August 7, 2024                                                         Home   Subscribe  Open in Browser

A particularly Inequality.org-y piece of news popped up this week. Senate Finance Committee chair Ron Wyden revealed Monday that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas failed to disclose even more of his private round-trip jet joy rides paid for by billionaire conservative donor Harlan Crow.

This latest disclosure failure underscores both the undue influence of the ultra-wealthy on American politics and the excessive use — by our wealthiest — of gas-guzzling private planes for travel.

Another issue we’ll bang the drum on at every opportunity: the democracy- distorting impact of “donor-advised funds.” A new Lever investigation details how shadowy “charity” groups have covertly funneled millions of dollars into the Heritage Foundation’s now notorious Project 2025, offering up, notes our colleague Bella DeVaan, a “poster child" example of the “threat to democracy” that donor-advised funds can pose.

And finally, we’d like to take a moment to thank this year’s Henry Wallace fellow on the Inequality.org team, Georgia Jensen. Georgia has written incisive articles on public libraries, solicited urgent pieces on anti-abortion clinics, and has generally been essential to operating our website. We wish her the best of luck as she gets started with her junior year at Rice University!

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

Working To Counter the Continuing ‘Criminalization’ of Poverty

This week’s frontline face: Christiana Stalnaker, a volunteer with RESULTS from West Virginia. She’s raising the alarm about the recent Supreme Court decision in Grants Pass that essentially opens the door for jailing people for the “crime” of not having stable housing.

What she’s doing to help create a more equal world: When the pandemic hit, Staniker and her husband lost both their business and their home and wound up living in tents for three months with their children and pets.

Now the U.S. Supreme Court, a body where several members regularly accept pricey gifts, has ruled that sleeping outside can now qualify as grounds for arrest.

What makes this fight so important: “Things need to change for families like mine,” notes Stalnaker. “The Supreme Court’s cruel decision to penalize people who are suffering is a big step in the wrong direction. How is fining and arresting people who are too poor to pay going to help?”

A far better idea, Stalnaker adds, would be to “invest in affordable housing, ensure people are paid living wages, and support struggling families with a robust safety net.”

Solving Our Transportation Woes: Why Not Publicly Owned Rail?

Last year’s toxic train derailment in Ohio’s East Palestine brought national attention to a festering problem: America’s increasingly faulty rail system. In a new piece for Inequality.org, Adam Barrington of Railroad Workers United makes the case that the crash has helped expose a system that prioritizes profits above all else, even safety. Instead of letting corporate interests run a critical transportation network, Barrington argues, let’s nationalize that network.

Public ownership of rail transportation has a long history in the United States. During World War I, a nationalized rail system both met military production needs and led to better working conditions and improved rail service. Over the pond in the UK, the rail network — only privatized in the 1990s — has an even longer history as a public service. The newly elected Labour Government has now announced plans to renationalize the UK’s rail system.

In the United States, the Railroad Workers United’s Barrington notes, we have “little hope for any improvement” in our rail system “so long as it remains in the hands of the irresponsible and unaccountable Class I robber barons.”

Are undocumented immigrants in the United States contributing their fair tax share? In 2022, calculates the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, these immigrants actually paid state and local taxes at higher effective rates than the top 1 percent of taxpayers in 40 out of 50 U.S. states. Effective tax rates measure the percentage of a person’s income that goes toward taxes. Nationwide, undocumented immigrants paid an average effective state and local tax rate of 8.9 percent, significantly more than the 7.2 percent rate that top 1 percenters paid. For an interactive version of this chart, check out the link below.

The Upcoming Tax-the-Rich Rumble in Rio: Stay Tuned!

This coming November, the heads of state of the world’s top economic powerhouses — the G20 nations — will have on their annual summit agenda a vision for creating what amounts to a minimum tax on the wealth of the world’s wealthiest. That vision comes from the G20’s national finance ministers. These ministers have just adopted a “declaration on international tax cooperation” that emphasizes the importance of getting “all taxpayers, including ultra-high-net-worth individuals, to contribute their fair share in taxes.”

How much importance should we give this unprecedented G20 finance minister declaration? Plenty. Inequality.org co-editor Sam Pizzigati has more.

This Big-Time Campaign Contributor Isn’t Keeping His Hints Subtle

This week’s dour deep pocket: Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of the networking site LinkedIn and a major donor to the presidential candidacies of Joe Biden and now Kamala Harris.

What has Hoffman sour: The angry public reaction to his attack on Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, for “waging war on American business.” Added Hoffman in a CNN interview: “I would hope that Vice President Harris would replace her.”

That would be a horrible mistake, Khan’s many admirers believe. As FTC chair, notes the American Economic Liberties Project’s Helaine Olen, “Khan has spearheaded efforts to block mergers that could result in monopolies in sectors ranging from big tech to grocery stores” and “stood up for worker rights.”

Hoffman sold his LinkedIn to Microsoft eight years ago for $26.2 billion and currently sits on the Microsoft board. Kahn’s FTC, the Wall Street Journal reports, is now investigating whether Microsoft and Hoffman’s artificial intelligence firm “structured a recent licensing deal in a way that avoids a government antitrust review.”

The last word: Billionaire campaign contributors, U.S. senator Bernie Sanders points out, “should not be telling candidates who to be keeping on or not.”  

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