Trump's Destruction Of The Tax System Can Only Be Remedied By Progressives, Not By Less Toxic Conservatives

David Leonhardt's NY Times column yesterday about the wealthiest 400 Americans paying lower taxes than the rest of us, is just another indication-- as if we need one-- that Trump lied about everything he said when he ran for president... and continues to do so. Did you ever think this claim was anything other than pure bullshit?

He was laughing at you

Do you know what a progressive tax rate is? The idea goes all the way back to the Roman Republic since he was meant to mitigate some of the societal ills associated with out of control income and wealth inequality. Bernie's political career has always been about this mitigation. Republicans and conservative Democrats have always sought to defend the wealthy against progressive tax rates, which began when Lincoln replaced a flat tax in 1862. The idea of progressive taxation is that the RATE increases as your taxable income increases. One of the key ways conservatives have gotten around progressive taxation is by exempting certain income. Trump and his Republican cheerleaders have brought taxes on the rich down so precipitously that the country is in fiscal danger. "For the first time on record," wrote Leonhardt the 400 wealthiest Americans last year paid a lower total tax rate-- spanning federal, state and local taxes-- than any other income group. This depressing milestone has two main causes: President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cut and the long-term rise of tax avoidance by both companies and individuals."

The average tax rate on the richest 400 households last year was only 23%, down from 70% in 1950 and 47% in 1980. Why? In recent decades, the top income-tax rate and the estate tax have both fallen, and corporate taxes-- which are effectively paid by shareholders-- have plummeted. Middle-class and poor families, on the other hand, haven’t benefited much if at all from the falling corporate tax or estate tax, and they now pay more in payroll taxes than in the past. Overall, their taxes have remained fairly flat.

The combined result is that over the last 75 years the U.S. tax system has become radically less progressive.

The data here come from the most important book on government policy that I’ve read in a long time-- called The Triumph of Injustice, to be released next week. The authors are Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, both of the University of California, Berkeley. Saez has won the award that goes to the top academic economist under age 40, and Zucman was recently profiled by Bloomberg BusinessWeek magazine as “the wealth detective.”

They have constructed a historical database that tracks the tax payments up and down the income spectrum since 1913, when the federal income tax began. The story they tell is maddening-- and yet ultimately energizing.

“Many people have the view that nothing can be done,” Zucman told me. “Our case is, ‘No, that’s wrong. Look at history.’” When the United States has raised tax rates on the wealthy and made rigorous efforts to collect taxes, it has succeeded in doing so.

And it can succeed again.

Saez and Zucman portray tax history as a struggle between people who want to tax the rich and those who want to coddle the rich. The story starts in the 17th century, when Northern colonies created more progressive tax systems-- including wealth taxes-- than Europe had. The Southern colonies, by contrast, were hostile to taxation, out of a fear that taxes could undermine slavery, as historian Robin Einhorn has explained.

By the middle of the 20th century, the high-tax advocates had prevailed. The United States had arguably the world’s most progressive tax code, with a top income-tax rate of 91%. But the second half of the 20th century was mostly a victory for the low-tax side. Companies found ways to dodge taxes. Politicians cut every tax that fell mostly on the wealthy, with the justification that the economy would benefit.

The justification turned out to be wrong. The wealthy, and only the wealthy, have done fantastically well over the last several decades. The American economy just doesn’t function very well when tax rates on the rich are low and inequality is sky high. It was true in the lead-up to the Great Depression, and it’s been true recently. Which means that raising high-end taxes isn’t about punishing the rich (who, by the way, will still be rich). It’s about creating an economy that works better for the vast majority of Americans.

In their book, Saez and Zucman sketch out a modern progressive tax code. The overall tax rate on the richest 1% would roughly double, to about 60%. The tax increases would bring in about $750 billion a year, enough to pay for universal pre-K, an infrastructure program and much more. Those are the kinds of policies that do lift economic growth.

One crucial proposal is a minimum global corporate tax of at least 25%. A company would have to pay the tax on its American profits even if it set up headquarters in Ireland or Bermuda. Saez and Zucman also favor a wealth tax; Elizabeth Warren’s version is based on their work. And they call for the creation of a Public Protection Bureau, to crack down on tax dodging.

I already know what some critics will say in response-- that the rich will always figure out a way to avoid taxes. That’s simply not the case. True, they will always be able to avoid some taxes. But history shows that serious attempts to collect more taxes usually succeed.

Ask yourself this: If efforts to tax the super-rich were really doomed to fail, why would so many of the super-rich be fighting so hard to defeat those efforts?

For the same reasons, no doubt, they are fighting to defeat Elizabeth Warren and, even more so, Bernie, the serious two candidates who actually want to deliver on fundamental change. It's also the reason why progressive candidates for Congress are always up against the forces of conservatism, whether in Democratic primaries-- where progressives have to battle the DCCC and their corrupt candidates for nominations-- or in general elections (when Republicans are always the greater evil).

Eva Putzova is the Blue America-endorsed candidate running against Republican-pretending-to-be-a-Democrat (Blue Dog) Tom O'Halleran, a consistent voter against everything even vaguely progressive. Eva-- who is adamantly opposed by both the Republicans and the conservative DCCC-- told us that "If we doubled the tax rate on the rich, closed corporate tax loopholes, and imposed a wealth tax, we could raise the money we need to invest in healthcare, education, and green infrastructure. It would produce millions of good paying jobs which would benefit people who have been neglected for decades. We built the greatest middle class in history after World War II by enacting a strong progressive tax system and we can do it again if we elect politicians with the guts to take on corporate interests."

Jason Butler, our progressive pastor in Wake County, North Carolina is running against a reactionary Republican, George Holding, whose record shows he doesn't think rich people should pay taxes, just working people. Jason could disagree more: "Let’s get this straight-- taxes pay for our national defense, our infrastructure, healthcare for the vulnerable, our public schools, they preserve our national parks and our national treasures, they provide a safety net for the suffering, assist those in need, help rebuild communities after disasters, fund pivotal programs for economic development, and so much more… and the rich are constantly trying to pay less. Why? Like it or not, paying taxes is one of the most patriotic ways we participate in a shared nation. And as the old saying goes, 'to those who have been given much, much is required'-- yes, the rich have benefited tremendously from America and much is required. I’d like to see more stop trying to hide from their responsibility and more embrace their potential role as leaders in our patriotic duty."

Kim Williams, a Central Valley progressive running for the 16th district seat held by Blue Dog-- quasi-Republican-- Jim Costa noted that "Nowhere in California are the failures of our current system more apparent than in the Central Valley. We are home to one of the most unequal regions in California with high-income households making 14 times as much as poor households. And since 2007, incomes at the bottom 10 percent have dropped by 26 percent, which means that the poor continue to get even poorer. The conversation around fair taxation tends to center itself on whether the rich will pay and how hard they will fight to hold onto their wealth. But for many people in this Valley, the conversation should be around life or death. Because while billionaires are complaining about taxes on their yachts and vacation homes, people here are choosing between medicine and food. I will absolutely support a millionaire wealth tax, and I will vigorously support efforts to enforce it."

Another broken promise-- this one just a few minutes ago

Rachel Ventura is running for a Chicagoland seat held by multimillionaire New Dem who is a conservative on all fiscal matters. She disagrees with him and the GOP on taxation. She told us that she likes "the idea of a universal corporate tax rate on companies that try to dodge taxes by setting up shop in foreign countries. One could argue that businesses use as much or more of our taxpayer infrastructure than citizens do. Businesses depend on roadways to get their goods to market. In Will County, where I serve as an elected official, the roads that are pounded by truck traffic are in constant need of repair, costing taxpayers. The oil and gas industry is the dominant benefactor of our taxpayer-funded military presence in the Middle East and pharmaceutical companies benefit from the millions of dollars that taxpayers invest into research and development."

Rachel also told us she agrees "that we need to restore the 1950’s era progressive tax rates on the wealthy and I am a supporter of closing tax loopholes that are written by the wealthy, for the wealthy. Not only is Trump’s tax cut destructive to our economy, looking at the Republicans and their 2020 tax messaging is also important. The anti-tax wing of the Republican Party is already trying to boil things like the Green New Deal down to a 'meat tax' coupled with fear-based messages about 'taking away your hamburger.' In addition to having to call out Trump’s lies about his tax cuts helping working people, we also have to counter their entire 2020 campaign about the Democrats wanting to 'tax everything.' If we allow weak Democrats to handle the messaging in 2020, they will no doubt get clobbered by the anti-tax message. It will be important to go into the 2020 election cycle with strong progressives who can inspire the working poor to go to the polls in large numbers. We need to be talking about wealth inequality, taxing the rich, strengthening the middle class, protecting and expanding social security, creating good paying jobs and investing in real fixes to the climate crisis."

The Rise Of Wealth Inequality In Our Country Certainly Didn't Start With Trump-- And Not Even Bernie Is Going To Be Able To Reverse It Entirely

Over the weekend, the New Yorker, published an essay by Liaquat Ahamed which asks the question The rich can't get richer forever, can they? You might want to read it in the context of yesterday's post Being A Member Of The Elite May Be A Drag-- But Being A Slave Is Much Worse. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the U.S. in 1831 he noted that the relatively new country "was the world’s most egalitarian society. Wages in the young nation were higher than in Europe, and land in the West was abundant and cheap. There were rich people, but they weren’t super-rich, like European aristocrats." That's changed-- drastically.

According to Unequal Gains: American Growth and Inequality Since 1700, by the economic historians Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson, the share of national income going to the richest one per cent of the population was more than twenty per cent in Britain but below ten per cent in America. The prevailing ideology of the country favored equality (though, to be sure, only for whites); Americans were proud that there was a relatively small gap between rich and poor. “Can any condition of society be more desirable than this?” Thomas Jefferson bragged to a friend.





Today, the top one per cent in this country gets about twenty per cent of the income, similar to the distribution found across the Atlantic in Tocqueville’s day. How did the United States go from being the most egalitarian country in the West to being one of the most unequal? The course from there to here, it turns out, isn’t a straight line. During the past two centuries, inequality in America has been on something of a roller-coaster ride.

An early systematic attempt to chart the evolution of inequality in this country was undertaken by Simon Kuznets, at that time a professor at Johns Hopkins, who, in 1955, published what turned out to be a seminal paper, “Economic Growth and Income Inequality.” Drawing on years of assiduously collected data—for which he later won a Nobel Prize-- he reached a surprising conclusion. Like most economists, he had assumed that the general trend, in a capitalist economy governed by private property, would be for the rich to get richer-- for inequality to increase steadily over time. That had been true in the initial stages of industrialization, he found, but since then the United States, England, and Germany had experienced a narrowing of economic disparity. And, as more data about more countries became available, Kuznets found that in most advanced economies the poor were catching up with the rich. It was, he said, “a puzzle.”

The explanation appeared to involve two factors. First, there was the rise of mass education. Once countries had reached a certain level of industrialization, skills-- human capital-- became as important as physical capital in determining productivity, and a greater economic share accrued to those with more education, not just to those with money to invest. Second, politics took over from economics. The poor, with the weight of numbers on their side, realized that they could vote in favor of taxing the rich more heavily, redistributing the money to themselves in various ways.

...Kuznets’s article came out at the height of the Cold War. The U.S. economy was booming. More and more people were going to college. White-collar work was taking over from blue-collar work, and, during the Great Depression, the government had introduced programs such as Social Security and unemployment insurance. Americans took comfort in the fact that their version of capitalism was not only the most dynamic and productive economic system in the world but one that was steadily becoming more equitable and fair. It seemed as if they had the problem of inequality licked; it was the era of what came to be called the Great Compression. By the seventies, America was as equal as any of the Scandinavian countries are today.

And then, starting sometime in the early eighties, inequality started to rise. The shape of the curve went from an inverted U to something more like an N: up, down, and up. Nor was this shift a temporary aberration. It has continued for nearly four decades. The jump in inequality has been most dramatic in the United States, where the share of income going to the top one per cent has soared from eight per cent in the early eighties to almost twenty per cent today. But inequality has also increased in Britain, Australia, Canada, large parts of Europe, and even Japan, suggesting that there is something systemic at work across the world. (At the same time, there have been some affluent countries-- notably France and the Netherlands-- where inequality has barely budged.)

Economists are still arguing about the reasons for this reversal. One important factor, they mainly agree, was the opening up of China, Eastern Europe, and other less advanced regions to world trade; another was the liberalization of capital markets. Rising import competition hurt employment in domestic manufacturing and held down wages. Most economists also agree that changes in technology have put unskilled workers at a stark disadvantage.

What they disagree about is the role of government policy. Rising inequality coincided with a profound shift in economic policy throughout much of the advanced world. In the nineteen-seventies, productivity growth in advanced economies stalled, unemployment rates jumped, and inflation rose and remained obstinately high. And so, in one country after another, political parties got elected by promising to cut tax rates, free up markets, and reduce government intervention in the economy. The change was most pronounced in Great Britain and the United States, after Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took office. But it also occurred to varying degrees in Continental Europe, Canada, Australia, and Japan.





The story of this transformation is the subject of Binyamin Appelbaum’s The Economists’ Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society. It is a tale that has been told before, but Appelbaum adds flesh to the narrative by recounting it through the lives and careers of a small group of economists associated with the University of Chicago-- including the Nobel Prize winners Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Gary Becker, and Robert Mundell-- who were behind the shift.

...The Economists' Hour is a reminder of the power of ideas to shape the course of history, a heartening thought for those of us in the ideas business. But why did the free-market policies promoted by Appelbaum’s principals spread across the world? One reason was that they led to improved economic growth for a while. Yet international competitive pressures played a role, too. As the world economy opened up in the nineteen-eighties, newly mobile capital tended to flow to places that offered the highest return, and very often these were countries with the lowest taxes and the least onerous regulation. To hold on to capital, countries found themselves forced to match the free-market policies of their trading partners.

There is ample evidence that this shift, in turn, led to more uneven income distributions. Countries with larger tax cuts experienced bigger increases in inequality. Appelbaum’s book—focussing on the who, rather than the how—does not delve deeply into these consequences. But they are richly detailed in Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World by Branko Milanovic.





Even though inequality began to rise after 1980, it took economists a couple of decades to really notice. Among those who turned their attention to the fallout was Milanovic, who grew up in Communist Yugoslavia, spent a couple of decades in the research department of the World Bank, and now teaches economics at the City University of New York. Milanovic originally built his reputation in the late nineties, when, using a giant World Bank database of household incomes, he was able to demonstrate how the benefits of globalization had been distributed among different classes across various groups of countries. The big winners were the “global plutocrats,” whose returns on capital shot up, and the new mass middle class of the emerging world, mainly in East Asia and India, who benefitted from the spectacular growth of their regions. The big losers were Western middle-class workers whose incomes stagnated as the industries they worked in were hollowed out by foreign competition. Hence the visceral appeal of Donald Trump’s protectionist measures against China.

Milanovic isn’t just a whiz at number crunching; he has a whimsical, wide-ranging appreciation for history and culture. He has written about income distribution in the early Roman Empire (inequality during the Augustan age was roughly comparable to that of the United States today), the effects on European soccer when limits on the number of foreign players allowed in club teams were lifted (the richest clubs became even more dominant in their leagues), and the financial implications of Elizabeth Bennet’s decisions in Pride and Prejudice (marrying Mr. Darcy would put her in the top tenth of one per cent, while, as a spinster, she would have fallen from the top percentile to about the fiftieth percentile). Capitalism, Alone builds on Milanovic’s previous book, Global Inequality, which came out in 2016. Indeed, so many of the themes and ideas in the new book were prefigured in the last one that ideally the two should be read together.

In Global Inequality, Milanovic traced the fluctuations of inequality back to the Middle Ages in Holland, Spain, and Italy, and showed that inequality has been going up and down in long and unpredictable waves ever since, responding to various contending forces. In the fourteenth century, for instance, the Black Death led to shortages of labor, which drove up wages in Italy; in the twentieth century, two world wars and the Great Depression destroyed a generation’s worth of capital, causing the incomes of the rich to plunge. Surveying all the data, Milanovic concludes that there seems to have been some sort of cap on inequality-- a limit to the economic divisions a country can ultimately cope with. The rise of inequality in the United States during the nineteenth century, its subsequent fall during the middle decades of the twentieth century, and its resurgence in the past four decades provide an example of the wave at work. Kuznets had come up with his inverted-U-shaped curve only because he had focussed on too small a slice of history.

In Capitalism, Alone, Milanovic turns from the past to the future. With the rise of the emerging economies of Asia, he says, we now have two alternative forms of capitalism operating side by side. One is the “liberal meritocratic” version found in the West, and championed by the United States. The other is “political capitalism,” the less democratic and more authoritarian variant, which has taken shape, most notably, in China. Like all schematics, this one elides a lot of details, but it provides a useful conceptual frame.

In the “liberal meritocratic” world, inequality arises from the way capital is accumulated. The rich are able to save more than the poor, and thus come to own a disproportionate share of the capital and the wealth in the economy. Since the return on capital, a major source of income for the rich, tends to be higher than the growth of wages, the rich become richer. Almost as potent is the way the benefits of education are distributed: rich people tend to be more highly trained, and can earn higher salaries; they are also able to earn higher returns on their capital, since their wealth gives them greater tolerance for illiquidity and risk. In addition, they tend to marry other rich, educated people and are able to pass on more capital to their children, thereby perpetuating inequalities from one generation to the next.

The “political capitalism” of China has its own inequality-generating dynamics. Although China has become capitalist to the core-- almost eighty per cent of the country’s industrial output is produced in the private sector-- the commercial classes are under the thumb of a highly disciplined, autocratic bureaucracy. The rule of law is attenuated, decision-making can be arbitrary, property rights are not fully secure, and corruption is endemic. China is essentially going through a hugely accelerated version of the industrial revolution and the Gilded Age rolled into one. Add in the insidious impact of cronyism, and a very unequal society results. Income distribution in China, it turns out, is even more skewed than in the United States, approaching the sort of levels one finds in the plutocratic republics of Latin America.

What does all this mean for the future of global capitalism? Milanovic finds little on the horizon within either system that would curb the trend toward greater inequality, let alone reverse it. Despite the subtitle of his new book, though, Milanovic wisely trains his attention on the past and the present, steering clear of grand predictions.

...The cohort of European economists, including Milanovic and the French brigade, are following in the footsteps of Tocqueville. They have been able to hold up a mirror so that we Americans can better see ourselves. They’ve also succeeded in focussing public attention on the issue of inequality. They consciously moved away from quantifying inequality with opaque statistics such as the Gini coefficient, and instead popularized more readily understandable measures, like the share of income going to the very, very rich. The phrases “the top one per cent” and its obverse, “the ninety-nine per cent,” became potent political rallying cries during the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, and concern for the problem hasn’t dissipated. Inequality is a major political issue in the lead-up to the 2020 Presidential election; Democratic candidates are airing proposals for wealth taxes, steeper income taxes, more biting inheritance taxes, and a better social safety net. That’s another heartening reminder of the power of ideas to shape the course of history.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Happy TAX DAY everybody! Or, if you like, how about Happy Oligarch Creation Day!

Today is a religious holiday for supporters of the Greed Over People Trump/Ryan Tax Scam of 2017. It's a day where the stinking rich celebrate the biggest wealth redistribution of all time, a very efficient upward wealth redistribution right of of your pockets to theirs. Paul Ryan felt so comfy, smug, and happy about the cash his Tax Scam would bring him that he knew he could quit his job. This soak the poor greed fest didn't start with Trump and Ryan, though. They just put their feet down on the accelerator and floored it. That red line in the graph below that indicates what Ronnie Raygun wrought is going straight up by now; completely vertical. Reagan is smiling up from his hovel in Hell, saying "That's my boys!" Even before the Tax Scam, the richest 1% at the top had more wealth than the 99% at the bottom but that wasn't enough. They wanted it to be 99.9%. When they get it all, they'll start tearing at each other like a pack of rabid hyenas. Still waitin' for the trickle down? It ain't comin'. Be careful though. If you point that out, republican politicians and their media goons at FOX will accuse you of "class warfare" or worse. I've said for decades now that it's all about creating a pre-Magna Carta society of nothing but Lords and Serfs.

As you file your taxes, always remember, as tonight's meme illustrates: Socialism for you is bad, but for those who rammed the Trump/Ryan Tax Scam down our throats, socialism is fine and dandy. Handouts for the rich aren't socialism but handouts for the rest of us are. The more welfare for the rich the merrier and Trump is the biggest, fattest Welfare Queen of all. Oh, and fuck you, too, Jamie Dimon.

Jeff Bezos, America's Richest Man, Gets A Bill Named For Him: Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies

Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies (BEZOS for short) is the Senate version of a bill Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna introduced to Congress yesterday. It's not popular with plutocrats and oligarchs. One of their newspapers, the Wall Street Journal phrased their coverage as "an unusual public spat between Amazon.com Inc. and Sen. Bernie Sanders over workers’ wages... Sanders specifically targeted Amazon founder and leader Jeff Bezos, contrasting his vast personal wealth with the compensation of the companies' lowest-paid workers." It goes well beyond Bezos-- and Bernie.

First off, the House version, doesn't specifically target Jeff Bezos. Ro Khanna's bill-- co-sponsored by progressives Nanette Barragán (D-CA), Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), Hank Johnson (D-GA), Marcy Kaptur (D-OH), Barbara Lee (D-CA), Gwen Moore (D-WI), Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), Mark Pocan (D-WI) and Jamie Raskin (D-MD)-- is called The Corporate Responsibility and Taxpayer Protection Act and like Bernie's Senate version would make large corporations, not the taxpayer, pay for the costs of federal programs that low-wage employees turn to in order to make ends meet, such as nutrition or housing assistance. Khanna: "Companies are short-changing their employees by not paying a living wage. These companies are creating a drain on the economy by underpaying workers and should be responsible for covering the cost of the programs their employees rely on to make ends meet. It is my hope that this bill will further incentivize these companies to pay their employees a living wage without cutting their hours."

When large corporations underpay their employees, it hurts working families who are living paycheck to paycheck. It also places a burden on the taxpayer, who pay for the benefits and services low-wage workers need to help put food on the table or ease housing costs. In fact, low wages cost taxpayers $152.8 billion per year according to a 2015 University of California, Berkeley Labor Center study.

The reasoning behind the Corporate Responsibility and Taxpayer Protection Act is simple: An employee making minimum wage bagging groceries should not have to rely on nutrition assistance to put food on the table for his or her family. And taxpayers should not have to subsidize low-wage workers so wealthy corporations can get richer.

The Corporate Responsibility and Taxpayer Protection Act would make large corporations pay their fair share. By levying a direct fee equal to the public assistance each corporation’s employees are eligible to receive, the legislation is designed to compel all employers to pay their employees fairly with the goal that ultimately no company would be taxed for underpaying their employees.

Covered public assistance programs in the bill include:

• Medicaid
• Section 8 Housing
• Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)
• National School Lunch and School Breakfast programs (administered under Child Nutrition Act)

Barbara Lee didn't mince words: "Every American should have the basics: affordable housing and a livable wage. It is unconscionable that CEOs siphon off billions to line their own pockets while their employees struggle to make ends meet" and called the bill "a bridge over troubled water for Americans in need by strengthening essential programs for struggling families. Jamie Raskin got to the same conclusion from a different path: "It's very simple. The public should not be in the business of subsidizing giant corporations when they take the low road and pay inadequate compensation to their workers. It's not fair to the taxpayers and it's not fair to the vast majority of high-road businesses which pay their employees a fair day's wage for a fair day's work."

These were some of Bernie's remarks about the bill on introduction:

At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, when the 3 wealthiest people in America own more wealth than the bottom 50 percent and when 52 percent of all new income goes to the top one percent, the American people are tired of subsidizing multi-billionaires who own some of the largest and most profitable corporations in America.

Let me give you just a few examples of what we are talking about.

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is the wealthiest person on earth.

Today, his net worth is $168 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.]

Since the beginning of this year, his wealth has increased by about $260 million-- every single day.

Meanwhile, Mr. Bezos continues to pay many thousands of his Amazon employees wages that are so low that they must rely on food stamps, Medicaid or public housing in order to survive. Programs that are financed by middle class taxpayers.

According to a recent report from the New Food Economy, one out of three Amazon workers in Arizona and 2,400 in Pennsylvania and Ohio need food stamps in order to feed their families.

...In April, Amazon reported that half of its workforce makes less than $28,500 a year-- about $13.67 an hour.

Even that figure is misleading because it doesn’t include an estimated 40% of Amazon’s workforce who are employed through temporary staffing firms.

...But let me be clear: This discussion is not just about Jeff Bezos and Amazon.

The Walton family of Walmart is the wealthiest family in the country with a net worth of nearly $175 billion.

This one family owns more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of Americans.

Meanwhile, just like Amazon, Walmart pays its workers’ wages that are so inadequate that many of them are forced to depend upon public assistance programs in order to survive at a cost to taxpayers of some $6.2 billion each and every year.

The fast food industry is another major recipient of corporate welfare.

While the co-owner of Burger King, Jorge Paulo Lemann, has a net worth of more than $25 billion, low wages at this fast-food chain cost U.S. taxpayers an estimated $356 million a year.

And Burger King is not alone.

McDonald’s workers are actually encouraged to sign up for government assistance-- meaning the company fully acknowledges that it pays its employees wages that are non- livable.

Shockingly, 52 percent of all fast food workers rely on public assistance programs to make ends meet.

...The working families and middle class of this country should not have to subsidize the wealthiest people in the United States of America. That’s absurd. That’s what a rigged economy is all about.

The fact is that if employers in this country simply paid workers a living wage taxpayers would save about $150 billion a year on federal assistance programs and millions of workers would be able to live in dignity and security.

That is why we are proposing legislation to demand that Mr. Bezos, the Walton family of Walmart and other billionaires get off of welfare and start paying their workers a living wage.

Specifically, this bill would establish a 100 percent tax on corporations with 500 or more employees equal to the amount of federal benefits received by their low-wage workers. For example, if a worker at Amazon receives $2,000 in food stamps, Amazon would be taxed $2,000 to cover that cost.

Our legislation gives large, profitable employers a choice: Pay workers a living wage or pay for the public assistance programs their low-wage employees are forced to depend upon.

Let us be very clear: We believe that the government has a moral responsibility to provide for the vulnerable-- the children, the elderly, the sick and the disabled.

But we do not believe that taxpayers should have to expend huge sums of money subsidizing profitable corporations owned by some of the wealthiest people in this country.

Amazon's p.r. department, sounding like a more educated and slicker version of Trump, denied everything.

The American Zombie

In service of the almighty dollar, the corporate class has hollowed out America and created a permanent underclass. Real wages have not grown in 40 years and the average American's discretionary income is subject to the vagaries of the price of gas. Meanwhile, the money these hard working Americans earn and then put back into the community is circulated amongst the corporations that dominate the landscape of middle market America-- McDonalds, Walmart, and the like. That money leaves the community and is not reinvested. It ends up in the offshore tax haven of a Walmart scion.

This is the Trump base. That mythical base that the New York Times pursues with its fawning unending series, now almost a comedy routine, on the typical Trump voter.

The base that believes in Q-Anon. The base that Trump says loves him. This is the base that Koch Brothers service in order to get their destructive agenda passed.

The base that is slowly disappearing amidst a toxic miasma of opiod addiction and dwindling opportunities. The base that rose up during the Tea Party. And is now being led by the nose to believe in Q-Anon-- an hilarious scheme designed to sell t-shirts and generate Youtube views according to the fake news at NBC.

Now the that base has served their purpose and the corporations have squeezed everything they can out of them-- there is only one profit center left to exploit them-- private prisons. This is the base the wealthy campaign donors behind conservatism has created. They're addicted to opiates, cheap goods from China and the Church of Trump.

On Thursday, The Guardian noted that here in the U.S. CEOs now earn 312 times the average worker's wage. That's pretty unprecedented in modern history. And the number jumped right after the Republican tax scam when the CEOs got an average pay increase of 17.6%, "while their employees’ wages stalled." CEOs are making an average of $18.9 million. Workers' pay rose an average of 0.3%, less than inflation. "In 1965 the ratio of CEO to worker pay was 20-to-one; that figure had risen to 58-to-one by in 1989... Between 1978 and 2017 CEO compensation has increased by 979%."

The astronomical gap between the remuneration of workers and bosses has been brought into sharper focus by a new financial disclosure rule that forces companies to publish the ratio of CEO to worker pay. Last year McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook earned $21.7m while the McDonald’s workers earned a median wage of just $7,017-- a CEO to worker pay ratio of 3,101-to-one. The average Walmart worker earned $19,177 in 2017 while CEO Doug McMillon took home $22.8m-- a ratio of 1,188-to-one.

...“Over time I think there has been a loosening of norms.” said Mishel. “Everyone wants to believe their CEO is one of the best, so they look around and see what everyone else is being paid and then they pay them a lot more. They think everyone is better than average.”

The outsize pay packets have had a direct impact on people down the corporate ladder, Mishel claims. “The redistribution of wages to the top 5%, but particularly the top 1%, affected the wage growth of the bottom 90%. As a mathematical matter, had there not been the redistribution upward-- to the top 5%, but which is mostly about to the top 1%-- the wages of the bottom 90% could have grown twice as fast as it actually did.”

Movie Night-- Eat The Rich... Or Feed Them To Pigs

My friend Mike is a film critic and every week he sends me a list of coming releases and invites me to see them. Since I had my stem cell replacement operation, I've had to avoid movie theaters. I hadn't been to one in about 2 years. But one of the films looked interesting this week, Lauren Greenfield's Generation Wealth. I liked another movie she made a few years ago, The Queen of Versailles, which had given me plenty of ammo to use in posts. I imagined Generation Wealth would be as political. Instead, it was like a long, long, long advertisement for new her photo book. And did it ever suck! I hated every single character in it, especially Greenfield, although watching how she framed her very bright young son, Noah-- who she should have made the unscripted narrator if she wanted to save this nightmare-- was interesting.

At least Generation Wealth reminded me about two movies by Jamie Johnson that successfully accomplished what Greenfield didn't. Johnson's Born Rich (2003) is at the bottom of the page. Here's The One Percent (2006):

Johnson received some Emmy nominations for his work. That's not going to happen with Generation Wealth, which, if it wasn't already sickening enough, had some gratuitous Trump scenes. Rupert Neate reviewed Generation Wealth for The Guardian and I think he liked it more than I did. "Greenfield," he wrote, "introduces us to characters all motivated by the accumulation of wealth. 'No matter how much people had, they still wanted more,' Greenfield says of her subjects. We meet Florian Homm, a hedge fund manager living in self-imposed exile in Germany to avoid extradition to the US where he has been sentenced to 225 years in jail. Smoking cigars and dripping in gold, Homm, who became known as 'the antichrist of finance' for ripping off his investors for hundreds of millions of dollars, tells Greenfield that morality changed in the 80s. 'The value system changed completely. It wasn’t about who you are, but about what you are worth… Morals are completely non-productive in that value system.' As his hedge fund was imploding during the financial crisis of 2008, Homm, now 58, fled the €5m Majorcan villa he shared with a 27-year-old Russian lingerie model. With $500,000 stashed in his underwear and a humidor in hand, Homm boarded a plane to Colombia and disappeared for five years. We learn that he used his fortune to buy his son, then 15, the services of a Dutch prostitute. Homm was later arrested at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence."

Then there’s Eden Wood, six, a beauty pageant princess and star of reality TV show Toddlers & Tiaras, who tells Greenfield “My favourite princess is me” and says beauty means “that I get money, and I’ll be a superstar.”

...A growing number of academics warn that the widening gulf between the richest 1% and everyone else could lead to a backlash. The richest 0.1% of the world’s population has increased their combined wealth by as much as the poorest 50%-- or 3.8 billion people-- since 1980, according to the World Inequality Report. The report, by the French economist Thomas Piketty and 100 other researchers, also found that the richest 1% of the global population “captured” 27% of the world’s wealth growth between 1980 and 2016. Piketty warns that inequality has ballooned to “extreme levels” in many countries, and will only get worse unless governments take co-ordinated action to increase taxes and prevent tax avoidance.

...Greenfield interviewed several experts for the film, but just one survived the cut. Former New York Times journalist and leftwing activist Chris Hedges is quoted as saying “Wealth is whatever gives us value” and warns that “Societies accrue their greatest wealth at the moment they face death.” This last remark might trouble Americans in particular: last year Professor Philip Alston, United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty, made a statement accusing Donald Trump and the Republican party of consciously distorting the shape of American society in a “bid to become the most unequal society in the world.”

Poor Brett, doesn't he have enough problems already without appearing in this completely gauche movie?

Alston, who acts as a watchdog on extreme poverty, said Trump’s administration had passed tax laws that “overwhelmingly benefitted the wealthy and worsened inequality.” He said Trump’s policies “seem deliberately designed to remove basic protections from the poorest, punish those who are not in employment and make even basic health care into a privilege.”

But Greenfield says the chasm between rich and poor was widening well before the reality TV star’s 2016 election. “The American dream-- that everyone has equal opportunity-- became a fiction long before Trump,” she says. “Americans don’t hate the rich, as they imagine they could become the rich. They don’t want high taxes as they think they could become rich and won’t want to pay them. But what they dream of is an increasingly unbelievable fantasy.”

She says that while examining her photos it became clear to her that “We have left behind the American dream of my dad’s generation where there was the possibility of social mobility and the belief that anyone could make it. The things that were valued then-- discipline, hard work and frugality-- are not so important now. We have a culture that prizes celebrity, bling and narcissism.” Trump, she says, “is the apotheosis of generation wealth. With Trump you have wealth and celebrity achieving the ultimate goal. Trump is the natural evolution of the values of our culture.”

Or Is Mueller's Investigation The Real Distraction-- From Total Political Realignment?

According to Emptywheel, tomorrow is going to be a big day for Señor Trumpanzee and his world. Center stage: Robert Mueller, not whispers and suppositions. If Marcy is right-- and she usually is-- Mueller is ready to reveal the first cards in his case for conspiracy. I guarantee you that will be bigger news than the release last month of Thomas Piketty’s working paper about rising inequality and the changing structure of political conflict, even if Picketty’s work is of far more consequence.

What Piketty is attempting to do-- by using post-electoral surveys from France, Britain and the U.S.--  is to document “a striking long-run evolution in the structure of political cleavages. In the 1950s-1960s, the vote for left-wing (socialist-labour-democratic) parties was associated with lower education and lower income voters. It has gradually become associated with higher education voters, giving rise to a ‘multiple-elite’ party system in the 2000s-2010s: high-education elites now vote for the ‘left,’ while high-income/high-wealth elites still vote for the ‘right’ (though less and less so). He argue that this can contribute to explain rising inequality and the lack of democratic response to it, as well as the rise of ‘populism.’”

He also discusses “the origins of this evolution (rise of globalization/migration cleavage, and/or educational expansion per se) as well as future prospects: ‘multiple-elite’ stabilization; complete realignment of the party system along a ‘globalists’ (high-education, high-income) vs ‘nativists’ (low- education, low-income) cleavage; return to class-based redistributive conflict (either from an internationalist or nativist perspective). Two main lessons emerge. First, with multi-dimensional inequality, multiple political equilibria and bifurcations can occur. Next, without a strong egalitarian-internationalist platform, it is difficult to unite low- education, low-income voters from all origins within the same party.” Here’s how he described the paper in his introduction.

Income inequality has increased substantially in most world regions since the 1980s, albeit at different speeds. This process of rising inequality came after a relatively egalitarian period between 1950 and 1980, which itself followed a long sequence of dramatic events-- wars, depressions, revolutions-- during the first half of the 20th century. Given the recent evolution, one might have expected to observe rising political demand for redistribution, e.g. due to some simple median-voter logic. However so far we seem to be observing for the most part the rise of various forms of xenophobic “populism” and identity-based politics (Trump, Brexit, Le Pen/FN, Modi/BJP, AfD, etc.), rather than the return of class-based (income-based or wealth-based) politics. Why do democratic and electoral forces appear to deliver a reduction in inequality in some historical contexts but not in others? Do we need extreme circumstances in order to produce the type of Social-Democratic/New-Deal political coalition that led to the reduction of inequality during the 1950-1980 period?

This paper attempts to make some (limited) progress in answering these complex questions. The general objective is to better understand the interplay between long- run inequality dynamics and the changing structure of political cleavages. In order to do so, I exploit in a systematic manner the post-electoral surveys that were conducted after nearly every national election in France, Britain and the United States over the 1948-2017 period. I construct homogenous long-run series on the changing structure of the electorate in these three countries, i.e. who votes for which parties or coalitions depending on different dimensions of inequality (income, wealth, education, age, gender, religion, foreign or ethic origins, etc.). For instance, I show that the relation between voting behavior and income percentile is generally stronger at the top of the distribution than within the bottom 90%, and that the wealth profile has always been much steeper than the income profile. To my knowledge, this is the first time that such consistent series are established in a long run and comparative basis.

Next, and most importantly, I document a striking long-run evolution in the multi-dimensional structure of political cleavages in these three countries.

In the 1950s-1960s, the vote for “left-wing” (socialist-labour-democratic) parties was associated with lower education and lower income voters. This corresponds to what one might label a “class-based” party system: lower class voters from the different dimensions (lower education voters, lower income voters, etc.) tend to vote for the same party or coalition, while upper and middle class voters from the different dimensions tend to vote for the other party or coalition.

Since the 1970s-1980s, “left-wing” vote has gradually become associated with higher education voters, giving rise to what I propose to label a “multiple-elite” party system in the 2000s-2010s: high-education elites now vote for the “left”, while high-income/high-wealth elites still vote for the “right” (though less and less so).

I.e. the “left” has become the party of the intellectual elite (Brahmin left), while the “right” can be viewed as the party of the business elite (Merchant right).

I show that the same transformation happened in France, the US and Britain, despite the many differences in party systems and political histories between these three countries.

I argue that this structural evolution can contribute to explain rising inequality and the lack of democratic response to it, as well as the rise of “populism” (as low education, low income voters might feel abandoned). I also discuss the origins of this transformation (rise of globalization/migration cleavage, and/or educational expansion per se) as well as future prospects: “multiple-elite” stabilization; complete realignment of the party system along a “globalists” (high-education, high-income) vs “nativists” (low-education, low-income) cleavage; return to class-based redistributive conflict (either from an internationalist or nativist perspective). Recent elections held in the three countries in 2016-2017 suggest that several different evolutions are possible: France-US illustrate the possibility a shift toward the “globalists” vs “nativists” cleavage structure (see Figures 2e-2f for the case of France); while Britain supports the “multiple-elite” stabilization scenario (and possibly the return to class- based internationalism, though this seems less likely).

Two general lessons emerge from this research. First, with multi-dimensional inequality, multiple political equilibria and bifurcations can occur. Globalization and educational expansion have created new dimensions of inequality and conflict, leading to the weakening of previous class-based redistributive coalitions and the gradual development of new cleavages. Next, without a strong egalitarian- internationalist platform, it is difficult to unite low-education, low-income voters from all origins within the same coalition and to deliver a reduction in inequality. Extreme historical circumstances can and did help to deliver such an encompassing platform; but there is no reason to believe that this is a necessary nor a sufficient condition.

This work builds upon a long tradition of research in political science studying the evolution of party systems and political cleavages. This literature was strongly influenced by the theory of cleavage structures first developed by Lipset and Rokkan (1967). In their seminal contribution, Lipset-Rokkan stressed that modern democracies are characterized by two major revolutions-- national and industrial-- that have generated four main cleavages, with varying importance across countries: center vs periphery; state vs churches; agriculture vs manufacturing; workers vs employers/owners. Their classification had an enormous influence on the literature. One limitation of this work, however, is that Lipset-Rokkan largely ignore racial/ethnic cleavages, in spite of their importance in the development of the US party system.

In the present paper, I argue that the particularities of US party dynamics (whereby the Democratic party very gradually shifted from the slavery party to the poor whites party, then the New Deal party, and finally the party of the intellectual elite and the minorities), which often seem strange and exotic from a European perspective (how is it that the slavery party can become the “progressive” party?), might be highly relevant to understand the current and future transformation of cleavages structures in Europe and elsewhere.

Subsequent research has contributed to extend the Lipset-Rokkan framework. In particular, a number of authors have argued that the rise of universalist/liberal vs traditionalist/communitarian values since the 1980s-1990s, following in particular the rise of higher education, has created the condition for a new cleavage dimension, and the rise of the “populist right” (see e.g. Bornshier, 2010). My findings are closely related to this thesis. In particular, I stress the interplay between income, education and ethno-religious cleavages, and the commonalities and differences between US and European trajectories in that respect (while Bornshier focuses on Europe).

This work is also related to the study of multi-issue party competition,5 and to a number of papers that have recently been written on the rise of “populism”.6 However, to my knowledge, my paper is the first work trying to relate the rise of “populism” to what one might call the rise of “elitism”, i.e. the gradual emergence (both in Europe and in the US) of a “multiple-elite” party system, whereby each of the two governing coalitions alternating in power tends to reflect the views and interests of a different elite (intellectual elite vs business elite).

More generally, the main novelty of this research is to attempt to build systematic long-run series on electoral cleavages using consistent measures of inequality (especially regarding education, income, wealth). In particular, by focusing upon differentials in voting behavior between deciles of income, wealth or education (relatively to the distribution of income, wealth or education prevailing for a given year), it becomes possible to make meaningful comparisons across countries and over long time periods, which is not possible by using occupational categories (which the literature has largely focused upon so far).

The present paper should be viewed as a (limited) step in a broader research agenda seeking to analyze in a more systematic manner the long-run interplay between inequality dynamics and political cleavages structures. The post-electoral survey data that I use in this paper in order to cover the case of France, the US and Britain over the 1948-2017 period has obvious advantages: one can observe directly who voted for whom as a function of individual-level characteristics like gender, age, education, income, wealth, religion, etc. Post-electoral surveys now exist for a large number of countries, at least for recent decades. They could and should be used in order to test whether the same patterns prevail, and to better understand the underlying mechanisms. The advantage of looking at only three countries is that I am able in this paper to analyze these cases in a relatively detailed manner. However it is clear that in order to go further one would need to add many more country studies.

Post-electoral surveys also have major drawbacks: they have limited sample size,8 and they do not exist before the 1940s-1950s (and in some countries not before the 1980s-1990s). The only way to analyze changing inequality patterns and political cleavages from a longer run perspective (i.e. going back to electoral data from the 1870s onwards, or before) is to use local-level electoral data together with local-level census data and/or other administrative or fiscal data providing indicators on the socio-demographic and economic characteristics of the area. This kind of data exists in pretty much every country where elections have been held. It is only by collecting and exploiting this material that we can hope to reach a satisfactory understanding of the interplay between inequality dynamics and cleavages structures.

…Maybe unsurprisingly, the massive increase in abstention, which took place in all three countries between the 1950s-1960s and the 2000s-2010s, arose for the most part within the lower education and lower income groups. A natural interpretation is that these voters do not feel well represented in the “multiple-elite” party system.

The paper is over 60 pages long, so let me skip to a portion that deals with the U.S., which Piketty points out is the “best existing example of a two-party system (Democrats vs Republicans),” which he warns “is nevertheless relatively exotic and mysterious for many outside observers in Europe and elsewhere: how is it that the Democrats, which were the pro-slavery party in the 19th century, gradually became the New-Deal party and the “progressives” party over the course of the 20th century?”

By combining our results on changing US political cleavages by education and by income, we obtain the following picture. Whether we measure education cleavages by comparing university graduates vs non-university graduates, or by comparing top 10% vs bottom 90% education voters, which is probably most meaningful, we find the same broad evolution of the party system in the US. Moreover the evolution is very similar to that observed in France. Back in the 1940s-1960s, the US party system could be characterized as a class-based system, in the sense that low education and low income voters supported the same party (the Democrats), while high education and high income voters supported the other party (the Republicans). The US have gradually moved toward a “multiple-elite” party system, whereby the high-education elite votes for Democrats and the high-income elite votes for the Republicans.

In the same as way for France, it is unclear at this stage whether this “multiple-elite” party system will persist, or whether it will gradually evolve toward a complete realignment of the party system along “globalists” (high education, high income) vs “nativists” (low education, low income) lines. The 2016 election clearly seems to point in this direction: for the first time, the Democratic vote was associated both to high education and high income voters. It could be however that this is largely due to a specific Trump factor, and that the high-income elite will return to Republicans in the near future (of course this will depend on the choice of Republican and Democratic candidates)… [O]ne can interpret the unusual 2016-2017 electoral events as the consequence of a long-run transformation of the party system, which is now facing different possible trajectories: stabilization of the “multiple-elite” party system; “globalists” vs “nativists” realignment; return to some new form of class-based system.

Do You Feel Welcome In The New Gilded Age?

If you follow Austin Frerick, the Blue America-endorsed candidate for Iowa's 3rd congressional district on Twitter-- and you should: @AustinFrerick-- you are probably already familiar of the term Second Gilded Age or New Gilded Age. This morning Austin, a former Treasury Department economist, told me that "The 1st Gilded Age lasted from the 1870s to about 1900. I believe that we are living in the 2nd Gilded Age. It started with President Reagan and I'm running to end it with President Trump." He sent me this post from The Guardian and I don't think it was because he expected me to buy the golden Ferrari pictured on the page. "Not since the time of the Carnegies, Rockefellers and Vanderbilts at the turn of the 20th century was so much owned by so few" is the subtitle by Rupert Neate, The Guardian's "wealth correspondent." He wrote that "billionaires increased their combined global wealth by almost a fifth last year to a record $6 trillion-- more than twice the GDP of the UK. There are now 1,542 dollar billionaires across the world, after 145 multi-millionaires saw their wealth tick over into nine-zero fortunes last year, according to the UBS / PwC Billionaires report."

Josef Stadler, the lead author of the report and UBS’s head of global ultra high net worth, said his billionaire clients were concerned that growing inequality between rich and poor could lead to a “strike back.”

“We’re at an inflection point,” Stadler said. “Wealth concentration is as high as in 1905, this is something billionaires are concerned about. The problem is the power of interest on interest-- that makes big money bigger and, the question is to what extent is that sustainable and at what point will society intervene and strike back?”

Stadler added: “We are now two years into the peak of the second Gilded Age.”

He said the “$1 billion question” was how society would react to the concentration of so much money in the hands of so few.

Anger at so-called robber barron families who built up vast fortunes from monopolies in US rail, oil, steel and banking in the late 19th century, an era of rapid industrialisation and growing inequality in America that became known as the Gilded Age, led to President Roosevelt breaking up companies and trusts and increasing taxes on the wealthy in the early 1900s.

“Will there be similarities in the way society reacts to this gilded age?,” Stadler asked. “Will the second age end or will it proceed?”

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently said western governments should force the top 1% of earners to pay more more tax to try to reduce dangerous levels of inequality.

I asked several of the candidates Blue America has endorsed about the issues raised in this Guardian article. We should only be so lucky to wind up with Derrick Crowe in Congress. He's running for the open Austin-San Antonio district (TX-21) seat. The DCCC is pushing some wealthy nothing for the seat. Crowe, anything but "a nothing," would be part of a game changing proposition, along with Frerick, Randy Bryce, Kaniela Ing and the others you'll find by clicking on the thermometer just below, on the right. He told me today that "Not only are we in a moment where the rich are accruing incredible benefits and advantages over the working class in politics-- we're also facing major, simultaneous turning points in our national life that will have major ramifications for income inequality. The automation and AI revolution is about to put severe downward pressure on wages and put a very large percentage of people out of work--30 percent of Americans in the next 13 years, by some estimates. That crisis will hit us right about the time that we blow the carbon budget for staying under 2-degree global warming. If we don't wrestle control of policy-making away from the billionaire class right now, inequality and unemployment will skyrocket right as climate change begins to spin completely out of control.

"The correct policy choices to deal with this crisis are staring us right in the face: urgent climate change action that includes very deep investments in renewable energy, efficiency, and infrastructure, College for All to make sure people can get the higher education and mid-career retraining needed to adapt, and portable benefits like Medicare for All. We should also start looking into the options for universal basic income, because the simple fact is that these changes could hit us so hard and so fast that the term 'Gilded Age' doesn't even begin to cover the scope of the crisis."

"The American Dream was becoming distant for too many families before Trump," Orange County progressive Sam Jammal told us. "Now, with Trump and his agenda, it's on life support. And this is largely because we stopped focusing on growing the middle class and making sure workers can be upwardly mobile. Both parties forgot about the rest of us in order to cater to the wealthiest. Now, home ownership is at its lowest since World War II, wages no longer grow, no one is saving for retirement and things that used to be affordable-- like education and child care-- are becoming cost prohibitive. As automation and artificial intelligence transition our economy further, we are going to need to develop a new contract for the American worker that restores the path to upward mobility and ensures you can put in the work and still succeed in America. The status quo is untenable."



David Gill is running halfway across the country-- in central Illinois-- but he and Sam are on the same page: "I’m confident that we will bring an end to this 'Second Gilded Age' in the near future. Voters across the political spectrum are fed up, and they have a good understanding of the reason that life is so difficult for the majority of them. They understand that the deck is stacked against them by members of Congress who are bought and sold by the super-wealthy and the multinational corporations. Rather than standing up for a single-payer healthcare system, a $15 per hour minimum wage, and tuition-free access to public universities, colleges, and trade schools, we have a Congress that instead serves the interests of the insurance industry, the arms manufacturers, the fossil fuel industry, and the Wall Street banks. And the voters understand this, and they are just itching for the opportunity to support true populists who actually care about the well-being of ordinary citizens. Traveling the 14 counties of my district, one can sense that change is in the air, that there is a groundswell coming, and that Republicans and conservative Democrats who try to stand in the way of that groundswell are going to be swept away."

Jenny Marshall is a progressive (and Berniecrat) running for the North Carolina congressional seat held by multimillionaire anti-family bigot Virginia Foxx. She didn't have to hesitate before telling us that "I have often called big businesses who pay poverty wages while the top management rakes in millions in compensation and seeks to drive out competition so they can control the market, modern day robber barons. These new companies are mirrored after the old time robber barons who gobbled up their competition, raised prices and worked their laborers until they were no longer able to work then discarded them without a second thought. During this first Gilded Age we rose up demanding fair wages, safe working conditions, 40 hour work week, sick days, workers compensation, and the list goes on. People today are struggling to put food on the table and more and more workers are seeing their protections stripped away. We are seeing workers banding together to push back against these corporatist attacks. Our campaign is focusing on these issues making sure we get back to putting people needs over profits."

 During the 19th Century American Gilded Age "several industries," wrote Neate, "including oil, steel, sugar and cotton, became controlled by a few large companies, run by trusts. The trusts controlled every aspect of production, from raw materials to manufacturing and sales, enabling them to operate as monopolies in their industrial sector and keep out competitors. The trusts turned their owners into some of the richest people to ever live, and whose descendants still feature on annual rich lists. Anger at the wealth accrued by so few people at the apparent expense of their poorly treated workers led industrialists, including Cornelius Vanderbilt (railroads), Andrew Carnegie (steel), JP Morgan (finance) and John Jacob Astor (real estate and fur), to be dubbed robber barons. Historian TJ Stiles said the term was adopted to 'conjure up visions of titanic monopolists who crushed competitors, rigged markets, and corrupted government. In their greed and power, legend has it, they held sway over a helpless democracy.' Can anyone doubt that Trump and his grotesque menagerie are trying to recapture those good old days in everything they do, from appointments to gutting the regulatory system to this obscene tax scam?

President Theodore Roosevelt, elected in 1901, moved to break up the monopolies. John D Rockefeller’s Standard Oil was split into 34 separate companies, including the predecessors of Exxon, BP and Chevron.

The Gilded Age gave way to the Progressive Era, when the backlash against the excesses and inequalities of the earlier period prompted widespread social activism and political reform.

Frerick went further in an interview he did with NY Times reporter Alan Rappeprt this week. Rappeport's article shows how the Trump Regime "has ignored the traditional systems put in place by the Treasury to analyse the consequences of tax overhauls. The Senate was about to vote on the proposed tax plan and Steven Mnuchin had promised that a thorough analysis would be completed before the vote. That hadn't happened. "This negligence," Frerick subsequently wrote to his supporters in Iowa, "is a threat to our economy and an insult to the Department of the Treasury... Until May, I was an economist in the Office of Tax Analysis at the Treasury. I have been shocked at the disrespect shown to my former colleagues. Earlier this year, the Trump administration removed a paper from the Treasury website that was written by our team in 2012. Why? The research doesn't support the administration's claims about the current tax plan. We cannot stand with an administration that ignores facts."