March 5, 2025                                                         Home   Subscribe  Open in Browser

No one can blame you for skipping President Trump's nearly 100-minute-long address to Congress Tuesday evening, a speech predictably riddled with lies and bloviation about the administration’s “accomplishments.” We don't need to repeat what you already know about the emptiness and cruelty of Trump and his DOGE.

But let’s not forget that so many who chose to vote for Trump did so because they believed he would actually be tackling our ongoing cost-of-living crisis. More than a month into Trump II, that has clearly not been the case. Aggressive tariffs on our allies now stand poised to spike grocery prices, and Trump’s proposed tax breaks for billionaires won't be trickling down.

The Democratic Party’s opposition to all this came across last night as typically disorganized. Some Democrats chose to skip the speech entirely. Others resisted in ways that looked a lot more like January 2016 than March 2025. The official Democratic Party response from Senator Elissa Slotkin even included some puzzling praise for Ronald Reagan.

The evening’s bright spots: Bernie Sanders delivered a clear-eyed indictment of Trump's billionaire-enriching, all while pulling in hundreds of thousands more viewers than the official party reply. And new Congressional Progressive Caucus head Greg Casar summed up Trump's address perfectly: "They want to steal our healthcare, steal from our veterans, and steal from you to give to billionaires."

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

A Wells Fargo Employee Spotlights the Dangers of Excessive CEO Pay 

This week’s frontline face: Kieran Cuadras, a former internal investigator of misconduct allegations against Wells Fargo. 

What she’s doing to help create a more equal world: Cuadras recently spoke at a congressional staff briefing to explain — from her own personal experience — how excessive CEO pay harms workers and consumers.

Since Wells Fargo’s infamous “fake accounts” scandal of 2016, Cuadras has observed continued recklessness aimed at squeezing employees and consumers to pump up executive paychecks. She’s advocating taxes on excessive CEO compensation to encourage more equitable corporate practices. 

What makes this fight so important to her: Last year, Cuadras found out about a Wells Fargo plan to cut costs by outsourcing her department’s jobs to India, a move, she explains in a new Inequality.org op-ed, that will both cost Wells Fargo workers their jobs and possibly put “clients’ private information at risk.”

Cuadras and her co-workers last fall decided to unionize, but Wells Fargo has refused to negotiate. The company has also fired Cuadras for what she sees as retaliation for her organizing activity. Our nation’s leaders, says Cuadras, need to “do something about a CEO pay system that rewards executives with obscenely large paychecks for practices that harm workers and the broader economy.”

Correctly Classifying Workers Can Help Both Workers and Our States

Employers in the United States are increasingly dodging their legal obligations to workers by misclassifying them as independent contractors. This systematic dodging deprives workers of fundamental labor rights that range from minimum wages to protections against on-the-job discrimination.

Misclassifying workers, Economic Policy Institute researchers Adewale Maye and Daniel Perez note, also negatively impacts federal and state insurance funds. By establishing new rules about who can be considered an independent contractor, they add, policymakers can make real strides toward protecting worker rights.

Republicans now busy advancing their tax agenda are showing zero interest in addressing one of the most powerful drivers of inequality: the tax code’s preferential treatment of income from investments over income from work. The top tax rate for long-term capital gains now rests at just 20 percent. The top marginal tax rate on ordinary income? Almost double that: 37 percent.

This disparity overwhelmingly benefits the ultra-rich, who make most of their money from investments. The rest of us get the vast majority of our income from wages and salaries. For an interactive version of this chart and more on income inequality, click the link below.

America’s Most Celebrated 20th-Century Chief Executive Lives On

Back in the early 1970s, one of our nation’s top corporate chiefs — General Electric CEO Reginald Jones — was pulling down a mere $200,000 a year. His big-time CEO counterparts were then averaging, along with Jones, only 20 times or so more than what their workers were making.

Today’s CEOs, by contrast, are averaging hundreds of times what their workers are earning. Just how did we arrive at this sad state of affairs? Maybe we should blame Reginald Jones. He let Jack Welch become his successor. Inequality.org co-editor Sam Pizzigati has more.

A Big-Tech Chief Executive Takes on the Party Poopers at the SEC

This week’s dour deep pocket: Brian Armstrong, the billionaire CEO of the Coinbase crypto trading platform.

What has Armstrong sour: the nasty bureaucrats at the federal Securities and Exchange Commission. Two years ago these nasties charged that Coinbase, operating as an unregistered securities broker, had “deprived investors of significant protections,” including “safeguards against conflicts of interest.”

But those charges have now gone kaput. The SEC, Armstrong crowed late last month, has just cut an agreement with Coinbase that will have the crypto giant paying “$0 in fines” and making “zero changes to our business.”

Behind the SEC about-face: a massive wave of crypto-industry political contributions last year for Donald Trump and pro-Trump congressional candidates. Armstrong subsequently met with Trump shortly after the November elections and had his Coinbase hand $1 million to Trump’s inaugural bash.

The last word: Coinbase, Popular Information reports, has “also helped personally enrich Trump” since the election by “quickly listing” his new meme coin, $TRUMP, on its trading platform. Trump and his meme team have so far cleared over $58 million in $TRUMP trading-fee earnings.

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