"It more than a little ironic that these experts at tax avoidance are at the helm of a technological revolution that could drive inequality to new, unprecedented heights." Eduardo Porter in The Guardian

Analysis

by  Eduardo Porter

Condemned to plutocracy? The relentless rise of US inequality

Elon Musk is a beneficiary of America’s lopsided prosperity – does the country have any appetite for redistribution?

People protest against the SpaceX IPO in New York. Photograph: Sarah Yenesel/EPA

As Barack Obama’s presidency was coming to a close, Jason Furman, then chairman of the president’s council of economic advisers, laid out the strides his administration had made to curb the nation’s exorbitant income inequality in “the largest investments in reducing inequality since the Great Society”.

Indeed, by the end of 2016, taxes and transfers cut the share of income accruing to the richest 1% of households by just over a fifth, according to estimates from the congressional budget office (CBO), more than under any government since at least Jimmy Carter’s. They raised the slice of income going to the poorest fifth from 3.9% to 7.9%, the highest share since at least 1979.

Those were the days.

As Elon Musk is anointed the world’s first trillionaire, following the public offering of shares of his internet to AI conglomerate SpaceX, that moment, just 10 years ago, when the government bragged about its efforts to curb America’s lopsided distribution of prosperity, might give us some hope that we are not condemned to plutocracy; social and political forces can stop inequality’s relentless rise.

Benjamin Franklin liked to talk of America’s “happy mediocrity” – a country with “few … so miserable as the poor of Europe … few that in Europe would be called rich”. And yet, America’s history of combating inequality is rather grim. Obama’s track record as the United States’s most committed equalizer in over half a century underscores the ultimate lack of interest of the nation’s political coalitions in bringing about a more equitable distribution of the fruits of prosperity.

Supposedly a populist champion of the working stiff, Donald Trump’s priorities quickly turned elsewhere. His Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 offered massive tax cuts to Americans in the upper percentiles of income... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/21/us-inequality-plutocracy

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