February 21, 2024                                                          Home   Subscribe   Open in Browser

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.

Chuck Collins and Chris Mills Rodrigo
for the Institute for Policy Studies’ Inequality.org team

The Tax-Prep Industry’s TurboTax Would Love to Silence This Woman

Susan Harley, a veteran corporate watchdog at Public Citizen, has gone on a new mission — to spread the word about Direct File, the free tax-filing software soon to be available from the IRS. With this new tool, the IRS is aiming to help ordinary Americans avoid having to use programs like TurboTax to file their taxes online.

The profit-driven tax preparation industry, naturally, isn’t welcoming this new public option. With the IRS about to launch Direct File pilots in a dozen states, TurboTax’s parent company, Intuit, and other firms are spending big bucks to undercut the new program. 

“This is an important fight to ensure greedy tax prep companies don’t continue to rake in money from filers who are simply doing their civic duty,” says Harley, who co-leads outreach efforts for the Coalition for Free and Fair Filing. 

Critical to winning the fight for a tax-filing alternative? Getting the word out and lining up eligible taxpayers to use Direct File this tax season. Learn more from Harley and find out whether the IRS pilot involves your state at the link below. 

Big New Progressive Dreams for a Better Public Transit Future

Earlier this month, a user-made Atlanta transit map went viral on social media. Comments like “They should’ve done this 25 years ago” and “let’s get this idea in the hands of the politicians ASAP” flooded in. Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority quickly distanced itself, reminding the public that pursuing such projects would take billions in additional funding.

“I’m glad that people are starting to dream and have these big ideas of what the system should look like,” Transit Equity Organizer Bakari Height told Inequality.org in a recent interview. “People are waking up and seeing that this is something that’s really valuable, something that they want to utilize.”

Truth be told, most Americans want more public transportation. In a 2023 nationwide survey of registered voters, 71 percent of respondents agreed that we should be shifting funding from highways to public transit.

Yet car-centric infrastructure remains a top government priority. For every $4 allocated to highways, Congress typically only allocates $1 to public transit. This disconnect in U.S. transportation policy drives inequality and weakens public trust in government.

Things don’t have to be this way. Inequality.org’s Liam Crisan has more on what local community action groups and advocates on Capitol Hill are doing.

Could the World’s Next Big Billionaire Thing Be Hunting Humans?

How much — in our current 21st-century plutocratic climate — can the richest among us get away with? They can, two Austrian filmmakers posit, get away with murder. Literally. The two filmmakers, Daniel Hoesl and Julia Niemann, have just given their latest collaboration a world premiere at the annual Sundance Film Festival. Notes Hoesl: “We always follow the money.” And the money in their new film has led them to the story of Amon Maynard, a billionaire who enjoys hunting humans. Need some real-world perspective on Hoesl and Niemann’s fresh and daring satirical thriller? Inequality.org co-editor Sam Pizzigati has some to share.

Fomenting Friction in America’s Somewhat Less than Friendly Skies

This week’s dour deep pocket : Scott Kirby, the chief exec of United Airlines since 2020 — and the highest-paid CEO in the airline industry.

What has him sour: Just about everyone else involved in the airline business, most recently the flight attendants who last week staged demonstrations against “corporate greed” in some 30 airports.

Kirby last September ignited flight attendant anger when he claimed that United had become “overstaffed.” The union that represents United flight attendants promptly retorted that United’s prime competitor, American Airlines, has “nearly double” United’s staffing levels. 

Earlier last summer, amid a heavy thunderstorm stretch, United’s understaffing had the airline canceling 750 flights on just one day. Kirby blamed that disruption on a shortage of federal air traffic controllers. But U.S. transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg quickly pointed out that, amid the horrible weather, only United passengers had to suffer through massive flight cancellations and delays.

Meanwhile, on the same day United cancelled the 750 flights, Kirby — who pocketed $16.8 billion in 2022, according to one analysis — took a private jet flight to get himself from New Jersey to Denver.

The last word: “It’s time for United leadership,” the airline’s pilots union concluded last year, “to change their thinking and invest in its labor, staff support, and facilities with updated contracts instead of ensuring our CEO has the highest salary.”

More Perfect Union, Why Child Care Is So Damn Expensive Now, More Perfect Union. Parents can pay upwards of $20,000 per child per year, but most child care services struggle to break even. Half of Americans live in child care deserts. 

Paris Marx and Nastasia Hadjadji, France’s Start-Up Nation Is a Neoliberal Hell, Tech Won't Save Us.  A look at Emmanuel Macron’s plan to run France like a start-up and how that justified a further dismantling of France's welfare state. 

Global data provided by LinkedIn indicates that women made up just 32.2 percent of senior leadership positions in 2022, nearly 10 percentage points lower than women’s overall workforce representation of 41.9 percent. Women worldwide continue to be outnumbered by men in senior leadership positions across all industries. For an interactive version of this chart and other gender inequality charts, check out the link below.

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