A weekly newsletter from the Institute for Policy Studies |
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For nerdy number-crunchers like me, it’s always exciting when activists and elected officials make strategic use of our data. So I was thrilled this past week when I found that lawmakers were using our Institute for Policy Studies research to name and shame 35 corporations now paying their top execs more than they’re paying in federal taxes.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, Rep. Greg Casar, and 14 other members of Congress sent CEOs of this “shameful 35” letters demanding that these execs cough up info about their tax avoidance practices and lobbying expenditures.
“For decades, big businesses and the wealthy have skirted their responsibility to pay federal income taxes, leaving hardworking Americans to foot the bill,” the lawmakers wrote. “As Congress considers what to do when some provisions of the 2017 law expire next year, it is critical that we ensure that large, profitable businesses are paying their fair share.”
Which corporations rank in the “shameful 35”? A certain electric car company comes in at #1. Check out the full list and my thoughts on how we can crack down on corporate tax dodging and excessive CEO pay here. Sarah Anderson
for the Institute for Policy Studies’ Inequality.org team |
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INEQUALITY BY THE NUMBERS |
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Working to Overhaul Our Care Infrastructure This week’s frontline face: Tony Iovieno, a giving manager with Family Values @ Work and a caregiver.
What he's doing to help create a more equal world: Iovieno is speaking out about the need for paid family leave policies. Iovieno had his life turned upside down when he lost his brother in a car crash that also injured his pregnant sister-in-law. But Iovieno, thankfully, had access to paid family leave and had the right to put work aside to help his family grieve and recover from the tragic loss.
Most Americans — including the rest of Iovieno’s family — don’t have that right, a right absolutely necessary given the curveballs that life throws at us all. What makes this fight so important: “I’m sad that we lost Dave, but I’m also angry that when tragedy hits, our policies make life harder for families," Iovieno notes in a new analysis for Inequality.org. "I’m angry that for most of us, going back to work is a necessity, not a choice."
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Want To See Worker Rights Realized? Ending Filibusters Would Help!
In the United States today, the policy preferences of the many regularly play second fiddle to the preferences of our richest few. In no arena do these preferences of our wealthiest play out more obviously than worker rights.
The wave of labor activism that the coronavirus pandemic kicked off, notes National Employment Law Project Action director Paul Sonn, is now confronting that reality. Current U.S. Senate filibuster rules give our rich the power to block demands — like a $15 minimum wage — that have widespread public support. The federal minimum remains at an unbelievably paltry $7.25.
Current filibuster rules are also blocking the pending PRO Act, legislation that would remove major obstacles that workers face in their struggles to gain union recognition. Killing the filibuster once and for all, Sonn helps us understand, could be a real game-changer. |
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Wealthy donors, many connected to the fossil-fuel industry, are pouring billions of dollars into “charities” that are actively spreading disinformation about climate change. A new report from the Climate Accountability Research Project and the Institute for Policy Studies traces $219 million in such taxpayer-subsidized contributions to just six donor-advised funds and private foundations that are giving tax breaks to billionaires while threatening the future of our planet. Our colleagues Bella DeVaan, Chuck Collins, and Helen Flannery have a breakdown of that report below.
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The Real Shortcut to Long-Term Security: Greater Equality
Budding entrepreneurs the world over are devoting their time and talents these days to making our Earth as safe as possible for our planet’s richest, that top 1 percent that now holds more wealth, relates a new report from Oxfam, than the entire bottom 95 percent combined. Meanwhile, at the same time, the dollars of our global ultra-rich continue to be, Oxfam relates, “disproportionately invested in the companies driving climate breakdown.”
This can’t end well. Inequality.org co-editor Sam Pizzigati has more. |
PETULANT PLUTOCRAT OF THE WEEK |
A Trump Fanboy Fears Hard Times Ahead for Hedge Funds
This week’s dour deep pocket: the billionaire hedge fund manager John Paulson, a Trump mega-donor since 2016.
What has Paulson sour: the prospect that Donald Trump might lose the 2024 presidential election. A Kamala Harris win, Paulson told Fox Business last month, would raise the corporate tax rate from 21 to 28 percent and up the tax on realized capital gains from 20 to 28 percent.
And if Harris also does succeed in getting implemented a 25 percent tax on the unrealized capital gains of America’s super rich, Paulson ominously added, “that would cause mass selling of almost everything — stocks, bonds, homes, art” and trigger “a crash in the markets and a pretty quick recession.”
The last word: Donald Trump, Vanity Fair reports, has floated Paulson as the next secretary of the treasury should he be elected. |
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What's new on Inequality.org
Sam Pizzigati and Bob Lord, Walmart and Amazon Exploit and Destroy. The Alternative? Both companies are far too dominant in their industries. Cooperatives present an egalitarian alternative.
Chris Mills Rodrigo, The Campaign to Unionize Amazon Gains Momentum. Slow gains are chipping away at the e-commerce giant’s anti-union strategy.
Dan Petegorsky, How One Donor-Advised Fund Helps Leonard Leo Weaponize Philanthropy. Donor-advised fund giant Schwab Charitable plays a pivotal role in Leonard Leo’s weaponized funding schemes.
Elsewhere on the web
Max Lawson, Equality: A truly magic bullet, Equals. We need to do more than stress the incredible harms inequality foists upon us. We need to stress the incredible benefits that high levels of equality bestow.
Americans for Tax Fairness, Fact-Checking JCT Estimate Of Tax Rate Paid By Highest-Income 0.01%. Congressional Republicans are touting a recent Joint Committee on Taxation report as proof that the ultra-wealthy are paying their fair tax share, but nothing could be further from the truth.
Beth Kowitt, How Big Business Lost Americans’ Trust, Bloomberg. In the mid-20th century, a growing U.S. economy lifted everyone. These days, only the richest among us seem to be rising.
Rachel Lerman, Julie Zauzmer Weil, Emma Kumer, and Clara Ence Morse, Here’s how rich each candidate is compared with the average American, Washington Post. Only Tim Walz rates as “very ordinary economically,” a real change, says Princeton historian Julian Zelizer, from what we’ve been seeing. Robert Reich, Buying back CHIPS, Substack. We can prevent top corporate shareholders and executives from siphoning off public tax dollars.
Judith Garber, What do the highest-paid nonprofit hospital CEOs have in common? Lown Institute. Some “nonprofit” hospital CEOs are making over 1,000 times as much as their housekeeping staffers. Eva Krick, How social inequality breeds unequal political participation – and what to do about it, London School of Economics. The advantages our better-off enjoy heavily significantly distort rates of political participation.
Ken Theobald, The ‘pandemic of greed’ still divides the world, Canadian Dimension. The world has emerged from the pandemic with an unprecedented concentration of wealth and power in the hands of our super rich. Dev Kar, The Dark Underbelly of India’s Rising Income Inequality, The Wire. Inequality short-circuits economic growth by limiting a society’s overall increase in personal consumption. The ultra-rich, after all, can only consume so much. Take a reading break
CNBC, Senate Democrats target companies with imbalance in executive pay, taxes. The business network reports on Congressional letters to 35 profitable corporations that paid their top executives more than they paid in federal taxes in recent years.
To See Each Other, A Beloved Nursing Home. Former People’s Action Director George Goehl hosts this gripping podcast about smalltown Wisconsin residents fighting the sale of a public-owned nursing home to for-profit private equity investors. |
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ON BILLIONAIRES AND THE REST OF US |
This newsletter and the whole Inequality.org project are powered by donations. We’re not raking in cash from the billionaire class, though. We’re counting on people to see why this reporting, research, and advocacy matters, and then to become paid subscribers, by making a recurring monthly donation of any amount. Make a monthly gift as a paid subscriber. Start your paid subscription today. |
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Inequality.org | www.inequality.org | inequality@ips-dc.org Institute for Policy Studies
1301 Connecticut Avenue Ste 600
Washington, DC 20036
United States
Managing Editor: Chris Mills Rodrigo
Co-Editors: Sarah Anderson, Chuck Collins, Bella DeVaan, and Sam Pizzigati |
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