April 3, 2024                                                         Home   Subscribe  Open in Browser

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.

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

Fighting Back Against the Scourge of Private Equity Greed 

When Evan Brandt started working at the Mercury, the daily newspaper of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, in 1997, the paper had more than 20 editorial staffers. Brandt’s reporting would go on to help lead to the ouster of a corrupt local politician and the shutdown of a toxic worksite. 

Today, with the Mercury down to just two reporters, Brandt says he sometimes has to try to cover three community meetings at the same time. In-depth coverage of this year’s local political races? Forget it.   

The gutting of the Mercury began after a major Wall Street firm, Alden Global Capital, bought the paper in 2011 and promptly began following what has become the standard private equity playbook. Alden loaded the Mercury up with debt and then started slashing jobs.  

The same outfit that sucked the value out of the Mercury also bought the mobile home park where Valeria Steele lives in West Virginia. At a recent virtual event hosted by Americans for Financial Reform and the NewsGuild union, Steele explained how Alden hiked rent by 150 percent and started mass evictions.

Learn more from Steele and Brandt about the real-life impact of private equity — and what we can do about it — at the link below.  

A New Effort to Help Us Understand How Inequality Impacts Economics

Economics departments at major American universities have long tended to celebrate “free markets” and show next to no interest in wealth concentration and what the government can do about it. At American University’s new Institute for Macroeconomic & Policy Analysis, analysts are taking a different path. They’re incorporating inequality and market power into their calculations.

One of the Washington, D.C.-based Institute’s first pieces of research focuses on a trio of proposals to repeal credits for clean energy and clean vehicles that were included in the Inflation Reduction Act. The group found that eliminating these incentives, despite being pitched as a way to reduce spending and improve the economy, would actually reduce the U.S. gross domestic product. 

This new Institute will be celebrating its first anniversary later this month with a colloquium on inequality, tax policy, and macroeconomics, and Inequality.org co-editor Sarah Anderson will be moderating one of the session’s panels. Interested in attending? This April 17 event features a virtual option. You can register below!

Shouldn’t Every American Be Able To Enjoy the Luxury of a Roof?

Over 5.5 million Americans now hold liquid assets worth over $1 million, a total up 62 percent over the past decade. Rich people-friendly observers of America’s economic scene, naturally enough, see stats like these as cause for nothing but celebration. A rising tide, they like to quip, lifts all boats. But we are, in fact, witnessing no significant rising of any sort for working families. We are witnessing instead stunning increases in what America’s rich are spending on luxury for themselves. For America’s poorest, meanwhile, “luxury” has come to mean keeping a roof over your head. Inequality.org co-editor Sam Pizzigati has more.

Standing Up for the Right to Raze As Many Houses As You Want

This week’s dour deep pocket: Kathy Cargill, a married-in heir to the mega-billion fortune of Minnesota’s Cargill family, the owner of America’s largest privately held corporation.

What has her sour: The perplexed and hostile public reaction to her buying up over 20 single-family homes on the picturesque sandbar that juts out from downtown Duluth into Lake Superior — and then having the homes razed without offering any rational explanation why.

Cargill did say that she “couldn’t imagine living” in any of the homes, residences she called “pieces of crap.”

The global environmental group Mighty Earth has labeled the source of Kathy Cargill’s wealth, the agribusiness giant Cargill, the “Worst Company in the World” for its decades of — among other sins — exploiting child labor, hawking contaminated meat, and deforesting huge swatches of the planet.

The last word: Kathy Cargill, writes the Minnesota magazine editor Jay Boller, “apparently never considered the social consequences” of her real-estate bulldozing because of the “titanic chasm” between the daily concerns of Duluthians and the world where Cargill, an avid luxury-car collector, can snap up “six-figure” McLarens “like packs of gum.”

Tim Schwab, Amy Schiller, and Bella DeVaan, Reading Philanthropy: A Conversation with Authors Amy Schiller and Tim Schwab. How our philanthropic system allows richer-than-ever donors to exert enormous influence, launder their reputations, and preserve their wealth at the expense of solutions that address the root causes of inequality that necessitate philanthropy in the first place. 

Sonali Kolhatkar and Sarah Anderson, Tax Day Injustice,YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali. A discussion of solutions to unfair corporate tax rates in light of our new Inequality.org report on executive pay outpacing taxes.

Wealth is increasingly concentrating in nearly every nation. But the amount of wealth necessary to make the top 1 percent within individual nations varies widely.  According to the latest Knight Frank Wealth Report, an American needs to be sitting on at least $5.8 million to join this elite club, 5.4 times as much as the minimum needed to enter the top 1 percent in China, the world’s second-largest economy after the United States. For an interactive version of this chart and more on global inequality, check out the link below.

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