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?
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”.
People protest against the SpaceX IPO in New York. Photograph: Sarah Yenesel/EPA
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
[AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes or watch videos) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine]
Last
Monday morning Israeli forces uprooted some 1,500 fruit trees on a farm
of Daoud Nassar, a Lutheran farmer with land near Bethlehem. He is well
known to many US visitors as the head of “Tent of Nations” and has
fought to hold on to his family’s land in the face of opposition by
nearby settlers. His motto is “We Refuse To Be Enemies.” 
