May 15, 2023                                                                   Home   Subscribe    Open in Browser

U.S. billionaires set a new record last year. They collectively spent a jaw-dropping $1 billion on the 2022 midterm elections, according to new research from our friends at Americans for Tax Fairness.

That total represents a 72 percent increase over the 2018 midterms and a 3,000 percent increase since the midterms in 2010, just before the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision opened the floodgates for big money in politics. How big is the money? Just 15 billionaires generated almost two-thirds of all billionaire contributions to 2022 midterm campaigns.

All those dollars our nation’s wealthy are funneling into our elections are just a drop in the bucket compared to the return on investment they expect from the elected officials they financially support. And they’re getting that return. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, for example, has pocketed “extraordinary” billionaire backing. He has, in return, rubber-stamped a juicy pro-corporate agenda. 

We’re now seeing first-hand what happens when lawmakers let billionaires get away with paying taxes at a lower effective rate than average working people. Billionaires are, in effect, parlaying their untaxed wealth gains into legislation that attacks our nation’s most vulnerable. More on the corrupting influence of grand fortunes — and what we can do about them — in this week’s issue.

Chuck Collins and Rebekah Entralgo,
for the Institute for Policy Studies' Inequality.org team

Teachers Are Standing Up to Anti-Union, Billionaire-Friendly Lawmakers

Last week, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis appeared at a Miami charter school to sign into law a slate of education bills. One of these bills, cynically marketed by DeSantis as “paycheck protection,” eliminates the ability of public sector unions to collect dues via payroll deduction. Another, a “school choice” bill, expands the state’s charter school voucher program, a move that will let parents opt out of public schools and send their children to private schools on the state dime.

This legislation, United Teachers of Dade President Karla Hernandez-Mats tells Inequality.org, will only exacerbate the state’s ongoing teacher shortage crisis and accelerate the larger right-wing agenda to defund public education.

“This will hurt working people and the middle class,” Hernández-Mats explains. “This is about going after our freedom, about going after workers and their right to a fair contract.”

Our managing editor Rebekah Entralgo has more on the new Florida legislation and what teachers are doing to fight back.

Regulate Donor-Advised Funds to Secure the Supreme Court

Journalists, it seems, just can’t stop unearthing shocking details of how shadowy influence campaigns have fashioned our Supreme Court’s conservative majority. Ultra-wealthy judicial activists exploit the law's current weaknesses to covertly channel their money into politics: Leonard Leo, for example, relies on a perfectly legal design flaw in our philanthropic sector. 

Tax filings from last year indicate that Schwab Charitable, a major donor-advised fund sponsor, contributed $141.5 million to the 85 Fund, a key charitable component of Leo’s court-packing project. Donor-advised funds, our Dan Petegorsky explains, can conceal donor identities and feign a broader berth of support, helping nonprofits retain their public charity status. 

Leo’s antics distill why we need to reform how charity operates. Check out Petegorsky’s take at the link below.

To Protect Our Children, Let’s Seriously Tax Our Rich

America’s social studies textbooks urgently need an update — on child labor. Those textbooks, ever since the mid-20th century, have applauded the reforms that ended the child-labor horrors that ran widespread throughout the nation’s early Industrial Age. Now those horrors are reappearing.

Jobs for the youngest among us, claim cheerleaders for erasing protections for kids, build character. Over a century ago, amid the initial push against child labor, no American did more to protect kids from sophistry like that than the philosopher Felix Adler. The nation, Adler deeply believed, must limit the incentives that drive employers to exploit kids — by refusing to let the rich keep as much as they could grab. Inequality.org’s Sam Pizzigati has more.

Scientists Say ‘No More’ to CEO’s Academic Profiteering

This week’s dour deep pocket: Erik Engstrom, CEO of RELX, the parent company of Elsevier, the world’s largest publisher of scientific journals.  

What has him sour: Engstrom, Elsevier’s CEO before moving up the RELX corporate ladder, has helped turn scientific publishing into a global empire “far more profitable” than either the film or record industries, businesses that take in comparable annual revenues. Elsevier profits have hovered near a remarkable annual 40 percent, and Engstrom, earlier this year, crowed about his company’s “strong cash flow and financial position.” But scientists have begun fighting back against Elsevier’s in-your-face profiteering. Last month, over 40 academics resigned as editors of two Elsevier journals after the company refused to drop the fee that scientists must pay to get their articles published. 

The last word: The neurologists who resigned from their Elsevier editorial roles are launching a nonprofit open-access journal because, as Cardiff University’s Chris Chambers notes, “Elsevier preys on the academic community, claiming huge profits while adding little value to science.”

Senate Budget Committee, The Rich Get Richer, Deficits Get Bigger: How Tax Cuts for the Wealthy and Corporations Drive the National Debt. On Wednesday morning, tune in to watch a significant hearing on the debt-ceiling battle. It’s appalling that IRS and public program funding is sitting on the chopping block — especially since the former will help us expand the latter. 

F.d Signifier, How Milton Friedman Broke The American Economy, The Class Room. Ronald Reagan learned his disastrous "trickle down" economics from an economist named Milton Friedman. We're still suffering the consequences today.

Jim Wallis, Matthew Desmond on America's "Sinful" Treatment of Poor People, The Soul of the Nation. Desmond explains why the United States has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. He calls the Republican plan to reduce federal spending by cutting poverty programs "sinful and shameful" and offers five ways we can all become “poverty abolitionists.”

The average wealth of the richest 400 Americans ended up lower in 2022 than in 2021. But don’t break out the hankies. At more than $10 billion, the average net worth of our super rich still ran higher than in any other year over the past four decades. We have an interactive version of this chart — and more wealth inequality data charts — at the link below.