June 26, 2024                                                         Home   Subscribe  Open in Browser

Defying all previously understood conceptions of time, the 2024 presidential campaign will kick off in earnest tomorrow with a nationally televised debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

If you can bring yourself to watch these two men duke it out again, we recommend paying particular attention to how the two approach our nation’s  continuing maldistribution of income and wealth. Their policy differences here, particularly on taxing the rich, could end up making a huge difference.

Trump's 2017 tax cuts have ushered in a new era of wealth concentration — look no further than our chart on stock buybacks in this week's issue for an example — and Trump most likely will champion extending those cuts when they expire at the end of 2025. Biden most likely won’t and has called for a new billionaires tax, although he has yet to throw his full weight behind it. Let’s see if he makes the case for that tax in tomorrow’s debate.

Speaking of new taxes on billionaires, yesterday saw an exciting new global development on that front. We have more on that below and will be following up in much more detail next week. Stay tuned!

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

Unionizing Banks to Protect Our Nation’s Workers and Consumers 

This week’s frontline face: Kier Cuadras, a 22-year employee of Wells Fargo and a member of the operating committee of Wells Fargo Workers United. 

In 2016, bonus-chasing executives pressured Wells Fargo employees to open millions of fraudulent accounts, leading to billions of dollars in fines. After that scandal, Cuadras transitioned from a branch manager position to an investigator post and handled complaints related to the bank’s sales practices.

Wells Fargo officials recently announced they’re shipping the job Cuadras does overseas, a move she fears will create more risks for the bank and its customers. 

What she’s doing to help create a more equal world: Cuadras recently joined a webinar the Institute for Policy Studies co-hosted with a variety of consumer and labor groups to explain how the current union drive she’s supporting at Wells Fargo would boost both financial stability and equity.

“Employees have no voice,” notes Cuadras. “If we’d had a union prior to 2016, I don’t think the fake accounts scandal would have happened.”

What makes equality so important to her: Wells Fargo called the Cuadras job cut an “efficiency” measure. But Wells Fargo CEO Charles Scharf pocketed $26 million last year and recently spent $550 million on a Manhattan office tower so he could avoid having to commute to the bank’s San Francisco headquarters. 

“It just breaks my heart,” Cuadras shares. “I’ve loved working for Wells Fargo. But we have a CEO who likes to hop from one financial institution to another telling veterans like myself that we’re not worth anything.” 

Hear more about the dangers of Wall Street greed from Cuadras, Inequality.org co-editor Sarah Anderson, and other experts at the link below. 

How — and How Much — To Tax the World’s Billionaires

A month from now, in Rio de Janeiro, the finance ministers of the world’s most powerful economic players will have before them a proposal that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. Yesterday, in a news conference hosted by Brazil’s finance ministry, that proposal — a call for a global minimum tax on billionaires —  had its public unveiling.

The presenter: Gabriel Zucman, a top global authority on how unequal our world has become. Earlier this year, Brazil — the nation that currently holds the G20 presidency — commissioned Zucman to prepare a feasibility study on the notion of a minimum global billionaire levy. His new report, A Blueprint for a Coordinated Minimum Effective Taxation Standard for Ultra-High-Net-Worth Individuals, finds that notion eminently realizable.

A global “minimum tax on billionaires equal to 2 percent of their wealth,” Zucman’s analysis shows, “would raise $200-$250 billion per year globally from about 3,000 individuals.” Extending the tax to individuals with net-worths over $100 million would add as much as $140 billion a year to that total.

Inequality.org will have much more on Zucman’s research — and the political prospects for a global minimum tax on billionaires — in next week’s issue.

Big corporations promised to put their windfalls from the 2017 Republican tax cuts into worker pay raises. Instead, they largely blew those windfalls on stock buybacks, a financial maneuver that artificially inflates CEO stock-based pay. Goldman Sachs analysts expect a sharp uptick in buybacks this year and a record-breaking outlay of more than $1 trillion in 2025. For an interactive version of this chart and more analysis, check out the testimony that Inequality.org’s Sarah Anderson recently delivered to the U.S. Senate Budget Committee. 

In France, a Bold New Take on ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité’

France has rendered unto the world, over the past quarter-century, a distinct public service. Thanks to the trailblazing research of three French scholars — Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman — we know much more about our world’s wealth concentration than ever before. Could France now be on the brink of making another significant contribution to a more equal global future?

That question has suddenly become surprisingly timely. French voters, after an unexpected turn of political events, will shortly have a real opportunity to begin shearing our world’s richest down to something approximating democratic size. Inequality.org co-editor Sam Pizzigati has more.

Should You Go to Jail for Just Trying To Share a Little Love?

This week’s dour deep pocket: The 87-year-old British billionaire Joe Lewis, a wheeler-dealer who used staffers he had serving on corporate boards pass him confidential tidbits useful for hitting insider-trading jackpots.

What has Lewis sour: The U.S. federal prosecutors who had Lewis, at the start of this year, fearing he might have to serve time in a federal high-security prison with a “dangerous inmate population.”

Those prosecutors last year had Lewis criminally indicted for abusing the “inside information he gained through his access to corporate boardrooms to tip off his friends, employees, and romantic interests.” He faced a maximum 20 years in prison.

But Lewis pled guilty earlier this year and apologized for his conduct to the judge hearing his case. That judge earlier this spring sentenced Lewis to three years of probation instead of jail time. Lewis will also have to pay a fine of $5 million, a sum less than 1 percent of his $7.67-billion personal fortune.

The last word: Lewis, amid his legal travails, admitted to prosecutors that he passed illegal insider-trading tips to his long-time private jet pilots to offset his failure to provide them with pensions.

More Perfect Union, How Tyson Captured All The Pork You Eat (And Made Billions). Intense concentration in the hog market has made a few companies billions and left small farmers with nothing.

Lever Time, The World After Billionaire Media. Semafor editor-in-chief Ben Smith joins David Sirota to discuss journalism’s industry-wide reckoning and why independent news might come out on top.

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