SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
wealth inequality
Report Details How Trump Economic Agenda ‘Will Make Ordinary Families Reliably Poorer in the Future’
In just one year, Republicans' 2025 budget package is expected to increase income inequality at quadruple the rate seen over the past 40 years.
Feb 24, 2026
President Donald Trump's economic agenda "will make ordinary families reliably poorer in the future," according to the author of a report published Tuesday by the Economic Policy Institute.
Josh Bivens, EPI's chief economist, said Trump's slashing of federal spending and jobs, mass deportations, chaotic tariffs, and anti-labor policies were suppressing hiring and wages, draining household and business spending, and slowing economic growth.
While a recession is not yet inevitable, Bivens argued that worrying signs are already on the horizon, with 1.4 million fewer new jobs than expected in 2025 and unemployment ticking up to 4.4%, up from the low of 3.4% in April 2023.
For low-wage earners, the past year has been particularly rough. After seeing unusually fast growth during the presidency of Joe Biden, real wages for the bottom 10% of earners fell by 0.3% in 2025.
The report predicts that Republicans' 2025 budget package will reduce “aggregate demand” in the coming years. The so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act cuts $100 billion annually from Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), while allowing health insurance subsidies that saved families thousands to expire, which the report projects will cause many families who rely on these benefits to pull back spending in the economy.
While the law reduced taxes, the vast majority of those benefits went to the wealthiest earners, whose spending was already much less constrained by their incomes.
The report notes the astonishing increase in inequality caused by the law. Between the years of 1979 and 2019, which were considered to have seen an explosion of wealth inequality, the share of income claimed by the richest 10% increased by about 0.25% per year.
It found that the GOP budget law will, in just one year, increase the top decile's share of wealth by a full percentage point. In other words, the rate of inequality will "quadruple in its first year."
Aside from this major driver of inequality, the report also says that the Trump administration's hostility toward collective bargaining rights and its mass firings of federal workers would further suppress wages by making the labor market less competitive, and that the president's erratic tariff regime would make those wages less valuable by fueling inflation.
“Disastrous policy choices that led to excess unemployment, slower growth in the economy’s productive capacity, and rising inequality have made life less affordable for typical families in recent decades," Bivens said. "The Trump administration’s policies double down on the worst policy decisions of this period and will make ordinary families reliably poorer in the future, even if an outright recession or spiking inflation does not happen."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Republican Unveils Bill to Let Billionaires Escape Proposed Wealth Tax in California
California's roughly 200 billionaires have more than $2 trillion collectively. Rep. Kevin Kiley said it's "unfair" to tax 5% of it to fund healthcare coverage for 3.4 million people at risk of losing it.
Feb 19, 2026
As Sen. Bernie Sanders barnstorms California to champion a proposed wealth tax on billionaires, a Republican congressman has joined the tech and crypto tycoons trying to stop the proposition in its tracks.
Service Employees International Union (SEIU) United Healthcare Workers West, the union that launched the effort, is currently working to gather nearly 900,000 signatures by April get the proposal on the ballot.
If they're successful, Californians will have the chance to vote this November for a one-time 5% tax on people in the state with more than $1 billion, which is projected to raise about $100 billion over the next few years to support healthcare spending gutted by President Donald Trump.
Proponents of state or local tax increases on the rich have often had to face fears that their proposals will backfire, leading CEOs to flee the state to protect their riches.
Indeed, several of the state's billionaires have signaled that they may leave the state or pull assets if they are required to pay the tax—including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.
California's proposal, however, avoids this problem by requiring any billionaire who resided in the state as of January 1, 2026, to pay the one-time tax, even if they move.
Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Calif.) on Wednesday announced plans to introduce legislation that would protect these billionaires from any plans to "confiscate" their wealth if they decide to flee.
The bill prohibits California and any other state that may try something similar from imposing a retroactive tax on individuals who no longer reside there.
“California’s proposed wealth tax is an unprecedented attempt to chase down people who have already left as a result of the state’s poor policies,” Kiley said. “As a result, many of our state’s leading job creators are leaving preemptively. No state should be allowed to reach back in time and impose a new tax on someone who no longer lives there. That is fundamentally unfair.”
Proponents of the tax argue that the unequal distribution of wealth it's meant to address is quite a bit more "unfair" than a tax hike on the state's richest would be—especially after Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year handed a historically large tax break to the wealthiest 1% of Americans, while social services for the poor were cut across the board.
"Last year alone, after receiving the largest tax break in history, the 938 billionaires in America became $1.5 trillion richer," Sanders shouted to a booing crowd at a rally in Los Angeles on Wednesday.
He emphasized that the roughly 200 billionaires in California are collectively worth more than $2 trillion and that paying just a single 5% tax on their wealth would protect healthcare for more than 3.4 million people facing coverage losses due to federal Medicaid cuts.
Billionaires in the state have marshaled huge war chests and hired seasoned campaign veterans to promote rival ballot measures aimed at undercutting the wealth tax.
One committee, backed by Brin, has already raised $35 million from industry barons around the state, according to Politico. Crypto mogul Chris Larsen has dumped $2 million into Brin's committee and spent $5 million more to create his own.
Another committee is staffed by consultants associated with Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom—a likely 2028 presidential frontrunner who has also come out against the tax, warning that it would cause too great a drain on California's state treasury.
In remarks on the House floor introducing his bill, Kiley claimed that "$1 trillion has exited California simply in anticipation of this policy," though in reality, many billionaires have merely claimed they were preparing to leave without actually having done so yet.
Christopher Marquis and Nick Romeo explained in TIME on Wednesday that while this "tax-and-flee story" often spreads whenever a tax hike is proposed, it is "based on biased or sloppy arguments where anecdote replaces systematic evidence, correlation poses as causation, and every modest redistributive proposal is framed as an existential threat to prosperity."
They wrote that:
Discussion should not focus on whether one billionaire makes a threat, but on what the data show across years, across the tax base, and after real policy changes. According to the data analysis firm Altrata, there were over 33,000 New Yorkers worth $30 million or more as of 2025. Quoting some famous ones on either side of the issue makes for a good headline—but bad reasoning.
We should look instead to systematic studies, like this one by the Fiscal Policy Institute, which found no significant out-migration by residents of New York State in response to tax increases in either 2017 or 2021; the latter increase is estimated to raise approximately $3.6 billion annually.
Sanders said billionaires "lie a lot," noting that some wealthy New Yorkers pledged to flee the city if Zohran Mamdani—who also pledged to hike taxes on the rich—was elected mayor, threats that have largely not materialized.
"I'm sure these guys don't want to pay a few billion dollars more in taxes. But for them, in many ways, that is pocket change," Sanders said. "What they are saying is 'If you stand up to us... If you think it's more important that children get healthcare than that we get massive tax breaks, we are going to punish you... We're going to move. We're going to shut down businesses here.'"
He added: "All that the folks in California are saying is that at a time when the very rich are becoming phenomenally richer, when the very rich have been given a massive tax break by Donald Trump, when millions of people in this state are struggling to be able to afford healthcare, maybe billionaires should start paying their fair share of taxes."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Billionaires Are 'Becoming a Problem for the Economy,' Declares Wall Street Journal Report
"Debate about how much tax billionaires pay is likely to grow as America’s fiscal situation deteriorates and its wealth gap widens."
Feb 18, 2026
A report published Wednesday by the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal outlined how billionaires' tax evasion schemes are causing problems for the US economy.
The report, written by London-based columnist Carol Ryan, began by noting how completely the US economy has come to depend on the spending habits of its richest households, whose wealth is primarily tied to the fortunes of the stock market, which "could mean the entire economy pays a steep price in the next market correction."
Ryan then walked through some of the plusses and minuses of the wealth tax being debated in the state of California, which has more billionaires than any state in the nation.
Even while personally finding flaws with the California proposal, Ryan said that plans to extract wealth from the super-rich aren't going away, even if the California tax plan is ultimately defeated.
"Debate about how much tax billionaires pay is likely to grow as America’s fiscal situation deteriorates and its wealth gap widens," Ryan wrote. "Data from the Federal Reserve shows that only the richest 1% of households have grown their share of overall US wealth since 1990."
Ryan also broke down how the very richest Americans have tax evasion options that mere multimillionaires don't have.
"A common strategy is to avoid salaries, which are heavily taxed," she wrote. "Billionaires prefer to be paid in shares, which are subject to capital-gains taxes when sold. But they don’t need to sell to fund their lifestyles. Billionaires use borrowed money for living expenses, pledging their shares or other assets as collateral."
Ryan added that "the interest on the debt is much lower than a capital-gains tax bill would be," and billionaires compound this wealth by passing it off to their children as part of a “buy borrow die” tax avoidance plan.
Boston College law professor Ray Madoff told Ryan that the wealth at the very top has grown so concentrated that even "very well-off Americans with high incomes" are now aligned "much more with the middle class" than in the past.
Ryan's report isn't the only one published by the Journal in recent weeks to warn of dangerous levels of US wealth inequality.
Chief Wall Street Journal economics commentator Greg Ip last week posted data showing that corporate profits' share of gross domestic income is now the highest it has been in more than 40 years, while the share of income paid out in workers' wages is at the lowest.
"Profits have soared since the pandemic, and the market value attached to those profits even more," wrote Ip. "The result: Capital, which includes businesses, shareholders, and superstar employees, is triumphant, while the average worker ekes out marginal gains."
Ip also said that this problem could grow worse if artificial intelligence lives up to its creators' hype and starts replacing human workers on a mass scale.
In such a scenario, wrote Ip, the "biggest winners" of the economy would be shareholders who, as Ryan explained in her piece, have ample tools to avoid paying taxes.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular