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income inequality
No, Friends on the Left, We Shouldn’t Tax Hardworking Americans Into Poverty
Many of those who would adamantly oppose the creation of a society where the income tax impoverishes struggling workers to enable those with seven-figure incomes to pay low rates are working overtime to maintain that very same situation.
Jul 22, 2026
Imagine this 2029 scenario: Americans making $1,000,001 or more per year have a slightly higher federal income tax rate than they currently do, while Americans who can’t afford to put food on the table—the ones who make less than what it takes to cover basic living expenses—don’t pay federal income taxes at all. Now imagine that President JD Vance proposes to cut the income tax rates of those with incomes over $1 million and to recover the lost revenue by taxing the working poor even further into poverty.
How many Democratic politicians would vote for that? How many left-leaning think tanks would write white papers supporting it? And how many left-leaning activist groups would lobby in support of it? NONE.
Unfortunately, the very tax structure that hypothetical proposal envisions already exists. Yet, amazingly, many of those who would adamantly oppose the creation of a society where the income tax impoverishes struggling workers to enable those with seven-figure incomes to pay low rates are working overtime to maintain that very same situation.
Recognizing that taxing hardworking people into poverty is both morally wrong and economically asinine, earlier this year, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) introduced the Working Americans’ Tax Cut Act (WATCA). Twenty-one senators and 13 representatives have signed on. The AFL-CIO has endorsed WATCA, as have the American Federation of Teachers, Oxfam, Americans for Tax Fairness, Take on Wall Street, and nearly a dozen other tax and justice organizations.
WATCA is based on the simple concept that workers with incomes equal to or less than the basic cost of living should not be required to divert income needed for basic necessities to pay federal income tax. WATCA provides an exemption from federal income tax for income up to the basic cost of living, $46,000 per year for a single American with no children, and recovers the lost tax revenue with a surtax on incomes over $1 million.
Criticism of WATCA has been fast and furious, coming mostly from folks who purport to advocate for average Americans. Their commentary, which can be found in American Prospect, Democracy, The New York Times, and even Rolling Stone, is chock-full of concocted reasons why continuing to oppressively tax struggling Americans is a fine idea. Mostly, their arguments are a repackaged version of billionaire Republican Sen. Rick Scott’s (R-Fla.) idea that he pushed in 2022 that the income tax requires all Americans to have “skin in the game.” Scott’s idea bombed badly—so badly, in fact, that he shelved it after just a few months.
The Working Americans’ Tax Cut Act fixes a fundamental structural flaw in the federal income tax: We’re taxing those with no ability to pay into poverty, while maintaining top rates that are absurdly low.
The words used by WATCA critics differ, although often not by very much, but the concept is the same. A Roosevelt Institute blog post explains how tax policy should “bind us all to one another.” In an impressive mental gymnastics routine, former Larry Summers acolyte Natasha Sarin acknowledges that ordinary Americans are “right to resent a tax system that’s skewed against them,” but that making those at the top pay their fair share would not be enough, so it’s the civic duty of everyone, no matter their level of income, to pay federal income tax. In Democracy, writers from the Tax Law Center at NYU Law, including two Obama and Biden administration alums, somehow manage to start by recognizing that the income tax "embodies the principle that the government should be financed based on ability to pay” yet end by attacking a proposal based on its recognition of the inability of those with income below the basic cost of living—or income below any threshold for that matter—to pay income tax.
You can’t top the tone-deafness of a billionaire Republican senator insisting that all Americans pay income tax to have “skin in the game.” But you know what comes close? A group of ivory-tower policy wonks ensconced in air-conditioned offices and drawing comfortable six-figure salaries insisting that exempting janitors making $40,000 a year from federal income tax would be a tragic policy mistake. No, they don’t use the phrase “skin in the game,” but they may as well.
And let’s be clear, all Americans have a lot of skin in the tax game whether or not they pay federal income tax. In fact, if Social Security and Medicare taxes were labeled to reflect what they actually are—income taxes—all but the lowest income Americans would be considered to be paying federal income tax.
Other attacks on the Working Americans’ Tax Cut Act are equally off base. The second favored theme is to mischaracterize WATCA as a middle-class tax cut. That attack line seizes on the reality that it’s never possible to craft a tax bill that precisely addresses its underlying policy objective. Exempting income up to the basic cost of living from income tax unavoidably confers an incidental benefit on those with incomes at a slightly higher level, a benefit that is rapidly phased out under WATCA.
So, yes, Americans with incomes considered middle class stand to benefit from WATCA. The benefit, however, becomes vanishingly smaller as income increases into middle-class range. But that didn’t stop former Biden National Economic Council member Bharat Ramamurti from referring to WATCA as a “very sweeping middle-class tax cut” which he suggested reflected poor prioritization. Consider how flat Ramamurti’s criticism would fall had he said that a tax cut for underpaid workers struggling to make rent reflected poor prioritization.
The Working Americans’ Tax Cut Act fixes a fundamental structural flaw in the federal income tax: We’re taxing those with no ability to pay into poverty, while maintaining top rates that are absurdly low. We can quibble about the details of fixing that flaw. Maybe the basic cost of living in America is not exactly $46,000. Maybe the cost-of-living exemption should be phased out over a narrower income range.
When our organization, Patriotic Millionaires, worked with congressional offices to develop WATCA, we fully expected commentary along those lines. But ironically enough, there has been remarkably little of it. Instead, we’re hearing that the fundamental structural flaw—and the misery it inflicts on struggling workers—should be left unaddressed. And as a result of their moral ambivalence, we’re left with a Democratic Party that can’t understand why working-class Americans have left them. We can.
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What the Nation Can Learn From Seattle's Fresh Bucks Program
After more than a decade of implementation, Fresh Bucks offers evidence that targeted investments in healthy food can improve food security, increase fruit and vegetable consumption, and help reduce nutritional inequality.
Jul 19, 2026
As rising food prices continue to strain household budgets and food insecurity remains a persistent challenge, a successful Seattle program is attracting national attention. For over a decade, the city’s Fresh Bucks initiative has helped lower-income families afford fresh fruits and vegetables through targeted food assistance. Now, Congress is considering whether to test that success at the national level.
Seattle launched Fresh Bucks in 2012. The initiative seeks to “eliminate disparities in healthy food access for communities most burdened by food insecurity, economic hardship, and environmental injustices,” according to the program website. Specifically, according to city data, Black and Hispanic households in Seattle are twice as likely to experience food insecurity—which is defined as “limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods, or limited or uncertain ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways” by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).
Today, Seattle’s Fresh Bucks initiative serves approximately 17,000 income-qualified households each month with benefits dedicated to purchasing fruits and vegetables. Research suggests the investment is paying off. A 2025 study by the University of Washington found that participating households experienced a 31% higher rate of food security than comparable households without the benefit. Additionally, the City of Seattle’s food insecurity dashboard shows aggregate declining insecurity rates since 2018.
The Fresh Bucks program also improves diet quality—not simply by increasing the quantity of food families can buy, but by making nutritious food more affordable. According to the same UW study, Fresh Bucks participants were 37% more likely than households on the program’s waitlist to consume at least three daily servings of fruits and vegetables.
A nationwide Fresh Bucks program would not reverse recent cuts to federal nutrition assistance, but it offers a practical, evidence-based way to reduce hunger while addressing one of inequality’s most basic dimensions: whether families can afford healthy food.
Those gains matter because access to healthy food remains deeply unequal. A 2017 study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found that healthier diets rich in fruits and vegetables often cost significantly more than heavily processed alternatives, which creates a financial barrier that affects lower-income households most. When income determines access to nutritious food, it reinforces broader inequalities in health and well-being.
Community leaders in neighborhoods served by Fresh Bucks say they see those challenges firsthand.
“In White Center and historically underinvested communities across King County, we see every day how rising grocery costs continue to strain working families, seniors, immigrants, and households already navigating increasing housing and living expenses,” Aaron Garcia, executive director of the White Center Community Development Association, said in a press release on new legislation to expand the program. “Access to healthy, culturally relevant food should not be determined by income—it should not be considered a luxury,” Garcia said.
White Center illustrates why programs like Fresh Bucks matter. One of the Seattle area’s most diverse communities, more than 61% of its residents are people of color and 27% were born outside the US. The neighborhood was historically targeted for redlining, which continues to shape poverty rates and income inequality across the Seattle region.
Census data show White Center has below-average household and per capita incomes and a poverty rate higher than the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metropolitan average. Residents of South Seattle, including White Center, face disproportionately limited access to grocery stores offering fresh, nutritious produce. Some advocates describe these neighborhoods not as food deserts, but as examples of “food apartheid”: the racial, geographic, and economic inequities that stratify society and dictate who has access to healthy food and who is relegated to nutritionally deficient diets.
Fresh Bucks was designed to confront those disparities in Seattle by making healthy food more affordable for families who have historically faced the greatest barriers to accessing it.
On the national level, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), whose congressional district includes Seattle, argued that the city’s local innovation can become a model to address broader food insecurity.
“[…] Seattle is once again leading the way with the Fresh Bucks program, which is successfully keeping people fed with nutritious food and reducing hunger,” Jayapal said. “We must pass this legislation to expand the program nationwide and get families in every corner of the country healthy produce they can afford.”
Jayapal introduced the Fresh Bucks for Fresh Produce Act on July 2. Modeled on Seattle’s program, the legislation would establish a pilot program within the US Department of Agriculture, providing households earning 80% or less of their area’s median income with $60 each month to purchase fresh fruits and vegetables.
The proposal comes as federal food assistance is moving in the opposite direction. Recent analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has fallen by more than 4 million people after Trump’s budget reconciliation bill passed last June—roughly a 10% decline. Meanwhile, the Trump administration recently eliminated roughly $1 billion in food purchases for schools and food banks by ending the Local Food Purchasing Assistance Program.
Other federal policies have also increased food costs. As The New York Times reported in May, executive tariffs on imported steel have driven up the cost of canned fruits and vegetables, because packaging accounts for roughly one-third of wholesale prices. Those increases disproportionately affect households that depend on affordable pantry staples such as canned corn and beans.
Public opinion indicates opposition to these trends. A 2025 Data for Progress survey found broad bipartisan support for SNAP and other efforts to help families afford food. A nationwide Fresh Bucks program would not reverse recent cuts to federal nutrition assistance, but it offers a practical, evidence-based way to reduce hunger while addressing one of inequality’s most basic dimensions: whether families can afford healthy food.
The proposed federal pilot would allow policymakers to test whether Seattle’s results can be replicated elsewhere. After more than a decade of implementation, Fresh Bucks offers evidence that targeted investments in healthy food can improve food security, increase fruit and vegetable consumption, and help reduce nutritional inequality.
That evidence is especially valuable as the USDA has suspended its annual report tracking food insecurity, making it more difficult to measure the full scope of hunger nationwide. Seattle’s experience suggests that local governments can serve as laboratories for policies that address inequality—and that successful municipal innovations may provide models for broader adoption.
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What Progressives Can Learn From Mexico About Avoiding a Right-Wing Backlash
Mexico’s continuity may reflect not only the material results achieved by the government, but also the broader narrative through which those results were understood.
Jun 26, 2026
The recent presidential election in Colombia highlighted a striking political paradox. New data from the country’s national statistics agency shows that the national poverty rate fell to 28% in 2025, the lowest level ever recorded. Nearly 1.8 million Colombians moved out of poverty in a single year, while extreme poverty and income inequality also declined. The figures represent a significant social achievement and continue a multi-year trend of improving living standards.
Yet, despite this advance, Colombians elected right-wing lawyer and businessman Abelardo De La Espriella, whose nationalist and law-and-order platform marks a sharp contrast with the policies of outgoing President Gustavo Petro. The outcome suggests that even significant social and economic progress does not necessarily translate into electoral support for the government that helped produce it.
Nor is Colombia unique. Across the region, electoral cycles have repeatedly shown that social progress does not necessarily produce lasting political loyalty. Similar patterns can be seen in Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, and elsewhere in South America, where periods of progressive governance have often been followed by the election of more conservative leaders or governments with markedly different priorities.
Former Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa offered one explanation for this phenomenon. He argued that when people escape poverty and enter the middle class, many become primarily concerned with preserving their newly acquired status. As a result, they may become less supportive of policies aimed at extending similar benefits to others. Whether or not one accepts this interpretation, it highlights an important political challenge: The very success of progressive social policies may alter the interests, expectations, and priorities of the people they benefit, making long-term political continuity more difficult to sustain.
The very success of progressive social policies may alter the interests, expectations, and priorities of the people they benefit, making long-term political continuity more difficult to sustain.
There is, however, one notable exception: Mexico.
Mexico presents an important counterexample. The presidency of Andrés Manuel López Obrador was followed by the election of Claudia Sheinbaum, who belongs to the same political movement and has pledged to continue much of the same agenda. Rather than producing a backlash, the governing project maintained broad popular support through a successful leadership transition.
Why Was Mexico different?
Part of the answer may lie not only in policy outcomes but also in political identity. While many progressive governments in South America have defined themselves primarily through ideological labels such as socialism or the left, Mexico’s governing movement increasingly describes itself through the concept of Mexican Humanism. Although its policies share many objectives with progressive governments elsewhere, the language is notably different. Mexican Humanism emphasizes dignity, community, solidarity, and national culture rather than ideological affiliation.
This distinction may matter. Political projects framed primarily in ideological terms can reinforce divisions between supporters and opponents. Projects rooted in shared cultural and ethical values may be better positioned to build identification across traditional political boundaries. From this perspective, Mexico’s continuity may reflect not only the material results achieved by the government, but also the broader narrative through which those results were understood.
The Colombian election therefore raises a broader question for Latin America. If poverty reduction, lower inequality, and improved social indicators are not enough to guarantee political continuity, what is missing? Is the decisive factor economic performance, security, media influence, political organization, or something deeper within a nation’s culture?
Mexico suggests that political durability may depend on more than effective governance alone. It may also require a shared sense of identity and purpose that transcends conventional ideological categories. The most interesting question may not be why some countries move from the left to the right, but why Mexico has not.
This article was first published on Pressenza.
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Join Me in the Streets This May Day
This year, the organizers of May Day Strong are calling for everyone to participate in a new version of a general strike—with no work, no school, and no shopping—wherever you are.
Apr 30, 2026
This May Day, I’ll be one of the millions who will peacefully take to the streets to denounce the cruelty and corruption of this administration and the oligarchs it serves. I will march because I believe our lives are worth more than dollars and cents. Every one of us deserves the right to live in dignity with hope for the future. I invite you to join me.
May Day began in the 19th century, when industrial workers came together to demand something we now take for granted: an eight-hour workday. At that time, even children worked 12 or more hours straight in factories, every day. We too easily forget how far we have come, and that victories like these were won by organized people.
In 1884, there was an extreme concentration of wealth in the United States, so labor organizers called for a general strike every year on May 1 until all workers achieved “eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what we will.” It took many strikes and marches, advances and setbacks, but the eight-hour workday ultimately became the law of the land in 1940.
This year, the organizers of May Day Strong are calling for everyone to participate in a new version of a general strike—with no work, no school, and no shopping—wherever you are. There will be large, peaceful marches you can easily join in cities and towns in every state.
This year, I find inspiration in everyone who has marched before me, and in all those across the country who are finding their voices as we step into the streets in this dark moment. Because it truly is up to us.
May Day Strong’s rallying cry is #WorkersOverBillionaires, at a time when the difference between rich and poor is even worse in this country than it was in the 19th century. The top 1% in this country controls more wealth than the bottom 93%, while one man—Elon Musk—controls more than 52% of American families.
Every four seconds, Musk and billionaires like him rake in more than the average person makes in a year. Extreme wealth is concentrating even more, fueled by the more than $1 trillion in tax cuts granted by the Trump administration to the ultra rich and corporations last year. But there’s more at stake than income inequality. We all know that a basic right in a healthy democracy is to have free and fair elections: While this ideal has never really been true for many of us, it’s a hard-fought right that guarantees us having a voice in how the country, and our daily lives, are run. That is precisely why it is under attack at this very moment.
That’s why the organization I lead, People’s Action, has joined May Day Strong and more than 400 partner groups across the country to host democracy bootcamps and solidarity schools, so every community can be prepared to defend democracy. You can join a solidarity school where you live, or organize your own. The materials we have developed for these trainings are freely available to anyone who wishes to use them, in English and Spanish, at organizingfordemoracy.org.
May Day has long served as an inspiration for the immigrant rights movement. For two decades, it has called for May 1 to be a “Day Without Immigrants,” as a way to show solidarity and make the work and contributions of immigrants visible to everyone.
This year’s organizers also found inspiration in Minneapolis, where faith and union leaders called for schools and businesses to close for a “Day of Truth and Freedom” on January 23, to protest the violent treatment of immigrants and peaceful protesters by federal agents.
More than 75,000 people poured into the streets of Minneapolis to express their outrage, and thousands more did in other cities. It worked: In the face of this solidarity, clear evidence the people of Minneapolis would stand together and protect each other, federal agents left the city.
Who answered the call in Minnesota? Workers of all sorts, small business owners, neighbors, mothers with children, pastors with their faithful, doctors, nurses, and teachers. That is, everyone who believes violence is never the answer, and that we all deserve better.
I am also inspired by the people of Hungary, who just ended the authoritarian rule of Viktor Orbán with their most effective tool: their votes. Despite all of Orbán’s efforts over 16 years to restrict, silence, and intimidate civil society, Hungarians united around a simple truth: They want to live in a future free from fear. Together, they won. And if they can do it, we can, too.
This year, I find inspiration in everyone who has marched before me, and in all those across the country who are finding their voices as we step into the streets in this dark moment. Because it truly is up to us. No one is coming to save us: We must rely on each other.
So I invite you to march with me this May Day, then let’s organize to win elections and protect our right to vote this November. Together, we can prove the power of organized people. I’ll be marching in Florida this year, and if you are nearby, you are welcome to join us. But wherever you are, I encourage you to do something. You will make new friends when you do.
It does not matter why, how, or when you decide it is time for a change. It could be today. What matters right now is that we show up for one another, and we learn how to organize with new neighbors to create a democracy where every one of us has a voice, a vote, and the right to live with dignity. You can choose to do this now.
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Big Oil's Post-Trump About Face Proves Corporations Won't Regulate Themselves
The sooner we stop expecting companies like Exxon to be voluntary agents of social change, the sooner we can stop the flow of hypocrisy and greenwashing and start working on resolving the social and environmental crises that blight the lives of billions.
Mar 28, 2026
President Donald Trump has long called global warming a hoax, but his sweeping anti-climate agenda has stunned even many of his supporters. Since returning to the White House, he’s withdrawn the US from the Paris Treaty, rolled back critical greenhouse gas regulations, and opened up millions of acres of previously protected public land for oil and gas drilling.
In response, big oil and gas companies have abandoned, without the slightest resistance, the showy public commitments they had previously made to climate transition. For example, BP has slashed green energy expenditures by 70%, Equinor has cut back its renewable capacity targets by almost 40%, and Chevron has reduced its carbon-reduction capital expenditures to about 5% of its total capital expenditures. None of the world’s 12 largest oil and gas companies plan to decrease fossil fuel production, and all of them project that fossil fuels will continue to overwhelm other sources of energy for the foreseeable future, according to a recent evaluation.
Far from a change of heart, this is simply Big Oil returning to form. The petroleum industry has never been serious about curbing emissions, 90% of which globally come from fossil fuels. Indeed, after decades of investment, renewables still account for a minuscule amount—about 0.13%—of total energy produced by the world’s largest 250 oil and gas companies, according to a recent research paper. “I think the article resolves the debate on whether the fossil fuel industry is honestly engaging with the climate crisis or not,” said the paper’s lead researcher. “Their interest ends with their profits.”
Some oil companies, such as ExxonMobil, continue to promise to reduce emissions to net zero by 2050. This appears to align them with the consensus of climate science that this is necessary globally to limit warming to 1.5°C (2.7°F) above preindustrial levels. However, Exxon is typical in designating a narrow target of greenhouse gases to eliminate: only those from its own operations, mainly pumping and refining oil and gas, and from buying electricity generated by fossil fuels. This conveniently ignores greenhouse gases from the consumption of its gasoline and other petroleum products, as well as those of its suppliers—which exceed by four times the total covered by Exxon’s commitment.
We should have realized that companies, like Exxon, that knowingly act in pursuit of catastrophe cannot be trusted to stop of their own accord.
Exxon wants us to believe that running its pump jacks and refineries on solar and wind power puts it on the side of the climate transition. It’s cynical buffoonery. But it’s also a sign that America’s leaders and electorate have been willfully blind. We should have realized that companies, like Exxon, that knowingly act in pursuit of catastrophe cannot be trusted to stop of their own accord. As Shakespeare might have said, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in Big Oil but in ourselves.”
The past is prologue. Ever since the advent of industrial capitalism in America in the early 1800s, corporations have consistently served one master, shareholders, delivering them profits by open competition in free markets. From the start, elites have insisted that corporations must regard financial and social objectives as mutually exclusive, even as a single-minded quest for profitability has pushed the system to its breaking point.
We saw the injustice of this belief in the late 19th century, when “robber barons”—who had clawed their way to the top of an unregulated, chaotic economy—justified poverty wages and harsh working conditions by co-opting Charles Darwin’s new theory of evolution, popularized as “survival of the fittest.” Railroad magnate Charles Elliott Perkins—who embodied Social Darwinism by rising from office boy to president of one of the nation’s largest railroads—declared his creed: “That a man is entitled to a living wage is absurd… [If] you take from the strong to give to the weak, you encourage weakness; therefore, let men reap what they and their progenitors sow.”
Early capitalism was marred by periodic, destructive economic downturns. But over time, government acquired fiscal and monetary tools to smooth the boom-and-bust cycles and soften the hard edges of fierce profit seeking through welfare programs, especially during the Progressive Era (1890s-1920) and the New Deal (1933-1938).
However, the bedrock of the corporate mission stayed solid even as the government built new structures on top of it. During the New Deal, for example, leading industrialists joined the American Liberty League to oppose innovations like Social Security. A League leader, echoing his counterpart six decades earlier, proclaimed, “You can’t recover prosperity by seizing the accumulation of the thrifty and distributing it to the thriftless and unlucky.”
The permanent establishment of a taxpayer-funded social safety net in the postwar period only reaffirmed corporations’ unwavering fealty to shareholder value. The president of the mighty Dow Chemical Company, Leland Doan, wrote in 1957: “Any activity labeled ‘social responsibility’ must be judged in terms of whether it is somehow beneficial to the immediate or long-range welfare of the business... I hope we never kid ourselves that we are operating for the public interest per se.”
The corporate community resisted even when the tide of public opinion turned against the malign Jim Crow segregation system in the 1950s and ’60s. When US Steel was accused of workplace discrimination in 1963, prominent academic Andrew Hacker struck back forcefully: “If corporations ought to be doing things they are not now doing—such as hiring Negroes on an equal basis with whites—then it is up to government to tell them so. The only responsibility of corporations is to make profits, thus contributing to a prosperous economic system.”
Predictably, that same decade, the corporate establishment dismissed the emergence of the environmental movement. In 1962, when Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring shocked the nation by exposing the harm to human and animal life posed by the unrestricted use of pesticides, a chemical industry spokesman responded, “If man were to follow the teachings of Miss Carson, we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth.”
Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize-winning economist and chief economic adviser to Ronald Reagan, famously summed up the unchanging corporate consensus in words still widely quoted today: “There is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.”
For the most part, investors have held their noses and counted their gains. But starting almost a century ago, in 1928, when the invention of mutual funds opened up the stock market to the middle class, “ethical” funds, as they came to be known, entered the arena. They were marketed to individuals and families who wanted their portfolios to reflect their values, and to asset managers who wanted their clients to consider them good citizens.
It is folly to ask business to do the work of government.
For a long time, these socially responsible funds were a negligible part of the industry because they typically underperformed the market. These funds used a strategy called negative screening—excluding certain “sin” industries, such as cigarettes, liquor, and weapons. Unfortunately, negative screening typically yields lower returns (sin often pays in the stock market!) and greater price volatility, due to limited diversification. In addition, there is no reason to believe that negative screening has any discernible effect on stock prices, so it has no power to compel corporations to reform.
The answer to this quandary finally came in the early 2000s, in the form of a new stock-picking tool called Environmental, Social, and Governance, or “ESG” for short. The seductive promise of ESG is “doing well by doing good”—or getting rich by investing in companies that make the world better. On the back of this dream, capital invested in accordance with ESG principles has grown monumentally, to as much as $30 trillion, about one-quarter of the global total of assets under management.
ESG claims that adroitly managing environmental and social risks will improve profitability and, therefore, stock prices. But ESG only counts risks that are financially material, ignoring all social or environmental harm for which a company faces no financial penalty. As you might expect, this often bears perverse results. For example, cigarette companies kill their customers—you can’t get more anti-social than that!—but smoking is legal, and Big Tobacco rarely faces liability for cancer from smoking. That is why tobacco companies are sometimes awarded good ESG scores and even appear in some ESG stock funds. Likewise, fossil fuel companies, which have historically made high returns and avoided significant regulatory penalties, appear in 80% of ESG funds.Whether it be alcoholism, gambling addiction, gun deaths, climate change, or other iniquities, the damage that companies inflict on society without literally paying for it—or the negative externalities, as they’re called in economics—entirely escapes ESG’s radar.
Worse, the key assumption of ESG—that adept social risk management translates into higher profitability—is fundamentally unprovable. Many studies have attempted to show a strong positive correlation between specific ESG policies, like emissions reductions or heightened employee benefits, and financial metrics, like cost of debt or return on assets. But, as I explain in my forthcoming book on socially responsible investment, very few succeed. In the end, the research only allows you to draw one conclusion with confidence: that it is simply not possible to precisely define ESG practices at a granular level, measure their direct effect on financial performance, and compare these results validly across different companies.
But that does not stop ESG rating agencies from trying. ESG ratings have grown into a big business, since fund managers pay dearly for them to guide their stock selection. The rating agency reports are typically long, detailed, and quantitative—but completely unreliable. These reports may look sober and professional, like credit rating reports from companies such as S&P Global or Moody’s. But credit rating agencies are analyzing real financial values to assess a tangible corporate quality: its ability to repay its debts. The numbers are verifiable and have a proven relevance to the projected outcome. That is why credit ratings have a 90% correlation; S&P and Moody’s seldom disagree substantially on a company’s rating.
ESG ratings, by contrast, are all over the map, with a correlation of only 40%. Analysts point to three key factors: the rating agencies choose different terms to measure; they measure them with incompatible methods; and they use contradictory methodologies to combine these idiosyncratic measurements into final ratings. These discrepancies build on each other to produce wildly variant final scores. A company denigrated as a dog in ESG terms by one rating agency may be lauded as a star by another.
If ESG is just an illusion, and negative screening a disappointment, how should investors direct their capital to make corporations more socially responsible? The answer is, they shouldn’t bother.
In the game of capitalism, the role of corporations is to make as much money as they can, while playing by the rules. The role of the state, as we learned in the Progressive Era and the New Deal, is to revise the rules periodically to ensure fair play and a socially positive outcome—without hobbling the players. We do want fierce competition, but we don’t want to destroy the playing field in the process.
Today, corporate profits are at their highest proportion of GDP in 50 years, while wages are at their lowest. Overall, income inequality has never been greater, not even in the Gilded Age, the period immediately preceding the Progressive Era, when many toiled in Dickensian poverty while a few, like the Vanderbilt dynasty, flaunted their extravagant and lavish lifestyles. Now, like then, the people, with justification, are losing faith in the system.
Like our Progressive forebears, we will have to revamp capitalism in order to rescue it. Key objectives must include rebuilding organized labor, since what benefits unions benefits the middle class. We’ll also need to break up de facto corporate cartels that stifle competition, squeeze wages, and lower productivity. To counter the existential threat of climate change, we need a cap-and-trade system that makes industry a partner in carbon reduction, not an opponent, and can serve as a model for other public-private partnerships.
It is folly to ask business to do the work of government. The sooner we stop expecting companies like Exxon to be voluntary agents of social change and acknowledge that they are amoral profit machines, the sooner we can stop the flow of hypocrisy and greenwashing and start working on resolving the social and environmental crises that blight the lives of billions. The path to greater corporate social responsibility leads through the voting booth and the statehouse, not through Wall Street and the C-suite.
This piece was originally published by The MIT Press Reader.
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It’s 2025. The AI Revolution Is Destroying the American Dream
The rise of AI will exacerbate income inequality throughout the country, and it’s the government’s duty to step up and take care of its citizens when required.
Nov 07, 2025
In 2019, the New York Times published a series of op-ed columns “from the future,” including one from 2043 urging policymakers to rethink what the American Dream looks like amid an AI revolution.
Well, it’s only 2025, and the American Dream is already in jeopardy of dying because of AI’s impact.
Earlier this year, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned of a “white-collar bloodbath,” which was met with criticism by some of his tech colleagues and competitors. However, we’re already seeing a “bloodbath” come to pass. Amazon is preparing to lay off as many as 30,000 corporate employees, with its senior vice president stating that AI is “enabling companies to innovate much faster.” As it (unsurprisingly) turns out, CEOs across industries share this same sentiment.
We’re seeing the most visible signs of this “bloodbath” at the entry level. Recent graduates are having difficulty finding work in their fields and are taking part-time roles in fast food and retail in order to make ends meet. After being told for years that going to college was the key to being successful, up-and-coming generations are being met with disillusionment.
If Americans can’t reach a decent standard of living now, they’ll be worse off as the AI revolution marches forward.
Despite dire statistics and repeated warnings from researchers and economists alike, people at the decision-making table aren’t listening. White House AI czar David Sacks brushed off fears of mass job displacement this past summer, and adviser Jacob Helberg dismissed the idea that the government has to “hold the hands of every single person getting displaced” by AI.
Unlike the hypothetical 2043, there aren’t people marching in the streets demanding that the government guarantee they’ll still have livelihoods when AI takes their jobs—yet. However, this prediction could easily come true. Life is already unaffordable for the majority of Americans. Add Big Tech’s hoarding of the wealth being created by AI and inconsistent job opportunities, and we could have class warfare on our hands.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman perfectly encapsulated the ignorance of Silicon Valley when he implied that if jobs are replaced by AI, they aren’t “real work.” It’s no surprise that Altman, who has profit margins reaching the billions, doesn’t understand that jobs aren’t just jobs to middle-class families; they are ways for Americans to build their livelihoods, and ultimately, find purpose. Our country—for better or for worse—was built on the idea that anyone could keep their head down, work hard, and achieve the American Dream. If that’s no longer the case, then we must rethink the American Dream itself.
We can’t close the Pandora’s box of AI, nor should we. Advanced AI will bring about positive, transformative change in society if we utilize it correctly. But our policymakers must start taking AI’s impact on our workforce seriously.
That’s not to say there aren’t influential leaders already speaking out. In fact, concerns about AI’s effects on American workers span party lines. Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy wrote a compelling essay arguing in part that there won’t be enough jobs created by advanced AI to replace the lost jobs. Republican Sen. Josh Hawley is pushing the Republican Party to make AI a priority in order to be “a party of working people.” Independent Sen.Bernie Sanders released a report revealing that as many as 100 million jobs could be displaced to AI and proposed a “robot tax” to mitigate the technology’s effects on the labor force—another version of universal basic income (UBI).
Now, I won’t pretend to know the best policy solution that will allow Americans to continue flourishing in the AI era. However, I do know that the rise of AI will exacerbate income inequality throughout the country and that it’s the government’s duty to step up and take care of its citizens when required.
This starts by looking at how we can rebuild our social safety net in an era where Americans do less or go without work altogether. For millions of Americans, healthcare coverage is tied to their employment, as are Social Security benefits. If Americans aren’t employed, then they can’t contribute to their future checks when they’re retired. This leads to questions about the concept of retirement. Will it even exist in the future? Will Americans even be able to find happiness in forced “retirement” without an income and without the purpose provided by work?
It’s easy to spiral here, but you get the point. This is a complicated issue with consequences that we’ll be reckoning with for years to come. But we don’t have that kind of time. If Americans can’t reach a decent standard of living now, they’ll be worse off as the AI revolution marches forward.
It’s 2025, and AI is already transforming the world as we know it. In this economy, we must create a new American Dream that allows Americans to pursue life, liberty, and happiness on their own terms.
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The Corporate Democrats Delivered Donald Trump
Addressing the root of economic systems that oppress Americans is exactly what the Democratic Party leadership, dependent on big corporate donors, has rigorously refused to do. If they continue this refusal, things will only get worse.
Oct 21, 2025
The human condition includes a vast array of unavoidable misfortunes. But what about the preventable ones? Shouldn’t the United States provide for the basic needs of its people?
Such questions get distinctly short shrift in the dominant political narratives. When someone can’t make ends meet and suffers dire consequences, the mainstream default is to see a failing individual rather than a failing system. Even when elected leaders decry inequity, they typically do more to mystify than clarify what has caused it.
While “income inequality” is now a familiar phrase, media coverage and political rhetoric routinely disconnect victims from their victimizers. Human-interest stories and speechifying might lament or deplore common predicaments, but their storylines rarely connect the destructive effects of economic insecurity with how corporate power plunders social resources and fleeces the working class. Yet the results are extremely far-reaching.
“We have the highest rate of childhood poverty and senior poverty of any major country on earth,” Senator Bernie Sanders has pointed out. “You got half of older workers have nothing in the bank as they face retirement. You got a quarter of our seniors trying to get by on $15,000 a year or less.”
Such hardship exists in tandem with ever-greater opulence for the few, including this country’s 800 billionaires. But standard white noise mostly drowns out how government policies and the overall economic system keep enriching the already rich at the expense of people with scant resources.
This year, while Donald Trump and Republican legislators have been boosting oligarchy and slashing enormous holes in the social safety net, Democratic leaders have seemed remarkably uninterested in breaking away from the policy approaches that ended up losing their party the allegiance of so many working-class voters. Those corporate-friendly approaches set the stage for Trump’s faux “populism” as an imagined solution to the discontent that the corporatism of the Democrats had helped usher in.
While offering a rollback to pre-Trump-2.0 policies, the current Democratic leadership hardly conveys any orientation that could credibly relieve the economic distress of so many Americans. The party remains in a debilitating rut, refusing to truly challenge the runaway power of corporate capitalism that has caused ever-widening income inequality.
“Opportunity” as a Killer Ideology
The Democratic Party establishment now denounces President Trump’s vicious assaults on vital departments and social programs. Unfortunately, three decades ago it cleared a path that led toward the likes of the DOGE wrecking crew. A clarion call in that direction came from President Bill Clinton when, in his 1996 State of the Union address, he exulted that “the era of big government is over.”
Clinton followed those instantly iconic words by adding, “We cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves.” Like the horse he rode into Washington — the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which he cofounded — Clinton advocated a “third way,” distinct from both liberal Democrats and Republican conservatives. But when his speech called for “self-reliance and teamwork” — and when, on countless occasions throughout the 1990s he invoked the buzzwords “opportunity” and “responsibility” — he was firing from a New Democrat arsenal that all too sadly targeted “handouts” and “special interests” as obsolete relics of the 1930s New Deal and the 1960s Great Society.
The seminal Clintonian theme of “opportunity” — with little regard for outcome — aimed at a wide political audience. In the actual United States, however, touting opportunity as central to solving the problems of inequity obscured the huge disparities in real-life options. In theory, everyone was to have a reasonable chance; in practice, opportunity was then (and remains) badly skewed by economic status and race, beginning as early as the womb. In a society so stratified by class, “opportunity” as the holy grail of social policy ultimately leaves outcomes to the untender mercies of the market.
Two weeks before Clinton won the presidency, the newsweekly Time reported that his “economic vision” was “perhaps best described as a call for a We decade; not the old I-am-my-brother’s-keeper brand of traditional Democratic liberalism.” Four weeks later, the magazine showered the president-elect with praise: “Clinton’s willingness to move beyond some of the old-time Democratic religion is auspicious. He has spoken eloquently of the need to redefine liberalism: the language of entitlements and rights and special-interest demands, he says, must give way to talk of responsibilities and duties.”
Clinton and the DLC insisted that government should smooth the way for maximum participation in the business of business. While venerating the market, the New Democrats were openly antagonistic toward labor unions and those they dubbed “special interests,” such as feminists, civil-rights activists, environmentalists, and others who needed to be shunted aside to fulfill the New Democrat agenda, which included innovations like “public-private partnerships,” “empowerment zones,” and charter schools.
Taking the Government to Market
While disparaging advocates for the marginalized as impediments to winning the votes of white “moderates,” the New Democrats tightly embraced corporate America. I still have a page I tore out of Time magazine in December 1996, weeks after Clinton won reelection. The headline said: “Ex-Investment Bankers and Lawyers Form Clinton’s Economic Team. Surprise! It’s Pro-Wall Street.”
That was the year when Clinton and his allies achieved a longtime goal — strict time limits for poor women to receive government assistance. “From welfare to work” became a mantra. Aid to Families with Dependent Children was out and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families was in. As occurred three years earlier when he was able to push NAFTA through Congress only because of overwhelming Republican support, Democratic lawmakers were divided and Clinton came to rely on overwhelming GOP support to make “welfare reform” possible.
The welfare bill that he gleefully signed in August 1996 was the flip side of his elite economic team’s priorities. The victims of “welfare reform” would soon become all too obvious, while their victimizers would remain obscured in the smoke blown by cheerleading government officials, corporate-backed think tanks, and mainstream journalists. When Clinton proclaimed that such landmark legislation marked the end of “welfare as we know it,” he was hailing the triumph of a messaging siege that had raged for decades.
Across much of the country’s media spectrum, prominent pundits had long been hammering away at “entitlements,” indignantly claiming that welfare recipients, disproportionately people of color, were sponging off government largesse. The theme was a specialty of conservative columnists like Charles Krauthammer, John Leo, and George Will (who warned in November 1993 that the nation’s “rising illegitimacy rate… may make America unrecognizable”). But some commentators who weren’t right-wing made similar arguments, while ardently defaming the poor.
Newsweek star writer Joe Klein often accused inner-city Black people of such defects as “dependency” and “pathology.” Three months after Clinton became president, Klein wrote that “out-of-wedlock births to teenagers are at the heart of the nexus of pathologies that define the underclass.” The next year, he intensified his barrage. In August 1994, under the headline “The Problem Isn’t the Absence of Jobs, But the Culture of Poverty,” he peppered his piece with phrases like “welfare dependency,” while condemning “irresponsible, antisocial behavior that has its roots in the perverse incentives of the welfare system.”
Such punditry was unconcerned with the reality that, even if they could find and retain employment while struggling to raise families, what awaited the large majority of the women being kicked off welfare were dead-end jobs at very low wages.
A Small Business Shell Game
During the 1990s, Bill and Hillary Clinton fervently mapped out paths for poor women that would ostensibly make private enterprise the central solution to poverty. A favorite theme was the enticing (and facile) notion that people could rise above poverty by becoming entrepreneurs.
Along with many speeches by the Clintons, some federal funds were devoted to programs to help lenders offer microcredit so that low-income people could start small enterprises. Theoretically, the result would be both well-earning livelihoods and self-respect for people who had pulled themselves out of poverty. Of course, some individual success stories became grist for upbeat media features. But as the years went by, the overall picture would distinctly be one of failure.
In 2025, politicians continue to laud small business ventures as if they could somehow remedy economic ills. But such endeavors aren’t likely to bring long-term financial stability, especially for people with little start-up money to begin with. Current figures indicate that one-fifth of all new small businesses fail within the first year and the closure rate only continues to climb after that. Fifty percent of small businesses fail within five years and 65 percent within 10 years.
Promoting the private sector as the solution to social inequities inevitably depletes the public sector and its capacity to effectively serve the public good. Three decades after the Clinton presidency succeeded in blinkering the Democratic vision of what economic justice might look like, the party’s leaders are still restrained by assumptions that guarantee vast economic injustice — to the benefit of those with vast wealth.
“Structural problems require structural solutions,” Bernie Sanders wrote in a 2019 op-ed piece, “and promises of mere ‘access’ have never guaranteed black Americans equality in this country… ‘Access’ to health care is an empty promise when you can’t afford high premiums, co-pays or deductibles. And an ‘opportunity’ for an equal education is an opportunity in name only when you can’t afford to live in a good school district or to pay college tuition. Jobs, health care, criminal justice and education are linked, and progress will not be made unless we address the economic systems that oppress Americans at their root.”
But addressing the root of economic systems that oppress Americans is exactly what the Democratic Party leadership, dependent on big corporate donors, has rigorously refused to do. Looking ahead, unless Democrats can really put up a fight against the pseudo-populism of the rapacious and fascistic Trump regime, they are unlikely to regain the support of the working-class voters who deserted them in last year’s election.
During this month’s federal government shutdown, Republicans were ruthlessly insistent on worsening inequalities in the name of breaking or shaking up the system. Democrats fought tenaciously to defend Obamacare and a health-care status quo that still leaves tens of millions uninsured or underinsured, while medical bills remain a common worry and many people go without the care they need.
“We must start by challenging the faith that public policy, private philanthropy, and the culture at large has placed in the market to accomplish humanitarian goals,” historian Lily Geismer has written in her insightful and deeply researched book Left Behind. “We cannot begin to seek suitable and sustainable alternatives until we understand how deep that belief runs and how detrimental its consequences are.”
The admonitions in Geismer’s book, published three years ago, cogently apply to the present and future. “The best way to solve the vexing problems of poverty, racism, and disinvestment is not by providing market-based microsolutions,” she pointed out. “Macroproblems need macrosolutions. It is time to stop trying to make the market do good. It is time to stop trying to fuse the functions of the federal government with the private sector… It is the government that should be providing well-paying jobs, quality schools, universal childcare and health care, affordable housing, and protections against surveillance and brutality from law enforcement.”
Although such policies now seem a long way off, clearly articulating the goals is a crucial part of the struggle to achieve them. Those who suffer from the economic power structure are victims of a massively cruel system, being made steadily crueler by the presidency of Donald Trump. But progress is possible with clarity about how the system truly works and the victimizers who benefit from it.
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We Must Fight Like Hell Against Trump's Authoritarianism
Trump's rising authoritarianism brings us to a more dangerous moment than any point in American history since the Civil War.
Oct 02, 2025
Make no mistakes about it, we are living in dangerous and unprecedented times as we combat Trump‘s oligarchy, authoritarianism, kleptocracy, and his horrific attacks against working families.
We have more income and wealth inequality than we've ever had; we have more corporate control of the media than we've ever had; we have more billionaire money buying elections than we've ever had.
We have a major housing and educational crisis, people are going to the grocery store and can't afford the food their families need, and we have a health care system that is completely broken.
Meanwhile, we have a president who is a pathological liar, who has little regard for the rule of law, who is suing media outlets that criticize him, threatening to jail his political opponents and talking about the military invading U.S. cities as practice.
History has always taught us that real change never takes place from the top on down. It always occurs from the bottom on up. It occurs when ordinary people get sick and tired of oppression and injustice—and fight back.
And on Tuesday night, as you know, the government shut down because—for the first time in modern history—Donald Trump and the Republican Party are approaching a budget conversation that requires 60 votes with a take it or leave it approach.
I will not take it.
I will not allow Donald Trump and the Republican Party to take away health care from 15 million people by making the largest cut to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act in history.
I will not allow Donald Trump and the Republican Party to increase health insurance premiums by 75 percent, on average, for over 20 million Americans who get their health care through the Affordable Care Act.
I will not allow Donald Trump and the Republican Party to fund this by giving a $1 trillion tax break to people like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and the other oligarchs in the top 1 percent.
I will not allow Donald Trump and the Republican Party to undermine modern medicine and the health and well-being of our children by rejecting the scientific evidence regarding vaccines.
I will not allow Donald Trump and the Republican Party to allow this country to be moved toward authoritarianism by putting federal troops on city streets without a request from a governor or mayor.
I was asked ahead of the vote if I would just continue to vote NO over and over again until these issues are addressed, and you are damn right I will.
Donald Trump and my colleagues in the Republican Party may not stay up late at night worrying about people who can't afford health care, the medicine they need to survive, groceries and an education for their children, but I do.
Republicans will not have my vote to fund the government unless they find a sense of morality and do the right thing on health care, income and wealth inequality, and stopping Donald Trump's march toward authoritarianism.
I want the Republicans to go back to their districts and ask their constituents whether or not they believe it's a good idea to take away health care from millions of Americans to give Bezos and Musk a tax break.
I suspect they will not like the answer they hear.
So no. Republicans will not have my vote to fund the government unless they find a sense of morality and do the right thing on health care, income and wealth inequality, and stopping Donald Trump's march toward authoritarianism.
Until that happens it is important for all of us to stand up and make our voices heard.
Will it be easy? Of course not.
Is it possible? Only if everyone does their part.
Let me remind you, history has always taught us that real change never takes place from the top on down. It always occurs from the bottom on up. It occurs when ordinary people get sick and tired of oppression and injustice—and fight back. That is the history of the founding of our nation, the abolitionist movement, the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement and more.
Sisters and brothers, we are living in dangerous times. Maybe more dangerous than any point in American history since the Civil War.
But this is a struggle that, for ourselves and future generations, we cannot lose.
Let us go forward together in solidarity
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Pope Leo Is Right: Uber-Wealthy CEOs Like Musk Are Paid Too Much
But there's a solution: The recently introduced Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act would base the CEO-worker pay ratio on five-year averages of the total compensation for a firm’s highest-paid executive and median worker.
Sep 18, 2025
In his first interview since becoming the leader of the Catholic Church, Pope Leo XIV fielded a question about the polarization that is tearing societies apart around the world.
A significant factor, he said, is the “continuously wider gap between the income levels of the working class and the money that the wealthiest receive.”
Pope Leo appears to be particularly baffled by the Tesla pay package that could turn Elon Musk into the world’s first trillionaire.
“What does that mean and what’s that about?” the Pope asked. “If that is the only thing that has value anymore, then we’re in big trouble.”
We are indeed in big trouble. But we are not without solutions.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) are spearheading an effort behind one particularly promising solution: hefty tax hikes on companies with huge gaps between their CEO and median worker pay.
Their recently introduced Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act would base the CEO-worker pay ratio on five-year averages of the total compensation for a firm’s highest-paid executive and median worker. The tax increases would start at 0.5 percentage points on companies with gaps of 50 to 1 and top out at five percentage points on firms that pay their CEO more than 500 times median worker pay.
Potential Revenue From 10 Leading Corporations
How much might specific companies owe under the bill if they refuse to narrow their gaps? At the Institute for Policy Studies, we ran the numbers on 10 leading US corporations with large pay ratios. We found, for example, that Walmart, with a five-year average pay gap of 1,091 to 1, would have owed as much as $929 million in extra federal taxes in 2024 if this legislation had been in effect.
Amazon, with an even wider gap of 1,995 to 1 and higher profits, would’ve owed as much as an additional $3.1 billion last year.
Source: Institute for Policy Studies analysis of compensation data in proxy statements and US pre-tax income figures from 10-K filings.
Home Depot would have owed as much as $725 million more in 2024 taxes under this legislation. Like most of these companies, the home improvement giant can’t claim to be short on cash. Over the past six years, they’ve blown nearly $38 billion on stock buybacks, a maneuver that artificially inflates a CEO’s stock-based pay. With the money the firm spent on stock buybacks, Home Depot could’ve given every one of their 470,100 employees six annual $13,423 bonuses.
Musk’s Trillion-Dollar Pay Package
Sen. Sanders pointed out that if Elon Musk receives the full $975 billion compensation package that Tesla’s board has proposed, Tesla could owe up to $100 billion more in taxes over the next decade under this legislation.
“The Pope is exactly right,” wrote Sanders in a social media post. “No society can survive when one man becomes a trillionaire while the vast majority struggle to just survive—trying to put food on the table, pay rent, and afford healthcare. We can and must do better.”
“Working people are sick and tired of corporate greed,” Rep. Tlaib added in a press release. “It’s disgraceful that corporations continue to rake in record profits by exploiting the labor of their workers. Every worker deserves a living wage and human dignity on the job.”
Additional original co-sponsors of the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act include: Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Peter Welch (D-Vt.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), and 22 members of the House of Representatives.
Polling suggests that Americans across the political spectrum would support the bill. One 2024 survey, for instance, found that 80% of likely voters favor a tax hike on corporations that pay their CEOs more than 50 times more than what they pay their median employees. Large majorities in every political group gave the idea the thumbs up, including 89% of Democrats, 77% of Independents, and 71% of Republicans.
In these hyperpolarized times, Americans of diverse backgrounds, faiths, and political perspectives seem to share enormous common ground on at least one problem facing our nation: the extreme economic divides within our country’s largest corporations.
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Meet 100 CEOs Getting Filthy Rich at Their Workers’ Expense
CEOs of the 100 S&P 500 firms with the lowest median wages, a group we’ve dubbed the “Low-Wage 100,” have enjoyed skyrocketing pay over the past six years.
Aug 22, 2025
The gap between CEO compensation and median worker pay at Starbucks hit 6,666 to 1 last year. In other words, to make as much money as their CEO made last year, typical baristas would’ve had to start brewing macchiatos around the time humans first invented the wheel.
Starbucks takes the prize for the most obscene corporate pay disparities of 2024. But jaw-dropping gaps are the norm among America’s leading low-wage corporations.
This year’s edition of the annual Institute for Policy Studies Executive Excess report finds that CEOs of the 100 S&P 500 firms with the lowest median wages, a group we’ve dubbed the “Low-Wage 100,” have enjoyed skyrocketing pay over the past six years.
The Low-Wage 100
In 2024, average compensation for Low-Wage 100 top executives rose to $17.2 million, up 34.7% since 2019 (not adjusted for inflation). Global median worker pay at these firms stood at just $35,570, after increasing at a nominal rate of only 16.3% since 2019—significantly below the 22.6% US inflation rate. The Low-Wage 100 pay ratio increased 12.9% to 632 to 1 over the past half decade.
Buybacks Bonanza
Here’s yet another sign of the Low-Wage 100’s skewed priorities: Between 2019 and 2024 these firms spent a combined $644 billion on stock buybacks. This once-illegal financial maneuver artificially inflates the value of a company’s shares and, in the process, pumps up the value of CEOs’ stock-based compensation. Even the most inept executives can rake in vast fortunes through this scam.
Every dollar spent on buybacks represents a dollar not spent on workers. The tradeoffs can be downright staggering. At Lowe’s, for instance, every one of their 273,000 employees could’ve gotten an annual $28,456 bonus over the past six years with the money the retailer blew on stock buybacks. Lowe’s median worker pay in 2024: $30,606.
80% of workers said they view corporate CEOs as overpaid, and nearly 70% said they do not believe their own company’s CEO could do the job they do for even one week.
If McDonald’s had spent their buyback outlays on worker bonuses during this period, they could’ve given all their employees an extra $18,338 per year—more than that company’s median wage.
Siphoning resources from workers to make CEOs even richer is especially outrageous at a time when so many Americans are struggling with high costs for groceries, housing, and other essentials.
Stock buybacks also divert resources from capital investments vital to long-term growth, such as employee training or upgrading technology, equipment, and properties.
At 56 Low-Wage 100 companies, outlays for stock buybacks actually exceeded capital expenditures between 2019 and 2024. If we exclude Amazon, a CapEx outlier, the Low-Wage 100 as a whole spent considerably more on buybacks than on capital expenditures over this six-year period.
Extensive research has also shown that excessive CEO compensation is bad for business because extreme internal pay disparities undermine employee morale and boost turnover rates.
Solutions to Executive Excess
As poll after poll after poll has shown, Americans across the political spectrum are fed up with overpaid CEOs and want government action. In one rather amusing recent survey, 80% of workers said they view corporate CEOs as overpaid, and nearly 70% said they do not believe their own company’s CEO could do the job they do for even one week.
How could policymakers incentivize more equitable pay practices? Several bills in the US Congress and state legislatures would increase taxes on corporations with huge CEO-worker pay gaps. Polls suggest this would be enormously popular. In one survey of likely voters, 89% of Democrats, 77% of Independents, and 71% of Republicans said they’d like to see tax hikes on companies that pay their CEOs more than 50 times what they pay their median employees.
Congress could also increase the 1% excise tax on stock buybacks that went into effect in 2023. If that tax had been set at 4%, the Low-Wage 100 would have owed approximately $6.3 billion in additional federal taxes on their share repurchases during the past two years. That revenue would’ve been enough to cover the cost of 327,218 public housing units for two years.
Policymakers have ample tools for tackling the problem of runaway CEO pay. Now they just need to listen to their constituents and get the job done.
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