This Week in Income Inequality: Dec. 20, 2024

Quality is down and nothing seems to work well anymore

This is one of many, many, many tires I’ve bought in the past year. No matter where I buy them from, they go flat in no time. (Photo by Michelle Teheux)

I had to replace another tire this week.

Maybe my husband and I are outliers, but we’ve been going through tires like mad the last few years, even though we live in town and aren’t doing crazy amounts of driving. We bought a portable tire inflator we can plug into the cigarette lighter because gas stations now charge for air and one or more of our tires is always going flat. We’ve bought tires from several different places, all highly reputable, and none of them have been any good.

This echoes our experience with a lot of things we’ve purchased in recent years. The soles of our shoes, for example, wear out in no time. Yes, we do walk a lot, but shouldn’t walking shoes last for more than a few months? And shouldn’t my previous refrigerator have lasted more than six years? (My grandmother had the same fridge for my entire childhood!)

It makes me wonder if we are making everything the way we make “fast fashion.” Are we cutting corners in the manufacturing process of everything now?

Inflation means most of us are trying to cut our spending, but that’s pretty difficult when basic goods you need to live are made so poorly that you need to replace them frequently.

This affects everyone, but it hits the poor and working class harder.

If you have some hot income inequality-related news you don’t see shared here, please add it in the comments or shoot me a message! I intend this round-up to be a one-stop shop for everyone who cares about this topic.

The GOP is not the party of workers

Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic

Trump’s hatred of Big Tech is highly selective. He's not proposing to do anything about Elon Musk, of course, except to make Musk even richer. Musk's net worth has hit $447b because the market is buying stock in his companies, which stand to make billions from cozy, no-bid federal contracts. Musk is a billionaire welfare queen who hates workers and unions and has a long rap-sheet of cheating, maiming and tormenting his workforce. A pro-worker Trump administration could add labor conditions to every federal contract, disqualifying businesses that cheat workers and union-bust from getting government contracts.

The Economic Perils of Trump’s Tariff Policies

Alexander Vindman, Why It Matters

The resurgence of Trump’s tariff-centered agenda marks a return to punitive trade strategies that risk amplifying inflation, undermining industrial innovation, and isolating the United States from critical allies. When combined with his proposed mass deportations of undocumented workers, these policies would exacerbate workforce shortages, increase production costs, and erode the strong economic gains inherited from President Biden, leaving Americans worse off.

Peaceful Solutions

A.R. Moxon, Reframes

It seems to me that some of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals in our society think they can create one kind of world for everyone else—a world where human life is disposable and as cheap as it can possibly be made—but then think they don’t have to live in the world they've forced us all to occupy. They think they can make a world where some people matter and other people don't, and in so doing will remain perpetually the ones who matter.… It seems to me that when you create a world where human life has been made as cheap as possible, you will eventually find you live in a world where your human life is deemed by others to be cheap, too.

Elon Punches Down on the Homeless

Salaam Bhatti, A Paycheck Away

The primary cause of homelessness is economic instability. Rising housing costs, stagnant wages, job loss, and insufficient social safety nets force many into homelessness. In fact, more than 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, making them one paycheck away from losing their homes.

The Big Shining Lie: We’re Better Off Now – No, We’re Poorer, Much Poorer

Charles Hugh Smith

There is only one true measure of prosperity: the purchasing power of an hour's labor / wage. It doesn't matter what the wage or price numbers are, what matters is: how much can you buy with an hour's wage?

Fact: in 1977, it took 2.25 days of work (18 hours) to pay the monthly rent on my studio apartment in the most expensive city in the U.S., Honolulu. …

Today, that would require an hourly wage of $60 to $90 an hour. The median annual wage is around $60,000, around $30/hour — half or a third of what it takes to pay the rent on a studio apartment in a high-cost urban area with 3 days of work.

Home Economics No. 18: Trading a Six-Figure Tech Job for a Freelance Writing Career

Lindsey Stanberry, The Purse

I want to have a healthier relationship with money. By that I mean be more carefree in enjoying what I have, living in the present moment without being so anxious about my financial future. I have gotten a lot better—and being with my partner, who’s very spendy, has helped me relax—but I can still be so cheap when I want to. My money mindset often correlates with my poor mental health. I think about money a lot—way more than I should—and while it’s helped me become wealthy, I ultimately don’t think my approach is always healthy.

What the Hell is Going On: An Explainer in these Strange Times

Jared Yates Sexton, Dispatches From A Collapsing State

After the Depression, there was the New Deal, which saved us from oligarchical control and fascism. It was a political program, but also a philosophy which communicated that the government should help its citizens and help regulate capitalism to keep it from getting out of control. This consensus lasted until the 1970s, when stagflation, coupled with the assault by the wealth class described above, broke that mindset.

We Can’t Afford Billionaires

A.R. Moxon, Reframes

And the billionaire uses the vast stores of value that they have stolen in order to create new mechanisms of theft—theft even of our awareness. This they do by buying up existing and trusted modes of information sharing, then doing with them what they do with everything else, which is to pervert them until they serve not the society that allowed them to succeed in the first place, but themselves. So we increasingly find our legacy news media promulgating pervasive frameworks for seeing the world, frameworks that present billionairism's unsustainable and false perspectives about human value as not only a sane and safe possibility, but as the only possible reality that can ever be imagined. And so it comes to pass that we can find vast numbers of people who are not billionaires and have scant hopes of ever becoming billionaires, who infect themselves with the sickness of billionairism, and defend billionaires from any critique; who fear a world in which a symptom of terrible social disease, like the existence of a billionaire, would not be possible; who consider anyone imagining such a world to be engaged in a profane and radical act. They look at the very people who have robbed them of their natural human birthright and consider them geniuses and benefactors, rightful owners of the world and proof that the world is a fair and meritorious place.

Money date No. 14: all I bought for Christmas

Dana Miranda, Healthy Rich

My holiday break-ish starts tomorrow, and You Don’t Need a Budget will be released in five days (hence the “ish”)!

I’m fully wrung out from book promotion — I love talking about this stuff, but also, it turns out performing for strangers and having super in-depth intellectual conversations about an entire cultural paradigm is… exhausting. I’ll welcome my week off, a little traveling and time with family, even though I know a portion of my brain will remain trained on the book launch all week.

Can the Muskrat shut the United States government?

Robert Reich

Musk effectively blocked a government spending bill by mobilizing his 205 million followers on X and then using his influence on Trump — influence he bought by spending more than $270 million getting Trump elected.

Yet Musk’s concern about the federal deficit seems to disappear whenever Trump and MAGA Republicans talk about passing tax cuts that will disproportionately benefit billionaires like Musk. Tax cuts, I might add, that will balloon the deficit by nearly $5 trillion.

We’re getting a preview of what the next four years will look like — dysfunction in D.C. that will make your life worse, driven by a petulant billionaire with an unquenchable thirst for wealth and power.

Solutions: Paid Sick Days

Kathryn Anne Edwards, Kedits

When people are sick, but they have to go to work, they accelerate the spread of infection. When people stay home while sick, they slow down the spread of infection. Since sick days enable more people to stay home, therefore in theory they should slow the spread of infection. And they do!

Keep in mind, this isn’t a benefit concentrated to workers who are sick but everyone in the community. City-wide rates of flu or flu-like viruses went down after a paid sick law went into effect. For all my Scrooges out there that couldn’t care less if people are sick, it’s worth pointing out that reducing health care consumption could be the biggest effect of this policy in terms of economic impact because health care is $.

The richest man on Earth owns half of Congress

J.P. Hill, New Means

In the wake of his first big win, Musk says “the voice of the people” has triumphed. This is, of course, untrue, and even Musk’s adherents don’t really believe it. He’s cultivated a base of tech bros and other whiny boys who want to feel like men, and who attempt to fulfill that desire by seeing the numbers go up in their bank accounts. Until their latest crypto asset gets wiped out, of course. This crowd knows that ‘the voice of the people’ means Musk and company. Fascists are fluent in doublespeak, and they know that the populations who have been scapegoated and maligned are not included in the in-group.

What the working class portion of this in-group might not realize is how vulnerable they too are to the government being stripped down and sold for parts. There is a delusion among some libertarian types and the far-right that they are somehow in the club. But the club is small, very small, and they’re not in it. None of us are in it. This club is of the .001%, the people who own the companies and factories and politicians of this country. Any effort to defund public goods and privatize government services benefits that group, and precisely none of the rest of us.

Stupid Shit People Used to Believe

Paul Crenshaw, Melt With Me

I know this doesn’t work because I’ve been waiting for money to trickle down since 1984. If money trickled down my parents would be rich. They did everything they were supposed to do—they went to work and raised their little family and then they waited for all the good things to come to them.

The American oligarchy is back and it’s out of control

Robert Reich

The richest 1 percent of Americans now has more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined.

The only other country with similarly high levels of wealth concentration is Russia, another oligarchy.

All this has been accompanied by a dramatic increase in the political power of the super-wealthy and an equally dramatic decline in the political influence of everyone else.

The Chaos Monkeys Have Already Taken Over the Zoo

Paul Krugman, Krugman Wonks Out

No, Musk is demanding — apparently successfully — that Republicans in Congress renege on a deal they had already agreed to, a continuing resolution that would keep the federal government going for the next few months. Why? Because, Musk says, of the outrageous provisions in that CR.

Except none of the items Musk is complaining about are actually in the bill. No, Congress isn’t giving itself a 40 percent raise. No, the bill doesn’t fund a $3 billion stadium in Washington. No, it doesn’t block future investigations into the Jan. 6 committee. No, it doesn’t fund bioweapons labs.

The Myth of the Secret Genius

Brian Klaas, The Garden of Forking Paths

The first problem is that many still falsely believe we live in a meritocratic society, in which riches are purely a marker of talent rather than of luck or generational wealth.

How the Subscriptions Era Came Too Late to Save the World

Michelle Teheux, Untrickled

What I’m saying is, if everyone 10 years ago had decided to buy a subscription to their local newspaper, most of those papers would still be around and still providing local news and commentary and still providing a pretty balanced source of news because you just can’t get away with much bias if you’re trying to sell your newspaper to everyone in town of every political persuasion.

But people absolutely howled at the concept of paying an online subscription. It was more or less a crime against nature. I took so many phone calls from screaming people when a (very porous) paywall first went up.

Which is odd, because now people have rolled over and agreed to subscribe to Netflix and Prime and Pandora and Spotify and Substack newsletters and Medium and many other platforms.

About Michelle Teheux

I’m a writer in central Illinois. If you like my work, subscribe to me here and on Medium. My new book is Strapped: Fighting for the soul of the American working class. My most recent novel is The Trailer Park Rules.