, local issuers.

Letting Capital One and Discover join up would further limit consumer choice in credit cards and increase already arduous interest burdens on American families.

But the pending deal can’t go through until government antitrust agencies give their approval. That provides a golden opportunity for the current crop of enforcers to make good on their promise to tackle corporate consolidation, especially in the financial sector. We’ll be watching this case closely.

In the meantime, this week we have coverage of the promising new tax-filing alternative to the for-profit tax-prep industry and a look at an imaginative struggle for a more promising public transit future.

This Valentine’s Day we’re hoping you can make a little more space in your heart for the workers fighting to be justly compensated for keeping this country running.

Case in point: the rideshare drivers who might have helped you get to your Super Bowl parties or might be delivering that special dinner for a Valentine’s date tonight. To protest the ever-growing slice that Uber and Lyft take from their transactions, these drivers organized a multi-city strike for today.

“This is the bubbling up of anger and complete degradation of drivers all over the country,” says Nicole Moore, a part-time Lyft worker and the president of Rideshare Drivers United, a Los Angeles based group helping lead the action.

Drivers in 44 cities across the United States and Canada are turning off their apps for the day and joining pickets calling for pay hikes.

“We have to build driver power to overcome this rampant business model that is designed to destroy labor rights and destroy drivers' lives,” Moore added.

In this week’s newsletter, we examine solutions to the stock buyback loophole that enriches top corporate execs and explore the critical importance of keeping a federal program for women with young kids adequately funded.

We don’t need to tell you that turnout will be absolutely key to our national election outcomes in 2024. But fewer people know that higher-income voting rates have always eclipsed lower-income participation, and when we factor in our campaign finance system that privileges the wealthy, it’s no surprise that politicians pay a lot more attention to their richest constituents.

The Poor People’s Campaign has just announced plans for an ambitious push to revamp this inequitable political landscape. Campaign activists are aiming to mobilize 15 million poor and low-income voters in the lead-up to Election Day, an effort to center the concerns of poor people in our political debate — and hike broad-based voter turnout at the polls this November.

For years, the Institute for Policy Studies has served as the research arm of the Poor People’s Campaign. To support this year’s mobilization, our colleagues produced detailed fact sheets — for the nation and all 50 states — that highlight the most pressing inequities America’s poor and low-income people face.

Congress has repeatedly blocked a raise in the minimum wage while greenlighting tax cuts that have helped make U.S. billionaires $2.2 trillion richer since 2017. Check out more about the Poor People’s Campaign below and find out online how you can participate.

Elon Musk and other overpaid CEOs probably didn’t sleep well last night, but our colleague Sarah Anderson is supremely well rested.

Sarah, one of our nation’s leading CEO pay critics, has faced countless attacks for her work denouncing a system that lets top execs channel unlimited sums into their own pockets. Apologists for these execs have called her “un-American.”

Late yesterday, a Delaware judge struck a powerful blow against those execs and their toadies. The judge voided the compensation contract that had made Tesla’s Elon Musk the richest man in the entire world.

The New York Times promptly highlighted Sarah’s reaction. This “incredibly important decision,” Sarah told the Times, “establishes that there is such a thing as excessive compensation.”

Musk’s now-voided 2018 contract — a stock-award package worth as much as $55.8 billion — launched a mega-grant wave at other major firms. With this landmark Delaware ruling, CEOs who rode that wave have to be wondering if they’ll become the target of the next lawsuit over excessive compensation.

Stay tuned for more from Inequality.org on this major breaking story in the battle to reverse our extreme inequality.

Hello readers! My name is Chris Mills Rodrigo, and I’m beyond excited to be taking over the reins as the new managing editor here at Inequality.org.

Fans of Bella DeVaan, this newsletter’s excellent steward, can rest easy. She’s going to continue pitching in on Inequality.org while she takes on a new Institute for Policy Studies role focused on charity reform.

A quick word about me: Before coming to IPS, I covered the tech industry for The Hill newspaper. That beat’s biggest story? The ongoing, staggering concentration of wealth and influence at the tippy-top of Silicon Valley, a wealth and influence essentially amassed at the expense of tech workers and users alike.

Thankfully, I had plenty of company challenging high tech’s most exploitative habits. I had the privilege of profiling myriad advocacy efforts to wrest a fair share of corporate earnings back from execs and reported on everything from union drives at Amazon to campaigns aiming to reclassify rideshare drivers.

Now on the Inequality.org team, I’m hoping to keep shining a spotlight on the worst excesses of our wealthiest — and keep elevating the activists so dedicated to ushering in a more just society for us all.

Need to reach me with a comment or a question? Just drop me an email at chris@ips-dc.org. Working together, we can forge a more equal world.

They’ve parked their private jets, whipped out their Loro Piana cashmere, and started pontificating about AI. Billionaires, political leaders, and corporate scions are convening once again this week high up in the Alps for the annual World Economic Forum.

But this year’s Davos gathering has an elephant in the room, and we don’t mean global geopolitical fears over the GOP’s presidential frontrunner.

That elephant: the dire global need to start redistributing wealth. At a forum that’s made “rebuilding trust” its central 2024 theme, writes our co-editor Sam Pizzigati in this week’s issue, redistribution shouldn’t remain a topic that Davos’ talking heads conspicuously neglect. Yet here we are.

Our affluent friends at the Patriotic Millionaires have been pleading to be properly taxed by the Davos set for years. Exasperated by the hold up, they have a simple message for their peers: “We’d be proud to pay more.”

New polling results show that strong majorities of the richest 5 percent in G20 countries would be proud to pay more, too. They’d support higher taxes on themselves if the revenue goes to spending for the common good.

How much money could our world’s richest spare at tax time? A new Oxfam report entitled Inequality Inc. shows just how starkly our economic systems have worsened inequality. Since 2020, our billionaires have become $3.3 trillion richer. We have more this week on how we can bust up extreme wealth concentration.

One final note: We have a new managing editor coming on board at Inequality.org, Chris Mills Rodrigo. I’m excited to introduce him to you all next week — and to tell you about my new role here on our Inequality.org team. Stay tuned!

Happy 2024! We hope you’ve had a wonderful start to the new year.

On our desks this week: the newly released Who Pays? report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a comprehensive state-by-state analysis that makes for a perfect incentive to get going on a year of tax justice advocacy.

In 44 states, this ITEP study finds, tax structures exacerbate inequality. In 41 of those states, the top 1 percent are even paying taxes at a lower rate than everyone else. And in most all of these states, the lower the income, the higher the overall effective state and local tax rate turns out to be. You can check out how your state is faring on ITEP’s website.

On the plus side: Six states — and the District of Columbia — are actually using their tax codes to reduce inequality. What can we learn from these states? Plenty. All these jurisdictions have in place highly progressive income tax brackets, offer targeted and refundable low-income tax credits, and rely much less on regressive consumption taxes.

“The wide variety of results seen across states in this study,” conclude the authors of the new Who Pays? report, “proves that regressive state and local taxation is not inevitable.”

We agree. How we tax at every level will always be, as Who Pays? notes, “a policy choice.” Here’s to making transformative egalitarian choices in 2024!