The United States has the highest level of wealth inequality of any wealthy democracy on earth. The three richest Americans own more wealth than the bottom half of the country combined — roughly 165 million people. This is not the result of a meritocracy. It is the result of rules: tax rules, labor rules, corporate rules, and financial rules that have been systematically rewritten over four decades to concentrate wealth at the top.
The top marginal income tax rate in 1960 was 91%. Today it is 37%. Capital gains — the primary income source of the ultra-wealthy — are taxed at a lower rate than wages. Corporations that once paid a third of federal revenue now pay a fraction of that, with thousands of profitable companies paying zero in federal income tax in a given year. The estate tax, which once applied to inherited wealth above a modest threshold, has been gutted to near irrelevance.
Meanwhile, wages for the bottom half of American workers have been essentially flat in real terms for fifty years. The minimum wage has not been raised federally since 2009. Union membership has declined from 35% of the workforce to under 10%, removing the primary counterweight to corporate power that built the American middle class.
The consequences are not merely economic. Concentrated wealth means concentrated political power. The donor class and the governing class have merged. Policy is made for and by the people who can afford to buy access to it.
What would an economy that works for everyone actually look like? Not just redistributive — but structurally different from the ground up. How do we build it?
What does a fair economy look like? Submit your vision.