What's new on Inequality.org?
Will Snell, Can We Build Public and Political Support for Tackling Inequality? Why we need to challenge the “meritocratic” narrative on how people get rich.
Reyanna James, 4 Charts on the Big Ugly Bill. The GOP reconciliation plan’s potential impacts on death, hunger, and disparity by the numbers.
Elsewhere on the web
Ignacio González, Juan Montecino, and Vasudeva Ramaswamy, Redistribution in Reverse: The Macroeconomics of the OBBB, The Institute for Macroeconomic & Policy Analysis. A macroeconomic analysis of the Republican budget finding negative effects on GDP.
Ray Madoff, Republicans no longer want to repeal estate taxes. That’s weird, The Washington Post. The reality of the situation is that the wealthy have already found workarounds for the so-called "death tax."
Bob Lord, Even Sky-High Income Tax Rates Won’t Stop the Relentless Rise of the Richest, Mother Jones. The reason: The government’s definition of taxable income doesn’t track true economic income, and this disconnect grows the further up the wealth ladder a deep pocket goes.
Abigail Disney, The Rich Should Be Paying More — and Yes, That Means Me, The New Republic. Power, like money, compounds. The more you consume, the thirstier you become.
Alexandra Marquez, Zohran Mamdani says 'I don't think we should have billionaires,' NBC News. Mamdani, the Democratic nominee in the New York mayoral race, wants to raise taxes on the super rich “to increase quality of life for everyone, including those who are going to be taxed.”
Adam Bonica, The AI Dividend: Turning Computational Power into Shared Prosperity, Substack. A Stanford political scientist’s proposal to create an “AI Dividend” that democratizes the gains from automation.
Jacob Hacker and Patrick Sullivan, Congressional Republicans’ budget bill is the most regressive in at least 40 years, Washington Center for Equitable Growth. The only reason we can’t label the pending GOP budget legislation the most rich people-friendly ever: We have the stats we need only for the last four decades.
Harold Meyerson, When the Capitals of Capitalism Go Socialist, American Prospect. One key reason why Zohran Mamdani so resonated in last week’s New York mayoral primary: The wealthiest 1 percent share of New Yorker income tripled from roughly 12 percent in 1980 to 36 percent in 2022.
Robert Reich, The Corporate Democrat’s Biggest Nightmare, Substack. The corporate Democratic establishment — fat cats on Wall Street, corporate moguls in C-suites, billionaire backers of Democrats who will do their bidding — remain the biggest problem for the party.
Brian Galle, David Gamage, and Darien Shanske, Money Moves: Taxing the Wealthy at the State Level, California Law Review. Critics of state wealth tax efforts have things exactly backwards: Threats by the wealthy to exit states that raise taxes on the rich don’t make state wealth taxes self-defeating. Carefully designed wealth taxes can counter tax-avoidance mobility.
Millionaire exodus did not occur, study reveals, Tax Justice Network. In 2024, a firm that sells golden passports to the super rich reported that millionaires were fleeing the UK in great numbers to avoid new tax hikes. That report led to over 10,000 news stories worldwide. But the mass fleeing never actually occurred.
Anusha Mathur, Private jet carbon emissions are soaring. Here’s who pollutes the most, Washington Post. The joyrides of America’s affluent account for 55 percent of the pollution emitted by private jets globally.
Jeet Heer, The Billionaires Are Abandoning Humanity, Nation. With Peter Thiel and his rich pals so determined on quitting humanity, maybe the rest of us can sponsor a mission to Mars so we can rid ourselves of them.
Take a reading break and listen to Chuck's appearance on Aspire with Osha.
