June 12, 2024                                                         Home   Subscribe  Open in Browser

Earlier today our Inequality.org co-editor Sarah Anderson testified before the U.S. Senate on the need to make Wall Street’s movers and shakers pay their fair tax share and just how we could make that happen.

For far too long, Sarah told the Senate Budget Committee, Wall Street’s “excessive power” has shaped our tax code and let its firms and execs “continue practices that benefit the few while putting the rest of us at risk.”

The upcoming 2025 tax debate, Sarah added, offers “an opportunity to fix these problems, as part of a much-needed overhaul of our tax code to make our economy stronger and more equitable.”

The nation will be having that tax debate next year because most of the tax changes that Donald Trump signed into law in 2017 will be expiring by the end of 2025. With Sarah’s continuing help, we'll be closely covering this crucial debate — and doing our best to help all of you make a positive impact on it!

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

In El Salvador, Resisting a Dangerous and Unconstitutional Regime

This week’s frontline faces: The civil society groups and activists standing up to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele as his controversial second term begins.

What they're doing to help create a more equal world: Bukele broke his nation’s constitution to allow himself a second term, one where observers worry he'll continue to use state force to repress critics.

Roughly 80,000 people have been arrested in El Salvador since Bukele declared a "state of emergency" in 2022. Observers consider between 30 and 70 percent of those detained to be innocent. Among the detainees: five water rights defenders the Institute for Policy Studies has been working to have released.

At a press conference held last month, Salvadoran activist leaders pledged to keep resisting government overreach despite threats against them.

What makes this fight so important: Bukele is “selling the country to the highest bidder and will do with it whatever he wants,” says Association for Economic and Social Development of Santa Marta leader Vidalina Morales.

"The repression of the most vulnerable sectors of the population is increasing through unjust arrests and the elimination of all guarantees for all citizens,” adds Ivania Cruz, an activist with United for Human and Community Rights.

Read more about the brave activists standing up to Bukele from IPS analyst Manuel Perez-Rocha at the link below.

Correcting the Record on Our Nation’s Generational Wealth Gaps

Millennials, the conventional wisdom used to go, have spent so much money on avocado toast and iced lattes that they will never be able to afford homes. Now new studies are suggesting that the generation may actually end up going down as the richest ever.

Researchers Rob Gruijters, Nicole Kapelle, Zachary van Winkle, and Anette Fasang have run all the numbers and found that Millennial wealth is indeed rising. But only a precious few, they note, are enjoying that prosperity.

A handful of 30-somethings — think Mark Zuckerberg, for example — have become so exorbitantly rich that they’ve distorted their entire generation’s economic status. To resolve these distortions, Gruijters and his colleagues are advocating for higher minimum wages and new taxes on wealth and inheritances.

Read their research at the link below and check out a chart in the next section that underlines the stark portion of wealth held by the richest Millennials.

For the Rich, One Nation Isn’t Rolling Out the Red Carpet

Norway’s wealthiest have faced a wealth tax ever since 1892, and, over the generations since then, no nation in the world has taken taxing wealth as seriously. But that tax-the-rich tradition came under a direct challenge in 2013 when a newly elected conservative government set about cutting Norway’s richest some slack at tax time. This experiment would end abruptly in 2021 after elections placed back in power a legislative majority deeply committed to having the rich pay their fair tax share. The result? Inequality.org co-editor Sam Pizzigati has more.

A Top Billionaire’s Blatant Bid To Sidestep Taxes Backfires

This week’s dour deep pocket:  Michael Saylor, the billionaire co-founder of the business software giant MicroStrategy.

What has Saylor sour: The District of Columbia, with some ace whistleblower help, has caught Saylor defrauding the city out of millions in personal income tax revenue. Last week Saylor agreed to a settlement that will have him cough up $40 million to the District’s tax office.

But Saylor is still denying charges that he lied when he misrepresented himself as a resident first of low-tax Virginia and later of no-income-tax Florida. 

“I continue to dispute the allegation that I was ever a resident of the District of Columbia,” Saylor insists. “I have agreed to settle this matter to avoid the continued burdens of the litigation on friends, family, and myself.”

Saylor attorney Eugene Scalia, former Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia’s son, last year dismissed the charges against his client as a “speculative tale of connivance” chock full of “fatal legal flaws.” Among the “flaws” that D.C. investigators had collected: a 2012 Saylor Facebook post with a photo captioned “view from my Georgetown balcony this morning.”

The last word: “This precedent-setting settlement,” notes D.C. attorney general Brian Schwalb, “makes clear that no one in the District of Columbia, no matter how wealthy or powerful they may be, is above the law.”

Good Work, Why do CEOs make so much money now? A look at how execs try to justify the widening gaps between their salaries and those of their employees.

Know Your Enemy, What Was the CIO? Historian Tim Barker and editor Ben Mabie join the show to discuss the history of this landmark labor body.

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