( Inequality.org ) – In our United States today, all of us do not have an “equal opportunity” to become rich — or even comfortable. Rich people like things that way. Grand fortunes only grow grander when the richest among us have plenty of exploitable people around to exploit.

To keep things that way, rich people have gone out of their way over the past half-century to make sure all of us do not have “equal opportunity” to a quality education. This week, with the Supreme Court’s stunning ruling that strikes down affirmative action in higher ed admissions, the most fervent advocates of plutocratic privilege have now completed their squashing of the world’s most ambitious attempt to create a system of public education that can truly guarantee all kids a quality education.

That ambitious effort began all the way back in 1787 when our new nation’s earliest lawmakers, in the Northwest Ordinance, required towns in future states to reserve prime real estate for public schools. Their goal: to ensure that “the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”

“Without education, the founders feared democracy would devolve into mob rule and open doors to unscrupulous politicians and hucksters,” the University of South Carolina Law School’s Derek Black has pointed out. “Our democratic experiment might very well just fail.”

Realizing the founders’ goal of “forever” encouraging public education would end up taking almost forever. Not until the years after World War II would the United States have anything remotely close to a public school system that extended equal opportunity to young people of all colors and classes, to children with and without disabilities. In the 1960s, federal tax dollars finally began helping every community offer all children a quality educational experience.

Those dollars came via progressive tax rates that actually had most of America’s richest contributing something close to their fair tax share.

In those same mid-20th-century decades, we overhauled American higher education. We created networks of public community colleges, all with free or low-cost tuition. We created student grant and loan programs that enabled millions of young people to earn four-year and postgraduate degrees without building up debts that would take them lifetimes to pay off.

Americans who wanted to opt out of this ambitious new world of public education remained free to do so. The rich could still send their kids to private academies. Any families that so chose could send their kids to religious schools — but not on the public dime. Public tax dollars went to fund public education. Those dollars, we believed, were building democracy, teaching people of all backgrounds how to work with and learn from each other.

These noble goals would, of course, regularly go unmet. But the goals themselves — the rhetoric of “equal educational opportunity” — did really matter. Parents and communities, armed with this rhetoric, ventured forth and did noble battle against the still formidable barriers to equal opportunity. They even won many of those battles. We were moving, as a nation, in the right direction.

And then rich people said stop. These rich felt like saps. High taxes on their “hard-earned” incomes were bankrolling the education of other people’s children. Their alma maters, our wealthiest fretted, might even start cutting back on the “legacy admissions” that guaranteed their offspring easy entry into the nation’s most prestigious colleges and universities.

The “indignities” these wealthy endured went well beyond the “disrespect” they felt. They saw the source of their fortunes, their “right” to run Corporate America as they saw fit, under direct threat as the United States entered into the 1970s. The federal government — under a Republican president no less — seemed to be hobbling business at every turn.

At the end of 1970, Richard Nixon had signed into law legislation that created a new federal agency to protect workers from injury and illness. Just a few weeks earlier, the first administrator of another new federal office, the Environmental Protection Agency, had announced his attention to give business polluters no quarter. As an independent agency, William Ruckelshaus pronounced, the EPA had “only the critical obligation to protect and enhance the environment.”

Things were clearly getting out of hand. Business seemed to be taking a shellacking from every direction. New federal agencies. A restless labor movement. Campuses full of profs and students who felt free to ridicule business values. Corporate America clearly had to respond. But how? The U.S. Chamber of Commerce would put that question to Lewis Powell, a leading corporate attorney.

Powell’s answer would come in a confidential 1971 memo, just two months before his nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. The time had come, Powell declared, “for the wisdom, ingenuity, and resources of American business to be marshalled against those who would destroy it.”

Business confronts, Powell would contend, critics “seeking insidiously” to “sabotage” free enterprise. “Extremists on the left,” he insisted, have become “far more numerous, better financed, and increasingly are more welcomed and encouraged by other elements of society, than ever before.”

Corporate America, Powell would exhort, must show more “stomach for hard-nose” combat. Yet individual corporate leaders, Powell understood, can only do so much. Real strength, he would go on to explain, lies “in careful long-range planning” and “consistency of action over an indefinite period of years.” Real strength demands a “scale of financing available only through joint effort” and “the political power available only through united action and national organizations.”

Powell’s 1971 musings, notes historian Kim Phillips-Fein, “crystallized a set of concerns shared by business conservatives in the early 1970s” — and gave “inspiration” to corporate leaders who would later become familiar names and powerful forces, men like arch Colorado right-winger Joseph Coors.

Together, these newly energized corporate leaders would unleash upon America what political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have called “a domestic version of Shock and Awe.” The number of corporate public affairs offices in Washington, D.C. would quintuple between 1968 and 1978, from 100 to over 500. In 1971, only 175 U.S. corporations had registered lobbyists in Washington. The 1982 total: almost 2,500.

Corporate leaders also bankrolled a series of new militantly “free market” think tanks and action centers: the Heritage Foundation and American Legislative Exchange Council in 1973, the Cato Institute in 1977, the Manhattan Institute in 1978, among many others.  The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, for its part, would double its membership between 1974 and 1980 and triple its budget.

Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash

Complementing this new ideological infrastructure: a torrent of campaign contributions to rich people-friendly pols. In the mid-1970s, U.S. senators were depending on labor for almost half their campaign funding. By the mid-1980s, senators were getting less than a fifth of their funding from union PACs.

By the early 2000s, adds Jacob Hacker, the Republican Party had solidified its intimacy with “very, very, very rich billionaire donors” and corporate groups. The GOP now marched in total sync with the policy priorities of America’s most fortunate: more regressive tax cuts, more deregulation, and more extreme conservatives on the nation’s judicial benches.

The personal payoff from this synchronization would be huge for America’s deepest pockets. Between 1995 and 2007, sinking effective income tax rates saved America’s 400 richest households an average $46 million per year. The “flip side” of this “aggressive pursuit of lower taxes by the rich”? Hacker and fellow analyst Nathan Loewentheil have the consequential answer: chronic government budget deficits and insufficient funds for public goods like public education.

The predictable result? Everything from overcrowded elementary school classrooms to tuition rates that make higher education unaffordable for vast numbers of American households.

George Washington would not approve. In 1796, in his annual presidential address to Congress, Washington opined that our nation’s lawmakers had no duty “more pressing” than “the common education of a portion of our youth from every quarter.”

We are failing that youth. We are coddling our rich instead.

Via Inequality.org

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Enormous Pentagon budgets are also inflating CEO pay at major military contractors. Here’s how to rein in this taxpayer-funded excess.

A campaign to curb greed was key to the first fight against child labor. With GOP states putting young kids to work, we need that battle again.

That fuming — from would-be passengers of Southwest Airlines and their families — filled airports throughout this past holiday week. For good reason. At the height of the travel-heavy holidays, Southwest was canceling 60 percent of the airline’s daily flights. Over 15,000 Southwest planes never lifted off.

Late December’s heavy dose of stormy weather certainly did set the stage for Southwest’s holiday meltdown. But Southwest can’t put the blame for the airline’s massive melt on the cold, wind, and snow. Other airlines delivered, amid the same winter weather, far better service.

So what did Southwest in? The airline’s top execs, analysts point out, have spent years underinvesting in needed new tech. One telling example: This past November, a generation into the electronic age, Southwest officials acknowledged that the airline was still delivering weather and baggage reports to pilots and gate managers on paper.

“It almost became a running joke around the company,” says Southwest flight attendant union president Lyn Montgomery, “that we aren’t able to make certain changes because it would involve technology.”

During the holiday storm crisis, some Southwest employees phoning in for instructions from the airline found themselves on hold for over five hours. Some even went to sleep with their phones — still on hold — next to their bedsides. They awoke the next morning, reports the Dallas Morning News, to find their phones still holding.

Why didn’t Southwest invest in new tech?

“Modifications and refinements to systems,” last year’s Southwest annual report explained, “have been and are expected to continue to be expensive to implement and can divert management’s attention from other matters.”

What sort of “matters” struck Southwest execs as more important than keeping their planes on time? Keeping shareholders happy — and themselves richer in the process. Everything else could wait.

Top management has readily admitted as much. In one pre-Covid “earnings call” with stock analysts, the Washington Post noted last week, then-CEO Gary Kelly explained that the airline had been delaying the tech upgrades his operations team had been seeking.

“We have starved them a little bit over the last decade,” he explained, “because again, our focus was more on the commercial side.”

Money that should have been going into upgrading Southwest’s operations has gone instead into dividends and stock buybacks. Since 2015, the Los Angeles Times analyst Michael Hiltzik reported last week, the airline “has paid out about $1.6 billion in dividends and repurchased more than $8 billion in shares.”

Those moves have worked out exceedingly well for top Southwest execs like CEO Kelly, the airline’s chief exec until early last year. In 2020, Kelly pulled down a “record $9.2 million” at the same time the Covid outbreak had the airline $3.1 billion in the red and a quarter of the Southwest workforce taking voluntary leave. CEO Kelly then took home another $5.8 million in 2021 before retiring early in 2022.

“Southwest’s well-compensated executives could have prioritized its workers and customers by preparing for the worst, but greed trumped all as they put a small group of wealthy investors first,” charges Kyle Herrig, the president of the corporate watchdog Accountable.US. “Consumers shouldn’t be the ones stuck holding the bag for Southwest’s greedy management decisions, but here we are.”

Southwest took in a $7-billion federal bailout during the Covid crisis, then showed its appreciation to America’s taxpayers by becoming, early last month, the first Covid-subsidized airline to announce plans to resume paying out dividends to shareholders, to the tune of $428 million in 2023.

“The reinstatement of our quarterly dividend,” Bob Jordan, Southwest’s new CEO, proudly noted during this dividend announcement, “reflects our balance sheet strength and continued focus on generating consistently healthy earnings, margins, and long-term capital returns.”

Missing from that focus: the well-being of Southwest workers. Just a few weeks after announcing the upcoming new dividends, the “bomb cyclone” hit wide swatches of the United States the day before Christmas. Southwest ground workers soon found themselves working 16-to-18 hour days, with some, says  their union president Randy Barns, ending up frostbitten.

Some lawmakers in Congress are now calling for a serious overhaul of how the United States goes about its airborne business. America’s airlines have essentially been calling the shots, notes a Washington Post analysis, ever since the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 iced state regulators out of the picture and “left airline companies accountable only” to the federal Department of Transportation, an agency that’s never prioritized consumer protection.

“Southwest simply has failed to prepare for the worst and that’s a fundamental breach of trust,” charges Connecticut U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal, who wants to see Congress enact a passenger bill of rights. “They said to passengers, in effect, if things go south, you are the ones who will bear the burden.”

Outside the United States, in nations ranging from Argentina and Malaysia to Finland and Fiji, airlines essentially operate as a public utility, not an opportunity for big CEO paydays. Scores of nations, points out journalist Joe Mayall, currently “either own airlines outright” or hold majority-shareholder status.

The United States could join that camp, Mayall notes, if Congress chose to charter a state-owned enterprise  to start up a new national airline. Or Congress could go the nationalization route by buying up enough stock “in publicly traded airlines to acquire a controlling share.”

Could the United States afford to take that sort of nationalizing step? The four most dominant U.S. airlines — Delta, American, United, and Southwest — last summer held a combined market value of $77.5 billion, Mayall points out, just $5 billion less than the $72.6 billion in our tax dollars that funded the federal government’s airline bailouts after 9/11 and during Covid.

Via ) Inequality.org

That would all soon change, particularly after Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election. “Rich people” would suddenly reemerge as a cultural phenomenon worthy of ample attention. In 1982, the editors at Forbes magazine even started annually profiling America’s 400 richest.

Serious books about the growing maldistribution of America’s income and wealth would, in short order, once again begin appearing. In 2014, one inequality book — Thomas Piketty’s 700-page Capital in the 21st Century — actually became Amazon’s top-selling title. Our new Gilded Age of grand fortune had created a publishing golden age for books that contemplated inequality’s impact upon us.

The books on inequality that abound today offer up important information and insights. They survey our unequal landscape, trace the drivers behind our top-heavy distribution of wealth , and propose serious solutions. Unfortunately, these important contributions to the literature on inequality haven’t had much of an impact. Our grand fortunes remain grand.

One sign of our still unequal times: As of this past September, despite a serious stock-market swoon, the net worth of our richest 1 percent still sits — after taking inflation into account — some 527 percent above the net worth of our richest 1 percent in 1976.

Our income stats tell a similar story. Incomes in our bottom 50 percent now stand, after inflation, just under a meager 30 percent higher than their level back in 1976. American top 0.01-percent incomes have soared almost 600 percent.

Amid numbers like these, books about inequality clearly remain as necessary as ever. And that brings us to a new book about inequality that just might make the sort of difference that books about inequality have so far been unable to make.

This book’s author, Stephen Bezruchka, will already be familiar to folks active in anti-inequality circles. Bezruchka, currently a professor emeritus at the University of Washington’s School of Public Health, has spent the last quarter-century teaching and lecturing all across the nation about the incredibly high price we Americans are paying for letting our wealth concentrate

How high a price? His new book, Inequality Kills Us All, rests on a grim reality: Americans have spent recent decades dying at much higher rates than people living in our peer nations, societies that all spend significantly less on medical care than we do in the United States and yet enjoy significantly longer life expectancies.

Stephen Bezruchka

How could that be? Decades ago, Bezruchka set out on a journey to find out. As a younger physician, he had fully bought in to the standard medical profession perspective. He equated health with health care, as did all the doctors around him. People got sick. Doctors did their best to get people well. End of story.

But real life, as the young doctor began living it, had a nasty habit of poking holes in that story. Bezruchka had spent time early on in his career practicing medicine in Nepal, a nation he had earlier encountered as part of the first Canadian Mount Everest expedition. He also spent years stateside working big-city hospital emergency rooms. All these experiences, bit by bit, had Bezruchka viewing health through a much more open-minded lens. Health care, he was learning, cannot guarantee health. Inequality gets in the way. Inequality kills.

Bezruchka’s new book goes deeply — and clearly — into the how. He walks us through the work of pioneering researchers like the UK’s Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett and Harvard’s Ichiro Kawachi and S.V. Subramanian. Inequality, the work of these scholars helps us see, packs a devastating one-two punch.

The first punch: the “psychosocial” stress that living in deeply unequal societies inevitably creates. People in these societies can have “enough resources to provide for basic needs,” Bezruchka explains, but not enough “to support the more lavish lifestyle that they see others enjoying.” The wider the gap, the stronger the pressure to constantly compete for higher status. We envy those above us. We scorn those below. We trust in others ever less. We cooperate ever less.

Bezruchka continually interlaces this status story with his own life’s story. In Nepal, he writes, he “lived with people in remote areas who had only the basic material goods they needed.” These Nepalese didn’t know what they didn’t have: “Their moral compass directed them to share.”

In the deeply unequal United States, by contrast, that sharing seldom shows. One arresting example: Drivers of high-status cars, as researcher Paul Piff has detailed, turn out to be “more likely to cut off other vehicles at intersections and endanger pedestrians at crossings than those in more modest automobiles.”

This unrelenting everyday pressure of “psychosocial status distinctions,” other research has shown, has distinct biological consequences. Such stress changes us. The wear and tear of coping with chronic daily stress — the “allostatic load” — leaves us with elevated blood pressure and immune systems too weak to respond when a “big challenge” emerges. This avalanche of stress, relates the emerging field of epigenetics, can start impacting how our lives unfold even before we emerge from the womb.

Via Pixabay.

In societies as unequal as ours, people do the best they can to cope with the stress they face. But the most common coping mechanisms — be they drugs or high-sugar, high-fat comfort foods — take their own heavy tolls. Life in societies much less unequal than ours, meanwhile, generates significantly less stress.

So why don’t we just take steps to become a more equal society? The basic story: In deeply unequal societies, not just wealth concentrates at the top. Power does as well.

Our rich, Bezruchka points out, see no need to employ that power on behalf of those without fortune. They see no particular reason to extend a helping hand to those without their fantastically good fortune. They believe they worked hard for their success. So why should they help others who didn’t? Keep taxes low, they demand. Keep government off our backs. Let the “free market” determine how our lives shake out.

The more wealthy the wealthy become, the greater their capacity to impose these mindsets on the rest of us. And the rest of us find ourselves split. Bezruchka offers an allegory to help us understand why. He asks us to imagine a billionaire and his chauffeur pulling up to a homeless family along the side of the road. The billionaire steps out of the car and snatches a loaf of bread away from the mom. The billionaire and the silent chauffeur then drive away.

Why does the chauffeur acquiesce to this brutal billionaire behavior? Bezruchka sees “something in the way of a private moral deal between the billionaire and the chauffeur,” a deal that’s left the world “meaner but solves an emotional problem for some people who, given the way their own lives are being squeezed, find themselves with less empathy left over for others outside their social circle.”

Those the furthest outside that social circle, society’s poorest, “do not complain of deep inequality” either. Bezruchka sees them quite understandably focused on their own personal issues, everything from food and housing insecurity to lack of access to medical care. They don’t focus on the reality “the rich have too much.” Their focus remains “ downstream, related to tangible issues nearby.”

Yet Bezruchka still believes that “windows of opportunity for effective change are opening.” His final pages have us, his readers, believing that too. We can, he notes, ready ourselves to seize that opportunity. We can confront the “wealth defense industry.” We can eventually move onto the table antidotes to wealth concentration — like a “maximum wage” — that today seem far beyond the realm of possibility.

What makes Bezruchka’s final chapter so powerful? Books about inequality typically deliver critiques of our top-heavy economy and polity, then send us on our way with pro forma exhortations to get involved in efforts to help make our world less unequal.

Bezruchka’s final chapter gets far more personal and powerful. He clearly takes delight in advocacy and feels we could feel that delight as well. Toward that end, Bezruchka asks us to inventory our skills and the activities we enjoy, then offers us a wealth of options for putting those skills and interests to work. He gets specific. He gives us examples. He guides us where to go to get started.

Tips for turning haphazard conversations with strangers into substantive discussions. Ideas for using photography to tell compelling inequality stories. How-to’s on everything from revising the rules of Monopoly, the world’s best-selling game, to giving talks at retirement homes. Bezruchka’s closing chapter imaginatively covers the sorts of ground books about inequality have never before covered.

And Inequality Kills Us All couples all this useful information and background with leads that can connect readers directly to the groups — and activist resources — now helping to build a more effective struggle for a more equal world. Bezruchka believes we can overcome the public indifference our rich and powerful count on. By the end of his final What Can We Do? chapter, we believe that just as much as he does.

Social movements begin, Bezruchka reminds us, with “people working on critical, timely issues as individuals and then together with others.”

Social movements can also begin with books. Dr. Stephen Bezruchka has given us a book we desperately need.

Via Inequality.org

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This summer’s U.S. daily high temperatures are continuing our torrid global pace. America’s media have been teeming over recent weeks with stats on heat horrors.

In Phoenix, “a sprawling urban heat island,” daily highs have averaged well over 100 all summer long. The National Weather Service in interior Northern California last month warned that record high temperatures had placed the “the entire population” at risk.

Oregon’s governor, around the same time, pointed to the “imminent threat” of wildfires the heat had created and declared a state of emergency. California, meanwhile, declared a statewide grid emergency “to cope with surging demand for power amid a blistering heat wave.” Sacramento then promptly registered 116, “its highest-ever recorded temperature.”

Widespread news coverage of records like these might well be focusing people’s attention on climate change more than any environmentalist rally ever could. But what’s alarmingly missing in most all this coverage? Any consideration of the inequality connection.

The inequality of modern American life turns out to be not just determining who’s suffering the most from all the heat. Inequality is actually driving the mercury higher, as new research out of New York is rather dramatically detailing.

A “street-level assessment of heat in New York City” — the first ever — has found that temperatures in the city’s low-income South Bronx run 8 degrees higher than temperatures a few miles away in the high-income neighborhoods of Manhattan’s Upper West and East Sides.

How does economic inequality help generate such wide temperature differentials? At a most basic level, the rich and powerful can and do use their wealth and power to shunt the most undesirable aspects of modern life onto poor neighborhoods. The undesirable consequences include higher temperatures for the neighborhoods where low-income families live.

Transportation plays a key role here. Five major highways — the notorious Cross Bronx Expressway among them — cut through and encircle the South Bronx. These high-traffic corridors spew contaminants into the air and deny South Bronx residents access to heat-relieving green and “blue” — public waterfront — spaces. In the South Bronx, these spaces barely even exist. The area has about only one park per every 60,000 residents.

In New York’s most affluent neighborhoods, streets themselves can actually become park-like when they sport plenty of tree cover. The vast majority of the South Bronx has no tree cover, and that absence — coupled with asphalt everywhere — nurtures heat pockets that compound air pollution. And the South Bronx’s old housing stock leaves residents few escapes from all this bad air and heat.

One result: The Bronx overall commands just 17 percent of New York City’s population but 95 percent of the city’s hospitalizations for asthma.

Community activists in the advocacy group South Bronx Unite are working to overturn these sorts of deadly social and environmental dynamics. They’ve proposed, for instance, a plan “to provide 100,000+ people access to a public waterfront that, for decades, has been inaccessible.”

New York’s powers-that-be, over the years, have allocated that waterfront to operations that service the city’s affluent, everything from printing presses for the Wall Street Journal to warehouses for companies like Fresh Direct, a food delivery service that sends out “approximately 1,000 daily diesel truck trips a day.”

Activists are also working to offset the incredible environmental damage that comes from the heavy daily traffic on the Cross Bronx Expressway, where the rumblings of 300 diesel trucks every hour are fouling the air and leaving the South Bronx ever hotter. They’re pushing for an ambitious project that, notes the Columbia University Millman School of Public Health, “would add a deck on top of below-grade sections of the Cross Bronx Expressway, with filtered vents to scrub exhaust.”

Atop the deck, under the project plan, would go a green park “along the lines of projects already completed in Boston, Dallas, and Seattle.”

Building out such an effort, Millman School analysts believe, would cost some $750 million. Too unreachably ambitious a price-tag?

Maybe not. New York City, Forbes reported this past spring, now boasts more billionaires “than any other city on the planet.” The city’s 107 billionaire residents have a combined net worth of $640 billion. A 1-percent annual wealth tax on that combined fortune would raise over eight times the cost of the proposed cap-the-Cross-Bronx-Expressway project in just one year.

Via Inequality.org

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A good many of us still fondly remember that poolside party scene. A 21-year-old “Benjamin” gets pulled aside for a career pep talk from an overbearing “Mr. McGuire” who says he has just one word of wisdom for Dustin Hoffman’s newly graduated young man: “Plastics!”

One real-life young man back then, James Dyson, would end up following Mr. McGuire’s advice — and go on to fashion plastic vacuum cleaners into the first global billion-dollar fortune that rests on polymers.

But no Mr. McGuire here in the 2020s would ever be pitching boring old plastics as a sure-fire path to grand fortune. What red-hot field of business endeavor would a modern-day McGuire be hawking? A new report from Bain & Company, a global consultancy with offices in 65 cities worldwide, has a suggestion: wealth management.

And why do analysts at Bain see wealth management — the business of helping people of means grow their assets — as such a promising career path? A simple financial fact: A colossal chunk of the world’s wealth now sits in the pockets of affluents who have no clue what to do with all their good fortune. The “investable assets” of these wealthy worldwide, Bain is predicting, figure to double by 2030.

“The rich are getting richer, that’s for sure,” as Bain partner Markus Habbel, one of the authors of the financial firm’s new report, told the Financial Times earlier this week.

“If you have a wealth management capability,” agrees Goldman Sachs chief operating officer John Waldron, “you have a much more valuable business.”

The new Bain study doesn’t dive deep into any detail about our continuing maldistribution of global income and wealth. But other analysts most definitely have been subjecting that maldistribution to some increasingly sophisticated analysis. Over the past quarter-century, these researchers — many inspired by the work of the French economist Thomas Piketty — have been developing new statistical approaches to determining just who has what and how much of it.

Researchers like Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, both at the University of California-Berkeley, have taken us well beyond the tax return data that’s traditionally driven our core inequality stats. In their just-published latest work, Saez and Zucman have joined with their UC colleague Thomas Blanchet to tackle the challenge of calculating inequality in what they call “real time.”

U.S. government stats, the three authors point out, “do not make it possible to know who benefits from economic growth in a timely manner.” Indeed, until recent years, most numbers on income and wealth distribution came from snapshots taken well before the data went public. The most recent distributional stats currently available from the Federal Reserve’s exhaustive triennial Survey of Consumer Finances, for instance, cover 2019.

In that same year, Federal Reserve analysts did inaugurate a brand-new data series with a much briefer lag time. These new distributional snapshots have been appearing quarterly ever since, and the latest, released last month, covers this year’s first three months. In 2022’s quarter one, the Fed’s “Distributional Financial Accounts” show, America’s top 1 percent held 31.8 percent of the nation’s wealth. The nation’s bottom half held 2.8 percent.

The University of California’s inequality stats team has now trimmed the data lag time even further, to help us “track the distributional impacts of government policies” on a month-to-month basis and provide critically important information to have in the middle of an economic crisis.

The Berkeley team notes that none of the timely government economic stats we’ve had up to now — on total national personal income, unemployment, and more — have come “disaggregated by income level.” Without that disaggregation, we can’t know what social groups are benefiting from current government policies and what groups aren’t. And if we don’t have that information, then government programs successfully helping people who really need help can fall politically by the wayside.

The Berkeley analysts illustrate that dynamic by applying their new “real-time inequality” statistical methodology to our Covid pandemic years. At the end of 2021, their approach shows, America’s working-class households found themselves with 20 percent more disposable income than before the pandemic, thanks to the federal government’s expanded child tax credit and expanded earned income tax credit for adults with children.

But disposable income for the nation’s working families promptly then fell in early 2022 after Congress let those aid programs expire. By June 2022, the Berkeley economists sum up, the wealth share of America’s top 0.1 percent had returned “to its pre-Covid level.”

So what do we do with all the new distributional data we now have available? Do we gaze at the new numbers and marvel at how incredibly rich our rich continue to be? Or do we battle to create a much more equal society where helping the wealthy manage their money no longer rates as our nation’s hottest career option?

A host of long-time egalitarian activists are choosing the latter. They’ve just come together to establish an Excessive Wealth Disorder Institute, and this new Institute, as its first order of business, is now teaming up with social justice advocacy groups and coalitions in a “Tax the Ultra-Rich Now” campaign to “TURN” America around.

TURN campaign activists will be initially “collaborating with grassroots organizations across five key states – Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – with a focus on organizations centered in communities of color.”

Other campaigns will no doubt follow, on a wide variety of fronts. Those campaigns will have no shortage of tax-the-rich proposals to draw from. Among the latest, from Bob Lord and Dylan Dusseault of Patriotic Millionaires, a call for the passage of an “Oppose Limitless Inequality Growth and Restore Civil Harmony Act.” This “OLIGARCH” legislation would key new taxes on the wealth of America’s super rich to the nation’s median — most typical — household wealth.

Under the OLIGARCH Act, households holding between 1,000 and 10,000 times America’s median household wealth would pay an annual 2 percent tax on their fortunes. Those rates would escalate on households sitting on even greater stores of wealth. In the top tax bracket, for households worth over one million times our most typical household wealth, the annual tax would run at 8 percent.

Back in 1980, Lord and Dusseault note, fewer than 0.005 percent of America’s adults held over 1,000 times the nation’s median household wealth. By 2020, the ranks of that wealth cohort had quintupled. In 1983, not a single American held a fortune that equaled 100,000 times the nation’s median household wealth. In 2021, slightly over 50 Americans exceeded that threshold, and two Americans actually held over a million times the wealth of America’s most typical households.

That can all change. We all can change it.

Via Inequality.org

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But we don’t just get unfairness when a boss can grab more in a year than a worker could make in over six centuries. We get bungling and inefficient businesses.

Management science has been clear on this point for generations, ever since the days of the late Peter Drucker.

Management theorists credit Drucker, a refugee from Nazism in the 1930s, for laying down “the foundations of management as a scientific discipline.” Drucker’s classic 1946 study of General Motors established him as the nation’s foremost authority on corporate effectiveness.

That effectiveness, Drucker believed, had to rest on fairness.

Corporations that compensate their CEOs at rates far outpacing worker pay create cultures where organizational excellence can never take root. These corporations create ever bigger bureaucracies, with endless layers of management that serve only to prop up huge paychecks at the top.

Drucker argued that no executive should make more than 25 times what their workers earn. And, in the two decades after World War II, America’s leading corporate chiefs by and large accepted Drucker’s perspective.

Their companies shared the wealth when they bargained with the strong unions of the postwar years. In fact, notes the Economic Policy Institute, major U.S. corporate CEOs in 1965 were only realizing 21 times the pay their workers were pocketing.

Drucker died in 2005 at age 95. He lived long enough to see Corporate America make a mockery of his 25-to-1 standard. But research since his death has consistently reaffirmed his take on the negative impact of wide CEO-worker pay differentials.

The just-released 28th annual edition of the Institute for Policy Studies Executive Excess report explores these wide differentials in eye-opening detail. The report zeroes in on the 300 major U.S. corporations that pay their median workers the least.

At these 300 firms, average CEO pay last year jumped to $10.6 million, some 670 times their $24,000 median worker pay.

At over 100 of these firms, worker pay didn’t even keep with inflation. And at most of those companies, executives wasted millions buying back their own stock instead of giving workers a raise.

Just as Drecker predicted, this unfairness has led directly to performance issues. Many of our nation’s most unequal companies, from Amazon to federal call center contractor Maximus, have seen repeated walkouts and protests from justifiably aggrieved workers.

Lawmakers in Congress, the Institute for Policy Studies points out, could be taking concrete steps to rein in extreme pay disparities. They could, for instance, raise taxes on corporations with outrageously wide pay gaps.

But with this Congress unlikely to act, the new Institute for Policy Studies report also highlights a promising move the Biden administration could take on its own. The administration could start using executive action “to give corporations with narrow pay ratios preferential treatment in government contracting.”

That would amount to a major step forward, since 40 percent of our largest low-wage employers hold federal contracts. If the Biden administration denied lucrative government contracts to companies with pay gaps over 100 to 1, those low-wage firms would have a powerful incentive to pay workers more fairly.

Various federal programs already offer a leg up in contracting to targeted groups, typically small businesses owned by women, disabled veterans, and minorities.

“Using public procurement to address extreme disparities within large corporations,” the IPS report adds, “would be a step towards the same general objective.”

And a step in that direction, as Peter Drucker told Wall Street Journal readers back in 1977, would honor the great achievement of American business in the middle of the 20th century: “the steady narrowing of the income gap between the ‘big boss’ and the ‘working man.’”

Via Otherwords.org

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative 3.0 License.

Ending the tax-evading ways of Russia’s rich could be a giant step toward reining in oligarchy worldwide.

( Inequality.org ) – Can we please get serious about taxing the rich? Polls show that hefty majorities of people in the United States — and around the world — believe the rich ought to be paying more at tax time. Yet our contemporary don’t-tax-the-rich era has now entered its fifth consecutive decade.

Egalitarian tax policy, you could say, has hit a rough patch.

Egalitarian tax circles need some fresh thinking, and, fortunately, we have some — from economists and political scientists who’ve been reflecting on how, why, and when do societies end up taxing the rich. Historical moments, these researchers conclude, really matter. Societies don’t tax the rich after duly deliberating about timeless questions of what makes for tax fairness. They tax the rich during moments of social convulsion, especially those that accompany conflicts between nations.

We may be in, with the war over Ukraine, one of these opportune moments. We may now have a chance — in the wake of the Russian invasion — to start shearing oligarchy worldwide down to a much more democratic dimensions.

What makes seizing this opportunity so important? In normal times, the British economist Faiza Shaheen notes, tax-the-rich-minded egalitarians face a political deck formidably stacked against them. The wealthy don’t just have mega millions to pour into the coffers of pols who tilt their way on tax policy. They can also draw from a vast reservoir of antiquated attitudes about wealth and the wealthy.

CNBC: “U.S. imposes new sanctions to tighten squeeze on Russian oligarchs”

Many of our fellow human beings, for instance, still buy into the flack-for-the-wealthy line that sheer envy is driving those who seek to tax the rich more substantially. And any one of us, still others of us without grand fortune believe, could become wealthy someday. Could we trust government to spend our tax dollars wisely? Pitchmen for the wealthy want us asking this question. They’re doing their best to sow a social distrust that translates into a knee-jerk hostility to talk about raising anybody’s taxes.

But wars, argue political scientists David Stasavage and Kenneth Scheve, can shake up these ideological dynamics. In wartime, elites need to build public confidence in government, not tear that confidence down. Wartime elites also face publics suddenly focused on equality of sacrifice. Average families with lives at risk tend to see no particular reason why the richest among us shouldn’t at least have some of their grand personal fortunes at risk.

These sorts of dynamics create — for fleeting moments — egalitarian windows of opportunity. Twice in the 20th century, first during the mass mobilizations that accompanied World War I and then during the even larger mass mobilizations around World War II, progressives seized these opportunities.

In 1942, just months after Pearl Harbor, U.S. corporate chiefs and conservatives in Congress started pushing for a 10 percent national sales tax and other assorted levies that would shield the nation’s most comfortable from the war’s enormous tax burden. President Franklin Roosevelt dubbed that sales tax proposal a “spare-the-rich tax” and proposed a far more progressive alternative: a 100 percent tax on all individual income over $25,000, the equivalent of about $430,000 in today’s dollars.

FDR wouldn’t get his 100 percent top marginal tax rate. But Congress did put in place a 94 percent tax on income over $200,000, and the nation’s top tax rate would hover around 90 percent for the next 20 years, two decades that would see the emergence — in the United States — of the first mass middle class in the history of the world.

Similar stories unfolded after World War II in other industrial nations. The world overall became a substantially more equal place. But the egalitarian momentum, alas, would not last. The sense of social solidarity the mass mobilizations of World War II fostered slowly ebbed away. Tax rates on high incomes worldwide began dipping significantly.

Will high tax rates on high incomes ever return? Some analysts don’t think so. The increasingly high-tech nature of modern warfare makes mass mobilizing less necessary, the argument goes, and elites that don’t need to mobilize vast publics don’t need to swallow significant tax hikes on their fortunes.

But other analysts see more hope for a return to a serious tax-the-rich future. They argue that convulsions of all sorts, not just wars, can create opportunities for more rigorously taxing the holders of grand fortunes. Global pandemics would certainly qualify as one of these convulsive moments.

How can we take opportunity of the openings these convulsions create? Internationally respected analysts like the University of Nairobi’s Attiya Waris, a global expert on fiscal law and policy, see “solidarity taxes” as the most viable approach. “Solidarity taxes” address emergencies on a short-term basis. Experience has shown, Waris relates in a report the NYU Center on International Cooperation helped publish last spring, that such taxes can both address emergencies and “remedy inequality simultaneously.”

Examples abound. In Czechoslovakia soon after World War I, lawmakers adopted a “capital levy on total property” to raise the funding needed to establish their new nation. The levy, originally scheduled to last three years, taxed grand fortunes at thirty times the rate imposed on small holdings.

Japan, after World War II, would adopt a solidarity tax designed to pay off the nation’s huge war debt and jumpstart its postwar recovery. The tax would fall the heaviest on the wealthy Japanese financial clique that had done so much to grease the way to war — and profit from it. Japan’s solidarity tax imposed rates, Attiya Waris details, that ranged from a modest 10 percent on property over 100,000 yen to 90 percent on property worth over 15 million yen.

This solidarity tax effort substantially reduced the concentration of wealth within the Japanese economy and left Japan with major corporate enterprises controlled by a multiplicity of small shareholders instead of a few fabulously rich families.

The coronavirus has rekindled interest in “solidarity tax” approaches. In Costa Rica, recounts Waris, lawmakers considered “a one-time solidarity wealth tax to fund efforts to reactivate the country in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic.” In 2020, Colombia and Uruguay both put pandemic solidarity tax levies into effect.

The Ukraine war adds another twist to this “solidarity tax” story: the oligarch connection.

Vladimir Putin’s Russia may be the world’s purest plutocracy. Russia’s 500 richest individuals, U.S. senator Bernie Sanders pointed out after the invasion of Ukraine began, hold more wealth than the 145 million Russians who make up their nation’s bottom 99.8 percent. The nation’s top 1 percenters have “as much wealth offshore as the rest of the Russian population holds onshore.”

The private fortunes of Russia’s oligarchic elite have been multiplying within — and corrupting — societies throughout the “democratic world.” In 2008, the oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev paid $95 million for a Palm Beach manse Donald Trump has bought for $41 million just four years earlier. In the UK, the wife of one kleptocratic Putin minister became a British citizen and promptly started handing that nation’s Conservative Party enough in contributions to make her “one of the party’s top 10 donors.”

But oligarchy, we need to remember, exists as a worldwide phenomenon, not a mere Russian affair. The Ukraine conflict could become a jumping-off point for confronting our entire contemporary global oligarchic empire.

Oligarchs worldwide grow and shield their fortunes through a global tax avoidance web of financial consultancies and shell companies. Landmark data dumps like the Pandora Papers have given us unnerving glimpses into this secret world of high-finance manipulation, a universe where deep-pocketed tax evaders have parked, Global Witness estimates, at least $12 trillion in offshore accounts.

Governments opposing the Russia’s Ukraine invasion are now rushing to impose sanctions on the oligarchs most closely connected to the Putin regime. They’re freezing their assets and denying them entry. But these sanctions have limited utility. They leave untouched the hoards of wealth hidden in the world’s tax evasion networks.

Russia’s top 0.01 percent, as University of California-Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman reminds us, has over half its wealth parked outside Russia.

“Shouldn’t an effective sanctions policy,” asks Zucman, “start by seizing these assets?”

Easier said than done, given the by-design opacity of global tax havens and the powerful interests within nations like the United States and the UK that have spent the last three decades enabling the oligarchs who’ve been robbing the Russian people.

“Money doesn’t just move and hide itself,” explains Spencer Woodman, an analyst with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. “The flight of Russia’s wealth has been supported by big banks and a global industry of professionals who specialize in providing rich clients with shell companies, trusts, and other secretive vehicles.”

We either take on these enablers or let our world’s oligarchs — from Russia and every other corner of the globe — keep building their enormous stashes of wealth. And we need to move with all due dispatch. This moment of outrage over Ukraine will pass. Our global oligarchs will close ranks, after perhaps sacrificing a handful of their Russian brethren, and seek to continue tax-evading business as usual. We can’t let them.

So where do we start our offensive against oligarchy? Woodman sees some immediate simple steps, like getting Congress to pass the “Enablers Act,” legislation pending since last October that would require all those Americans who facilitate the flow of assets into the United States, not just banks, to investigate how their foreign clients have built their fabulous fortunes.

“If we make banks report dirty money but allow law, real estate, and accounting firms to look the other way, that creates a loophole that crooks and kleptocrats can sail a yacht through,” notes Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.), a co-sponsor of the legislation.

Our eventual goal ought to be systematic transparency throughout the world’s financial system, via a cooperative effort to create what the Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation is calling a “global asset registry.” This GAR, the commission declares, would “prove a vital tool” against both “illicit financial flows” and attempts to avoid taxes on “legitimate income and profits.” With a global asset registry in place, governments could more effectively levy “appropriate taxation to reduce the negative consequences of inequality.”

Western political leaders haven’t yet committed themselves to such a registry. But some are leaning somewhat that way. This past Monday, officials in the UK released a “much-delayed economic crime bill” that will require anonymous foreign owners of UK land and property to reveal their identities.

President Biden, meanwhile, is talking tough.

“We are joining with our European allies to find and seize your yachts, your luxury apartments, your private jets,” he promised in his March 1 State of the Union address. “We are coming for your ill-begotten gains.”

But any seizures will likely be little more than more symbolic gestures unless, suggests journalist Edward Ongweso, we shut down the global tax haven networks that let the world’s elite conceal their fortunes in offshore hubs. And any successful shutdown move, he adds, will have to understand and overcome the political reality that elites everywhere have little interest in “establishing precedents that could come back to hurt them.”

We won’t, in other words, be able to take down Putin’s oligarchic buddies unless we directly take on global oligarchy writ large. What might that takedown entail? Imagine a crackdown on oligarchy that combines an assault on global tax havens with “solidarity tax” initiatives that redistribute wealth from oligarchs to refugees or pandemic victims or some other class of people in clear dire need.

Efforts along this line could have broad political appeal. Indeed, Rep. Malinowski has just introduced new legislation that would let the Biden administration confiscate Russian oligarch wealth and apply it toward efforts to rebuild Ukraine.

The trick to moving ahead in a wider, bolder fashion? Timing, says the UK economist Faiza Shaheen.

Our current window, she reminds us, “will only be open for a short time.”

Via Inequality.org

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