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inequality
Don't Just Tax the Uber Rich, Reform the Corporate Structure That Creates Them
The real engine of inequality is structural: corporate and financial practices that concentrate wealth among shareholders while shortchanging other stakeholders who should be benefiting from corporate profits
Mar 13, 2026
Targeting billionaires with California’s proposed wealth tax is an eye-catching idea, but perhaps the real problem is how some of these people become billionaires in the first place.
California has long eyed taxing the ultra rich. In 2024, Assembly Bill 259, backed by progressive Democrats and unions like the California Federation of Teachers, sought annual wealth taxes but was blocked by centrist Democrats, business groups, and Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Now, advocates are going for a one-time 5% levy on roughly 200 billionaires, covering everything they own—stocks, businesses, art, private islands, personal spacecraft, even intellectual property—basically the whole enchilada if they were state residents on January 1, 2026. Service Employees International Union United Healthcare Workers West estimates the tax could raise $100 billion for health and social services.
Backers call it a fair share. Critics cite economic, legal, and retroactive risks.
A one-time California wealth tax might dent the personal fortunes of the Zuckerbergs and Cooks, but it does nothing to slow the corporate machinery that grinds on to produce still more of them.
To many, the logic seems straightforward: Billionaires have absurd, even toxic amounts of money. The richest 1% now own more than the bottom 90% combined. Economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman note that middle- and working-class Americans often pay higher effective tax rates than the super rich, whose California fortunes grew over $2 trillion in just a few years.
Why not tax them?
But Here’s the Twist
Economist William Lazonick, a long-time critic of the way many US corporations are run, argues that targeting individual fortunes treats the symptom, not the disease. The real engine of inequality is structural: corporate and financial practices that concentrate wealth among shareholders while shortchanging other stakeholders who should be benefiting from corporate profits—and too often creating little of real value to society.
Most billionaires don’t “earn” their fortunes through work. They build wealth by owning stock in corporations. Executives and boards pump up dividends and stock prices, often using stock buybacks, which rocket their own pay into the stratosphere. Managers and professionals with stock options or stock awards can cash in too—but only if they keep their jobs. Everyone else—most workers and the wider public that depends on taxing corporate profits to fund schools, roads, and healthcare—gets left behind.
This shareholder-first model (famously called “the dumbest idea in the world” by former GE CEO Jack Welch), encourages executives and investors to treat companies like giant ATMs, pulling money out rather than reinvesting profits to create lasting value.
Stock buybacks and ownership stakes that line the pockets of executives at the expense of employees, communities, or innovation are a modern form of illth.
Consider Mark Zuckerberg. Nearly all of his mind-boggling fortune—the kind that just bought him a record-smashing $170 million mansion in Miami-Dade County near Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, and is funding a bombproof bunker-complex in Kauai that disturbs local wildlife—comes straight from owning stock in Meta Platforms. Meta has spent nearly $200 billion on stock buybacks in the past five years. Those buybacks have fattened the wallets of shareholders, including Meta’s top executives and professionals, while leaving the rest of society out of the gains (Meta is famous for its tax-dodging schemes). With Meta, there aren’t any hedge-fund activists forcing Zuckerberg to do buybacks—they’re happening by choice.
Lazonick points out that “with all the profits that they have, they could be creating stable, high-paid jobs for the workers whom they employ—and thereby put in place powerful social conditions for collective and cumulative learning.” He adds, “Instead they are using stock-based pay, which is always volatile and which results in unstable and inequitable employment, to compete for talent.”
Now, even some of Meta’s highest-paid employees are feeling the squeeze. With stock-based pay being cut back and the AI revolution changing work, some of the people who once seemed untouchable are discovering that their jobs aren’t as secure as they thought.
Then there’s Tim Cook. Much of his wealth comes from stock-based compensation tied to the stock-market performance of Apple Inc. Under his leadership as CEO, Apple’s so-called “Capital Return Program” has spent hundreds of billions on stock buybacks—north of half a trillion dollars when counting programs from the early 2010s on—which have helped push up the share price and richly rewarded executives and shareholders. Lazonick has criticized this trend, arguing that Apple’s huge buybacks reward shareholders who have never provided finance to the company, instead of investing in value-creating workers who are the source of innovation. This is the activity that has Cook extremely rich—though he still buys his underwear on sale at Nordstrom, so it’s not entirely clear why he needs all this money.
His workers could sure use a bigger cut. It is a fact that many of the workers who build, sell, or support Apple products have faced stingy pay and labor issues: Some retail employees have pushed for higher minimum wages and better benefits as recently as 2022, and labor-rights groups have documented low wages and complaints about conditions among Apple’s supply-chain workers.
A one-time California wealth tax might dent the personal fortunes of the Zuckerbergs and Cooks, but it does nothing to slow the corporate machinery that grinds on to produce still more of them.
Historically, reformers recognized this issue. For example, Thorstein Veblen critiqued the ways elites could extract wealth while contributing less to society than might be expected. And early 20th-century progressives championed higher corporate taxes and antitrust laws because they understood that inequality was more structural than individual.
This is what 19th-century critic John Ruskin had in mind when he coined the term “illth.” For Ruskin, true wealth, or “weal,” promotes everyone’s health and prosperity. Illth, by contrast, amasses when money is extracted or hoarded without focusing on social value. Stock buybacks and ownership stakes that line the pockets of executives at the expense of employees, communities, or innovation are a modern form of illth.
We don’t want illth.
Taylor Swift Isn’t the Problem
Now let’s bring in someone we can all relate to—Taylor Swift. Her fortune comes from her creativity, work, and audience engagement. She writes songs, records albums, tours, sells merchandise, and negotiates brand deals. Yes, corporate structures like Ticketmaster’s oligopoly complicate matters—but Swift herself isn’t the CEO of a company extracting illth through financial engineering. Taxing her personal wealth dramatizes the issue without addressing its source.
Policies aimed at corporate engines of inequality, rather than individual fortunes, could reshape the system itself. Lazonick and others have recommended a variety of approaches:
- Ban stock buybacks and suppress predatory value extraction. This curbs wealth concentration at the top.
- Encourage employee ownership or provide employee representation on corporate boards. Gains should benefit a broader group of stakeholders—not just shareholders.
- Reimagine corporate governance. Move towards stakeholder models balancing shareholder yields with social and environmental responsibility.
And last, but not least:
- Strengthen progressive corporate taxation. Close loopholes that allow extreme wealth accumulation.
As Lazonick sees it, whether it happens at the federal, state, or local level, government policy should focus on curbing predatory value extraction and promoting what he calls “progressive value creation”—which means passing laws to stop corporations from being looted, a key source of the exploding wealth of the mega rich. “From this position of regulatory power,” he advises, “we should then decide how the top 0.1% should be taxed.”
The real work, from this perspective, is reforming the structures that concentrate wealth. If we want an economy that fosters health, innovation, and opportunity instead of illth, chasing Taylor Swift won’t cut it. We need to start regulating the corporate engines behind her peers’ billions
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One-Third of Americans Skipped Meals or Cut Back on Spending to Afford Healthcare in 2025
“No one is safe from making these trade-offs,” said a researcher at Gallup, which found even insured Americans in higher income brackets have avoided daily expenses to pay medical bills.
Mar 12, 2026
As the Trump administration spends an estimated $1 billion per day in taxpayer money bombing targets across Iran that have reportedly included an elementary school and healthcare facilities, Gallup released a survey Thursday that found one-third of Americans reported making financial trade-offs in order to pay for medical expenses last year.
The West Health-Gallup Center on Healthcare in America polled nearly 20,000 US adults between June and August 2025 and found that roughly one-third of them—equivalent to about 82 million people in the richest country in the world—were forced cut back on at least one expense in order to afford healthcare.
Eleven percent of respondents—equivalent to 28 million Americans—skipped a meal or intentionally drove less in order to pay a medical bill. Fifteen percent, the equivalent of nearly 40 million people, said they prolonged a current prescription or borrowed money, and 9% cut back on utilities.
Those numbers were strikingly similar among people who have health insurance, with 14% of insured people prolonging prescriptions to avoid paying for a new one and 9% skipping meals. Among insured Americans, 29% made at least one trade-off to afford healthcare.
The crisis is also not exclusively affecting low-income people. A quarter of people in households earning $90,000 to $120,000 per year skipped meals or other expenses to pay medical bills, and 11% of people in households earning $240,000 or more did the same.
“No one is safe from making these trade-offs,” Ellyn Maese, a senior researcher at Gallup and research director for the West Health-Gallup Center, told The New York Times.
Sixty-two percent of people without healthcare coverage were forced to make trade-offs, and 55% of people with household incomes lower than $24,000 per year as well as 47% of people earning $24,000 to $48,000 avoided expenses.
Gallup also released the results of a separate poll taken between October and December 2025, which showed how Americans are delaying major life decisions as well as altering their daily lives to afford healthcare under the for-profit insurance system.
As the Trump administration's policies slashed healthcare for 15 million Americans and raised healthcare premiums for tens of millions of people—and as the White House demanded that families have more children—6% of respondents said they had postponed having or adopting a child due to healthcare costs, equivalent to about 16 million Americans.
Nearly 30% said healthcare costs led them to avoid taking a vacation, 18% said they delayed finding a different job, 15% said they postponed pursuing education or job training, and 14% said they postponed buying a home.
The polls are “telling a consistent story here,” Maese said.
The survey results were released weeks after the Trump administration proposed new regulations for healthcare plans purchased through the Affordable Care Act marketplace that would charge deductibles as high as $15,000 for individuals and $31,000 for families to offset lower monthly premiums—underscoring how the healthcare law passed 16 years ago has left American households vulnerable to rising costs under the for-profit health insurance system.
A survey taken last November by Data for Progress found that 65% of voters support expanding the Medicare system to everyone in the US, a proposal that would save an estimated $650 billion annually.
But as Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.)—who has sponsored Medicare for All legislation in the House—noted on Wednesday, Republicans and establishment Democrats continue to claim the proposal is unaffordable.
"When we ask for Medicare for All it’s 'too expensive,' and we 'don’t have the money,'" said Jayapal. "When the president drags us into his own personal war, no expense is spared. Our priorities are backwards."
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The Power of the Gun Vs. the Power of the People
The history of this country has shown not once but many times that people together resisting and fighting for justice (without guns) can win.
Mar 06, 2026
Power is felt, attributed, invisible, all-important, descriptive, without shape, and so much more. There is personal power, governmental power, and the collective power of the people. Power can be bought, sold, traded, bestowed, even rescinded. It can be good or bad, positive or corrupt. However you might wish to describe power, one thing is clear: How it’s used depends on the society in which we live.
At present, of course, our society is one in which President Donald J. Trump is the quintessential seeker of power, a man who needs power the way most of us need food. And as it happens, he has at his beck and call not just the entire military establishment, but Immigration and Customs Enforcement (and so much more). With him in the White House, power is distinctly in fashion.
Personal Power
Married and with children, my brother, who was a veteran, kept guns in his basement. “To hunt,” he told me when I objected. But he didn’t hunt, not in Nassau County where he lived, not by taking part in a sport that cost money he didn’t have to travel somewhere, get licenses, and who knows what else. Did he keep guns because he felt afraid? Absolutely not, he insisted. Was his neighborhood one with many break-ins? No, he assured me. So, why did he need weapons in his basement? He couldn’t say, except that it was important to him to own them.
Why? I kept asking him. As a soldier, he reminded me, he had been taught that without his gun he was in danger of being killed.
Under the Trump administration, when more is taken away from so many people than given to them, guns offer those who carry them a reprieve from a sense of powerlessness over their daily lives and futures.
Had he been a man of means, that inculcation wouldn’t, I suspect, have been as powerful, but he wasn’t and never did feel empowered. He’s gone now, but his world isn’t. Guns remain as much a staple in the United States as potatoes.
Well-off families keep guns, too, hopefully in locked places and have the money to buy hunting rifles, licenses, and whatever other paraphernalia they need. But in the United States today, all too many guns—sometimes even untraceable “ghost guns”—aren’t locked in boxes, but carried by young people on the streets and even sometimes into schools. The guns on the streets of inner cities, in rural areas, and even in some suburbs are all too often unlicensed stolen ones. And a desire or need to be seen, known, or heard all too often leads to someone shooting others with one of those weapons in a mall, movie theater, or school. Nearly 47,000 people died of gun-related injuries in this country in 2023. Such shootings occur more often in the United States than in any other nation. Why?
Under the Trump administration, when more is taken away from so many people than given to them, guns offer those who carry them a reprieve from a sense of powerlessness over their daily lives and futures. Many of them are young people alienated by a society that cares little about their well-being. With gun in hand, they experience steadiness, security, and yes, hope (however false it may prove to be).
With a weak social safety net, a gun offers a false sense of personal power and security. Should anyone come too close and aggravate the anger that may be boiling inside, however, that gun could go off. And who wouldn’t be angry? Too many young people in working-class families today are unsure where they might be headed and fear the dead-end jobs that they know lie in their future. The Trump administration, of course, offers such young people little or nothing—and if they weren’t born in the United States, they face the everyday menace of fear, degradation, and deportation. In America today, immigrants have become the scapegoats for such unvarnished racism that it takes one’s breath away. And don’t imagine that this is about so-called borders. Not a chance! Rather, it’s part of Donald Trump’s and his adviser Stephen Miller’s plan to rid the country of as many people of color as they can, with the end result, they hope, being white supremacy.
Though guns should be difficult (if not impossible) to obtain, like drugs, they are, in fact, available around more or less any corner in the most impoverished areas of any state. To stop the acquisition of guns, we would need more than enacted laws. We would also need to strengthen hope and offer a deeper belief in the daily safety of those who don’t for a moment feel taken care of in the most powerful country in the world.
And there’s no hiding from those in need how power is used to procure more and more money for the already wealthy, the Trumpian billionaires of our world.
Why should some, but not most of us, have an equal chance to do more than survive? For too many, their present and future safety becomes their personal problem, while Trump and crew are busily engaged in pursuing military and imperial power to gain yet more wealth for themselves and other billionaires, none of which enhances the power of the American people. And don’t forget that Donald Trump’s blatant racism is a vile infection that spreads daily from the Oval Office.
From Toy Guns to Machine Guns to Tanks
From toy guns to actual machine guns, the United States offers a constant example of how to express power through weaponry. There are the guns of war, the guns of intimidation, and the guns used against countries whose governments we choose to assault. Take Venezuela, where a recent US military sneak attack killed untold numbers of civilians and snatched its president to imprison him in the United States. That, I say, is one hell of a lot of nerve. The Trump administration certainly didn’t do that to make life better for the Venezuelan people, but to steal that country’s oil riches, which Trump plans to use for the benefit of US oil companies.
And with that in mind, let me head into the past for a moment. In 1968, when riots erupted in many communities to protest the killing of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., tanks first appeared on the streets of American inner cities—big, bulging, heavy vehicles, much like the ones being used in the Vietnam War that was then still raging.
That moment could, in fact, be seen as the public start of the militarization of this country’s police—the start but far from the end of it, which we see today, 77 years later, in many states like Minnesota. There, masked, gun-carrying (as in the old West) Border Patrol and federalized ICE agents have invaded, terrorizing and killing innocent civilians and pulling people out of their cars to deposit them in deportation camps. Such scenes not only increase the frustration and fear of so many Americans, but also the desire to carry licensed (or unlicensed) guns to protect themselves.
ICE is the most recent incarnation of weaponization in this country, in which the agents themselves have become the weapons.
Such macho terrorizing actions as in Minnesota, Chicago, Los Angeles, and so many other places in this country, involving the rounding up of immigrants, are all too much like the 1930s Gestapo in Nazi Germany rounding up Jews. The use of such terror is not only sanctioned by the Trump government but also encouraged by racists like Stephen Miller. He is the quintessential representation of where this country is headed, if not stopped and stopped quickly.
In addition to guns, ICE Agents carry other weapons of war: fire suppressers, lasers, accessory mounts, dump pouches, magazine wells—and they use drones. Pepper spray and other debilitating substances are also being used against those who protest the terror.
War is now being waged against Americans on the streets of our country, which is not only antithetical to all our laws but distinctly unconstitutional and, of course, immoral to the nth degree. Such weapons are perfected for one reason: to kill.
Unsurprisingly, ever more money is once again being spent on the Defense Department (now the Department of War), instead of on health, education, science, and so much else. And Donald Trump wants to spend far more. Guns over butter is an old meme, which we simply must not accept.
People Power
In Minnesota, ordinary people organized against the fascistic actions of ICE. Their resistance was not only brave, but an important example of the ways in which the people have chosen the good over the actions and behaviors of a bad government, president, and the Stephen Millers of this world. As demonstrated in Minnesota, we Americans have refused to go quietly into ICE’s nightmare. We wouldn’t stand for such injustice and intuitively began organizing to meet the needs of our neighbors and those who are being treated horribly. Watch groups, food groups, school groups, even singing groups were organized by ordinary citizens, inspired by an innate sense of justice and an innate hatred of injustice.
The struggle of Americans during the siege of Minnesota has indeed had results. The Department of Homeland Security, President Trump, Stephen Miller, and their cohorts have lost some credibility and perhaps some of their ability to frighten people into obedience. It’s more than unfortunate, however, that, in the process, children had to (and will continue to have to) experience the unjust power exhibited by ICE and Trump.
The use of guns will undoubtedly continue to be a staple of Donald Trump’s war of intimidation, clearly focused on developing a society where white supremacy rules. (See Project 2025.) His followers are laying the groundwork for the few to rule the many at the cost of our freedom.
We the people have power, too. There is power in knowledge, power in organizing, and power in resistance, all of which can be used to halt the brutality and lies of this administration.
The Russian playwright Anton Chekhov once wrote that, if you introduce a gun in Act One, make sure to use it by the end of the play. In other words, unless stopped, what the Trump administration has been doing will only grow more brutal. Its attempt to militarize this country goes beyond the Department of War to other government departments like the Department of Homeland Security. Its plebeian belief that might is the only right (and only its right) is also its way of opening a road leading to an authoritarian government, where voting itself will undoubtedly become endangered.
We’re living through an exceptionally dark time where tyranny, lies, and encroaching fascism at home, and the rapidly accelerating destruction of our planet (again, with a distinct helping hand from President Trump) are happening in tandem. Our elected representatives have shown themselves to be spectacularly ill-prepared in the face of such threats.
But neither the president nor his government owns the people. We the people have power, too. There is power in knowledge, power in organizing, and power in resistance, all of which can be used to halt the brutality and lies of this administration. Moreover, the people have the numbers. If we wish not to be overtaken by an authoritarian government in whose hands so many more will suffer, then it’s important to resist now.
We the people know how to do that. We have done so throughout history. We have rallied and demonstrated. We have called on our neighbors, friends, and families. We have called on our local media. We have called on members of Congress. We have written letters and posted signs and billboards. We have sat in protest, walked in protest, and even gone to jail in protest. And we weren’t to be stopped. We made our voices heard across society. We appeared in thousands of towns and cities across America.
The history of this country has shown not once but many times that people together resisting and fighting for justice (without guns) can win. It was how Social Security was won, how child labor was ended, how the Vietnam War was made ever more difficult to pursue, and that’s just to start down a long list of examples. Recently, on MS Now, TV host and political analyst Lawrence O’Donnell said:
The protesters always win,
And people die,
But protesters always win.
History proves O’Donnell right.
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