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As Trump Recession Looms, New WSJ Poll Backs Call for Democrats to Embrace Economic Populism
"It feels like it's on the brink, it's on the precipice of this recession," one economist said this week.
Sep 02, 2025
A new poll from The Wall Street Journal released Tuesday is sparking calls on more Democrats to embrace economic populism, as it shows that Americans are still feeling gloomy about their financial prospects.
According to the poll, a record-low 25% of Americans now say they have a good chance at improving their standard of living, while almost 70% said they no longer believe that merely working hard is enough to get ahead.
On top of all this, more than 75% lack confidence that future generations will be better off than they are today.
The poll shows that US President Donald Trump is facing problems similar to the ones that former President Joe Biden faced over his last year in office, in that economic pessimism appears high even as the unemployment rate and the rate of inflation appear low by historical standards.
One major issue that appears to be weighing down economic sentiment is the cost of housing, as The Wall Street Journal writes that "fewer than one-quarter of respondents said they were very confident they could buy a home if they wanted to," while "some 56% said they had little or no confidence they could do so."
Democratic pollster John Anzalone took stock of the poll in a post on X and said that it "shows how important it is for Dems to get a strong economic message" given that "70% of people said they believe the American dream no longer holds true."
Democratic media operative Dan Ancona zeroed in on a question in the poll showing that a majority of Americans agreed with the statement that Trump and the GOP "are trying to scare and divide Americans so they can cut their own taxes and keep wealth flowing to the very rich."
In fact, roughly 27% of respondents who voted for Trump in the 2024 presidential election either somewhat or strongly agreed with that statement. Given this, Ancona called the populist economic framing "a pretty good starting point."
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) also jumped at the findings of the WSJ poll and said that stamping out economic inequality in the US needed to be Democrats' priority.
"We must tackle the economic divides tearing our nation apart and make the economic independence of every family and community our highest mission," he declared. "I call it a new economic patriotism."
The WSJ poll showing Americans' sour economic mood comes as more economic forecasters have been raising the odds of a recession hitting the US economy.
Fortune reported on Tuesday that investment bank UBS believes the probability of a recession occurring in the near future has grown significantly in recent months, although it notes there is still a great deal of uncertainty over what the economy will look like in six months.
"The key message is the US economy, by these hard data measures, is locked in a prolonged phase of stagnation or slow contraction, warranting caution even as outright collapse has not yet materialized," wrote Fortune. "This aligns with other analysts' warnings that, even if a recession doesn't materialize, the economy is headed for a bout of 1970s-style 'stagflation,' a combination of a stagnating economy and rising inflation."
Moody's Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi has also been sounding the alarm about the state of the American economy, and he believes state-level data are already showing the US "on the edge of recession," according to Newsweek.
As Zandi explained this week, both California and New York, which together account for over 20% of American gross domestic product, are essentially flat at the moment, while southern states that have been the strongest in terms of economic growth in recent years have been slowing down.
"I don't think the economy is in a recession, at least not at this point," Zandi said in an interview with Newsweek. "But it feels like it's on the brink, it's on the precipice of this recession."
Along with a potential impending recession, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich pointed out that Americans are well aware of structural inequalities.
"CEO pay is up 1,085% since 1978, while worker pay is up just 24%. Millions live paycheck to paycheck as they struggle to afford basic goods," said Reich. "Is it any wonder why 70% of people said they believe the American dream no longer holds true or never did?"
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Wealth of World's Richest Has Doubled Over Past Decade
The total wealth of billionaires increased by 121% from 2015-24.
Dec 06, 2024
Driven largely by the accumulation of massive wealth by the richest people in the United States, the Swiss wealth manager UBS said Thursday the assets of billionaires around the world more than doubled over the past decade.
Between 2015-24, the total wealth of billionaires increased by 121%, from $6.3 trillion to $14 trillion.
Meanwhile, the MSCI AC World Index of global equities, which measures the performance of more than 3,000 stocks from both developed and emerging markets, rose by 73%.
The planet's total gross domestic product is about $105.4 trillion, with a population of just over 8 billion, underscoring the extreme concentration of wealth among the very richest people.
The number of billionaires rose from 1,757 to 2,682 over the past decade, while the wealthiest people in the world boasted significant gains over just the past year.
Billionaires' wealth jumped by about 17% in 2024, with the accumulation of wealth among the richest people in the U.S. offsetting a decline in China.
U.S. billionaires amassed wealth gains that were 27.6% higher than the previous year, accumulating a total of $5.8 trillion—more than 40% of international billionaire wealth.
The tax cuts pushed through by President-elect Donald Trump and the Republican Party in 2017 are still in effect in the U.S. Tax policy analysts have found that the law was skewed to the rich, with households in the top 1% of incomes expecting to receive an average tax cut of more than $60,000 in 2025 compared to an average tax cut of less than $500 for people in the bottom 60%.
As Common Dreams reported this week, the top 12 U.S. billionaires now control $2 trillion. The wealth of the four richest people in the U.S.—Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—has hit $1 trillion.
"These four men were worth $74 billion 12 short years ago," said Americans for Tax Fairness. "Tax billionaires."
At the G20 Summit last month, world leaders agreed to "engage cooperatively to ensure that ultra-high-net-worth individuals are effectively taxed."
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Gilded Age for Billionaire Offspring as $5.2 Trillion Wealth Transfer Accelerates
"Without robust wealth and inheritance taxes," said one analyst, "the children and grandchildren of today's billionaires will dominate our future politics, economy, culture, and philanthropy."
Nov 30, 2023
The Swiss bank UBS released a report Thursday showing that a massive transfer of wealth from billionaire business founders to their heirs is underway and accelerating, with trillions of dollars in assets moving from those who accumulated fortunes through entrepreneurship to family members whose vast riches are owed to the simple accident of birth.
In the 12-month period between April 2022 and April 2023, newly created billionaires acquired more wealth through inheritance than entrepreneurship for the first time since UBS began studying billionaire wealth trends in 2015. The bank, a friend of the super-rich, said that 53 heirs inherited nearly $151 billion in wealth during the study period, exceeding the $140.7 billion amassed by billionaire entrepreneurs.
"This year's report found that the majority of billionaires that accumulated wealth in the last year did so through inheritance as opposed to entrepreneurship," Benjamin Cavalli, head of strategic clients at UBS Global Wealth Management, said in a statement. "This is a theme we expect to see more of over the next 20 years."
The latest edition of the Billionaire Ambitions Report estimates that the number of global billionaires rose by 7% during the one-year period analyzed by UBS, up from 2,376 to 2,544. The U.S. alone had 751 billionaires as of April 2023, 20 more than it had in 2022.
After falling in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic—during which billionaire wealth soared as millions died across the globe—billionaires' collective net worth "recovered by 9% in nominal terms from USD 11.0 trillion to USD 12.0 trillion," UBS found.
UBS estimates that more than 1,000 billionaires are over the age of 70 and poised to hand a combined $5.2 trillion down to their heirs over the next several decades, perpetuating inequality that is eroding democracies and fueling social uprisings worldwide.
"While this great wealth handover has long been anticipated," UBS said, "data suggests that it is now gathering momentum."
"A new, powerful, and unaccountable aristocracy is being created in front of our eyes."
Chuck Collins, director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), told Common Dreams that "this is how wealth dynasties are formed."
"The so-called 'self-made' billionaires invest in 'wealth defense' to pass as much wealth to future generations within their families," he said.
Collins argued that this ongoing wealth transfer "should be an occasion for substantial inheritance taxes, but given the porous and weak state of such taxes, we're seeing dynastic oligarchies grow."
"Without robust wealth and inheritance taxes, these intergenerational concentrations of wealth and power will grow," said Collins. "The children and grandchildren of today’s billionaires will dominate our future politics, economy, culture, and philanthropy—with huge billion-dollar legacy foundations. It is true that a small segment of the next generation will redeploy and redistribute some of this wealth to more socially positive ventures and organizations. But at this point, this is a tiny percent and not a substitute for a progressive tax system where the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes."
The UBS report notes that billionaires with inherited wealth "seem more reticent" than first-generation billionaires to pledge their fortunes to philanthropy, which the ultra-rich often use to avoid taxes.
According to UBS, just under a quarter of first- and later-generation billionaires said they are concerned about "developments in taxation," an indication that they don't believe world leaders will heed growing global calls for new taxes targeting the fortunes of the mega-rich and their offspring.
Oxfam International observed earlier this year that two-thirds of countries don't have any inheritance taxes and half of the world's billionaires live in those countries, allowing them to pass huge wealth down to future generations tax-free.
"A new, powerful, and unaccountable aristocracy is being created in front of our eyes," the group said.
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