May 14, 2025                                                         Home   Subscribe  Open in Browser

This week we’ve been pouring through the 432-page House Republican tax plan — and following the boring committee mark-up process — so you don’t have to. Trust me, this hasn’t been fun. 

What President Trump is calling a “big, beautiful bill” would deliver more than $1 trillion in tax giveaways to our richest 1 percent while kicking millions of Americans off their health insurance and taking food away from hungry children. If enacted, Trump's tax plan would become our nation’s largest single transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich ever.

But this budget battle still has a ways to go. Politically vulnerable Republican lawmakers are expressing discomfort about the severity of the pending cuts to Medicaid, food stamps, and other programs their constituents rely on. And the public outcry will only grow as more details come to light. As one of my friends puts it, “these bills age like milk.” 

We’ll be keeping you up on all this as the budget debate rolls on.

Sarah Anderson
for the Institute for Policy Studies’ Inequality.org team

A Fired Federal Worker Warns: Hurricane Prevention Cuts Will Hurt the Poor

This week’s frontline face: Sabrina Valenti, one of the more than 120,000 federal employees who’ve lost their jobs under the Elon Musk-DOGE assault on public spending. Valenti worked for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, helping to restore coastal wetlands to protect communities from hurricanes. Her work particularly aided poor households, those least likely to be able to evacuate and most likely to suffer the consequences of severe storms. 

What she's doing to help create a more equal world: Valenti, since she lost her job, has been speaking out at rallies and in the media to help Americans better understand the critical role that federal workers have played in hurricane prevention and tracking — and the potentially disastrous effects of mass layoffs. 

What makes this fight so important to her: Valenti grew up in the Gulf Coast area and remembers having to evacuate for Hurricane Ivan and having refugees from Katrina pouring into her school district. 

“I’m no stranger to natural disasters, and that’s exactly why I felt called to spend my career at NOAA,” Valenti explains. “It’s not too late to protect the federal workers who remain in their roles working on hurricane preparedness. Much of the damage from hurricanes this summer can be restored, but you can’t bring back the dead.”

Cities and States Can Lead the Way on Taxing Excessive CEO Pay

With Congressional leaders fixated on delivering new tax giveaways for the wealthy, fair tax advocates have high hopes for progressive reform at the city and state levels. This past week, Steve Novick, a member of the Portland, Oregon city council, released a plan to expand one of the most innovative municipal “tax the rich” policies: a surcharge on firms with huge CEO-worker pay gaps. 

Back in 2016, Novick led the successful effort to enact this ground-breaking law. How does the law work? For companies doing business in Portland, the standard local business profits tax stands at 2.6 percent. But under the city’s “pay ratio surcharge,” that tax increases by 10 percent if a company’s CEO compensation runs more than 100 times its median worker pay. Companies with pay ratios of more than 250 to 1 face a 25 percent increase. 

Novick now wants to hike the surcharge to 50 percent for companies with gaps of 100-to-1 and to 100 percent for a 250-to-1 ratio. This boost, he estimates, will raise Portland’s annual revenue from its excessive-CEO-pay tax from $5 million to about $27 million. For more info on curbing extensive CEO pay, including the latest on federal bills that mirror the Portland law, click the link below.

The U.S. poverty rate has declined by merely 1.8 percentage points since 1970. Over those same years, the top 1 percent of American earners have enjoyed a 10 percentage point increase in their share of national income. In the current budget negotiations, House Republicans are considering a variety of changes that would increase poverty, including deep cuts to Medicaid and Child Tax Credit restrictions that would exclude 4.5 million children. For an interactive version of this chart and more on income inequality, click the link to our Inequality.org Facts section below.

For the U.S. Postal Service, a New Privatizing Head Honcho

This week’s dour deep pocket: David Steiner, the former CEO of Waste Management and current FedEx board member just named the nation’s latest U.S. postmaster general.

What has Steiner sour: Attacks on his appointment from the unions that represent U.S. Postal Service workers. National Association of Letter Carriers president Brian Renfroe is calling Steiner’s naming “an aggressive step toward handing America’s mail system over to corporate interests.”

“Private shippers,” Renfroe adds, “have been waiting to get USPS out of parcel delivery for years.”

FedEx executive chair Frederick Smith, meanwhile, is publicly lauding Steiner’s “sharp business acumen.”

The last word: Instead of privatizing the U.S. Postal Service, notes American Postal Workers Union president Mark Dimondstein, we need to be expanding it, taking steps as varied as setting up electric vehicle charging stations in USPS parking lots and letting the USPS once again cash checks. Adds the postal worker leader: “This is the people’s postal service, emphasis on ‘service.’ It shouldn’t be sold off or diminished.”

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