June 18, 2025                                                         Home   Subscribe  Open in Browser

With the assassination of Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark this past weekend, we haven’t just lost a pair of loving parents and active community residents. We’ve lost a champion of egalitarian policies.

Melissa Hortman helped drive the “Minnesota Miracle” of 2023. Under her speakership, the Minnesota House of Representatives ushered into law pro-labor reforms ranging from minimum pay and benefits for nursing home staff to wage-theft protections for construction workers.

Hortman also helped secure the right of teachers to negotiate over class sizes, and her legislative activism has given nurses a greater say in staffing levels. The bills she championed to ban employer-friendly “non-compete” pacts and “captive audience” meetings will no doubt boost many future union campaigns.

May Melissa and Mark’s memory be an inspiration for fighting everywhere for a more equitable distribution of the wealth that worker labor creates.

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

Hitting the Road in the Ongoing Struggle for Tax Fairness 

This week’s frontline face: Kristen Crowell, the executive director of Fair Share America, a new organization supporting efforts to make wealthy individuals and the profitable corporations they run pay what they really owe. 

What she’s doing to help create a more equal world: Crowell is now heading off on a 14-state “Stop the Billionaire Giveaway” bus tour to publicize the high stakes in the current federal budget debate. 

What makes this fight so important to Crowell: Over recent months, while knocking on doors and holding in-person and online town halls, she’s encountered widespread anger about the deep cuts to social programs and tax giveaways for billionaires in the pending GOP budget plan. 

“Getting to be with people who are scared and hurting but doing something powerful together to make change,” Crowell has told Inequality.org co-editor Sarah Anderson, “keeps me going.”

Several of Crowell’s children will be joining her on the bus tour, and Crowell is hoping the experience will give them “a strong example of what it means to stand up for our values.”

How Crowell will keep up her energy covering 4,000 miles in three weeks: “I’ve been working in the tax justice space for a long time and look forward to seeing old friends and new allies along the route. It truly will be one of the greatest months of my life. And my love of strong, black coffee doesn’t hurt!”

For the full Crowell interview, click the link below. 

America’s Homeless Families Need Housing, Not Jail Stays

The U.S. Supreme Court last year ruled in Grants Pass v Johnson that localities can criminalize people for sleeping outside, even if no local shelters for the homeless exist. That decision came as people working full-time across the country are finding themselves increasingly unable to afford safe living spaces.

Many cities, meanwhile, are choosing to ramp up sweeps of the encampments that homeless people have set up, and those local government sweeps are cutting access to services and destabilizing already difficult situations.

The solution? We don't need criminalization, writes Farrah Hassen in a new Inequality.org analysis, we need adequate housing for all.

“The Grants Pass decision may have opened the door to new cruelties, but local governments still have a choice to do what’s right," Hassen argues. "Now, more than ever, we must demand real housing solutions."

On May 22, 2025, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a budget bill that features tax breaks for the rich and the largest cuts ever to Medicaid and SNAP food assistance. This House budget, if enacted, would lower average household resources for the poorest 10 percent by 3.9 percent, or $1,600, over the next decade. Resources for our nation’s richest 10 percent, by contrast, would jump 2.3 percent, or $12,000, according to the Congressional Budget Office. For an interactive version of this chart and more on taxes and inequality, click the link to our Inequality.org Facts section below.

Profiteering Off Scapegoated Migrants Can Sometimes Get Tricky

This week’s dour deep pocket: George Zoley, the executive chair and founder of the GEO Group, the private firm that runs Delaney Hall, a 1,000-bed immigration detention center in Newark, New Jersey.

What has Zoley sour: how media coverage of protests last week by Delaney detainees — migrants getting held for deportation — has highlighted the jail’s horrible living conditions. Detainees, the New York Times reported Saturday, have been sleeping on floors, getting slices of bread instead of meals, and finding the facility’s faucet water “sometimes scalding or foul tasting.”

Zoley’s GEO Group in February won a 15-year, $1-billion national contract from the Trump administration to house migrants targeted for deportation. Local officials in Newark have maintained that the company has not allowed inspectors to properly check out the Delaney Hall facility.

Summed up U.S. senator Andy Kim this past Friday: “We are paying billions of dollars for for-profit prisons” that “are skirting” their responsibilities and trying “to pocket as much of that money as possible.”

The last word: George Zoley has done an ample share of that pocketing. He collected $3.9 million in compensation last year and, right before last week, held a net worth of at least $101.5 million.

Our research, editorial, and publishing team depends on hundreds of paid subscribers who make monthly gifts. Some give $3 each month. Others give $200! All told, this support enables our team to stay focused on identifying causes and solutions to our deep economic inequality. Paid subscribers have contributed more than $20,000 in the past year. Ready to become a paid subscriber? Sign up today.