Ending Plutocracy: A 12-Step Program
America’s first Gilded Age didn’t merely end. Progressives had to fight to end it. Our forebears did battle, decade after decade, for proposals that dared to “soak the rich.” How quaint that phrase...
View ArticleAn Epoch Named!
With Barack Obama in the White House–and the greatest economic meltdown since the Great Depression upon us–an era may finally have ended, an era that has dragged on excruciatingly for nearly three...
View ArticlePay-Cap Populism
In his first week as president, Barack Obama cited years of “greed and irresponsibility on the part of some” as a major contributing factor behind our economic meltdown. In his second week, he...
View ArticleOWS Revives the Struggle for Economic Equality
The young men and women who launched Occupy Wall Street haven’t yet made our nation one whit less unequal. But these Occupiers have, all the same, overachieved magnificently. They have thrust...
View ArticleWhy Greater Equality Strengthens Society
A placard placed against a war memorial in central London November 30, 2011. REUTERS/Toby Melville For American progressives, looking at Britain can sometimes seem like looking in a mirror. The...
View ArticleThe Great Regression
(AP Photo/Mike Groll) Whatever happened to the “progressive” income tax, the notion that taxpayers who make more money should pay taxes at a higher rate? Tax progressivity today has virtually...
View ArticleSwiss Activists: Let’s Cap CEO Pay
Not all that many generations ago, the idea of an income floor for working Americans—a minimum wage—seemed impractically utopian. Today we have mandated state and national minimum wages, and the vast...
View ArticleHow US Tax Policy Encourages Outrageous CEO Compensation
Over-the-top CEO pay has come to symbolize our nation’s staggering economic inequality. Major corporate CEOs now earn more than 300 times the pay of average workers, up from 30 only a generation ago....
View ArticleOffshore Tax Havens Are Strangling Local Government
Research from University of California, Berkeley, economist Gabriel Zucman has shown that approximately 8 percent of the world’s financial wealth resides in tax havens. Since 1980, the volume of US...
View ArticleWant Debt-Free College? Tax the Rich.
Higher education has become a debt sentence for millions of Americans, limiting economic mobility and contributing to our growing economic divide. Student debt now tops $1.3 trillion, and the burden...
View ArticleRetirement Benefits Are Rigged to Favor the Rich
Our nation faces a retirement divide even wider than its income divide. Here’s just one dramatic indicator from a recent Center for Effective Government and Institute for Policy Studies report: 100...
View ArticleHow the Super-Rich Can Kickstart the Green Economy
We know our future depends on finding a way to keep fossil fuels in the ground. But who should bear the cost of the transition to a clean-energy economy? Developing nations like India and China have...
View ArticleBlack Workers Matter, Too
The Black Lives Matter movement has focused a much-needed spotlight on our nation’s structural racism and the widespread criminalization of poverty. The world of work should not be immune from this...
View ArticleThe Secret to Funding Universal Pre-K Is Buried in the Tax Code
Millions of Americans sweat and strain at work every day. They lift. They pound. They come home exhausted. Other Americans make their living wheeling and dealing on Wall Street. The most strenuous part...
View ArticleHow Wall Street Reform Could Give Low-Income Families a Big Boost
Low-income Americans, particularly blacks and Latinos, face tremendous obstacles as they struggle to put aside money for investing. According to a recent Institute for Policy Studies report, the...
View ArticleInequality Will Not Go Away On Its Own. Here’s How to Close the Gap.
The immediate crisis may have passed, but most Americans still haven’t recovered from the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression. Wealthy Americans, on the other hand, are doing better than...
View ArticleInequality Gave Rise to Donald Trump’s Presidency
Inequality created the presidency of Donald Trump. Will that presidency now create more inequality? That remains to be seen. Precious few of the 60 million Americans who cast their votes for Trump want...
View ArticleHow to Get Rid of the Super-Rich
Redistribution—via the tax code—has been central to the progressive vision ever since the original Gilded Age. Let’s tax our wealthiest, this traditional approach urges, and use the resulting revenues...
View ArticleWhen Corporations Pay CEOs Way More Than Employees, Make Them Pay!
In 2018, an American city made history by introducing the world’s first tax penalty on companies that pay their CEOs more than 100 times their median wage. Portland, Oregon, now levies a 10 percent...
View ArticleWe Asked the 2020 Contenders How They Plan to Tackle Inequality
Is America’s political discourse on inequality finally getting real?1 In the early going of the 2020 presidential campaign, this has become a question worth asking. White House hopefuls have been...
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