This Week In Income Inequality - Jan. 31, 2025
Even the rich are at risk now
It’s not just the poor and working class people who are suffering from income inequality and the greater issue of oligarchs pillaging the public good for private gain. Ultimately, the rich are at risk, too.
If anybody thinks they’re so financially comfortable they need not worry – that this is an issue that only affects the little people – they can stop thinking that right now.
Unless your last name is something like Musk, Bezos or Zuckerberg, you’re not safe. (In fact, they might not be safe, either.)
We elected a chaos agent
His choice to tear down instead of shore up air travel safety seems likely to have contributed to the Washington D.C. plane and helicopter collision. Even if you happen to own your own plane, you use the same runways and air traffic controllers everyone else depends on. Maybe you’d like them to be safe?
The fires in Los Angeles are another excellent example. Turns out one thing that arguably made fire damage worse was the city’s inability to keep a whole fleet of firetrucks running. We can look to private equity for that mess.
Finally, history tells us that people will only put up with so much before we see things like pitchforks, torches, guillotines and Luigis. I don’t think that’s a good thing, but I think it’s an inevitable thing. And I think we are closer to that than we’ve ever been in my lifetime.
Maybe you are scoffing at that. Maybe you think that things are fine, and that the masses are content with their lot because we gave them endless TV shows to stream and legal marijuana to to keep them happy.
Well, just remember that the status quo can change very quickly, and usually nobody sees it coming.
And now, here’s the roundup.
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.
How Democrats Can Win Back the Working Class
Qasim Rashid, Esq., Let’s Address This
Ever since FDR’s New Deal, Democrats were the steadfast advocate for labor unions, working families, and those striving for a better future. Meanwhile, for decades GOP policies have sucked money from the pockets of working families into the bank accounts of billionaires and bankers, and now a grifter who can’t speak five sentences without a lie has recaptured the presidency.
Donald Trump pretends to be on the side of regular Americans — and then pushes for tax cuts for billionaires, and tariffs that will make everything more expensive. And yet Trump and the GOP managed to convince millions of families that they, not the Democrats, were the party of working people: in November, almost half of union households voted GOP. They included not just white families, but Black, Latino and Asian American families, too.
Yes, reshoring American industry is possible
Noah Smith, Noahpinion
Reshoring American industry has become a bipartisan policy objective — it has always been part of Donald Trump’s agenda, and Biden cared a lot about it as well. The idea has always been met with skepticism from a number of directions. Many economists and free traders are skeptical of anything that involves tariffs and/or industrial policies. And partisanship being what it is in America, both Republicans and Democrats have naturally doubted the others’ ability to follow through on their promises. But in addition, I often encounter a natural skepticism about America’s ability to do manufacturing at all.
Americans can be forgiven for having this impression. Most of our lived experience has either been the Rust Belt era of the 1980s, or the supercharged offshoring of the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. America has not had a factory building boom in a very long time.
Did a Private Equity Fire Truck Roll-Up Worsen the L.A. Fires?
Basel Musharbash, Big
Why couldn’t the LAFD keep its equipment in working order? A lot of people blame budget cuts, but there’s another root issue - increasing prices and metastasizing production delays for these vehicles. The cost of fire trucks has skyrocketed in recent years — going from around $300 -500,000 for a pumper truck and $750-900,000 for a ladder truck in the mid-2010s, to around $1 million for a pumper truck and $2 million for a ladder truck in the last couple years. …
The skyrocketing prices and longer delivery times have made it difficult for the LAFD to replace aging vehicles in its fleet, many of which have exceeded their service life. …Against this backdrop, the LAFD wound up having to face some of the worst fires LA has seen in a century while both understaffed and under-equipped.
… the increasing price is a result of a private equity firm, American Industrial Partners, consolidating the fire truck industry and forcing up prices across the board.
It’s time to give up on ‘Normal’
J.P. Hill, New Means
The stereotypical vision, that some pundits and outlets have embraced since the onset of the Trump years, is a hardworking farmer in Indiana who just can’t make ends meet anymore. And that’s real, there’s plenty of those folks out there. But there are also millions of families in big cities, medium towns, and suburbs who aren’t the prototypical white guy on a farm or in a factory, who are also struggling to feed their kids and keep a roof over their heads. The working class of all stripes has been struggling, and has been passed over by the onslaught of capitalism.
On Having a Maximum Wealth
Hamilton Nolan, How Things Work
At Davos last week, AI was the hot topic of discussion. The business leaders there understand, as we all do, that the advancement of AI may automate and thereby eliminate millions and millions of jobs. For CEOs, this is a selling point: the main allure of AI today is, for most companies, its potential to lower labor costs. For this reason, it has been widely observed that AI has the potential to supercharge our already awful trend of increasing economic inequality. If nothing is done to prevent it, the gains of AI will accrue to a small pool of already wealthy investors and tech company executives, at the cost of countless normal people losing their jobs and becoming worse off. This is why the relevant discussion about AI is not really one of technology, but rather a political one: How will the gains of this technology be distributed?
We’re ruled by Losers
J.P. Hill, New Means
All of this exploitation and greed that has always featured prominently in capitalism, and which has generally been harmful to most of the working class, is particularly glaring in the age of tech barons who, not content to enjoy their spoils privately, insist on public adulation. And even that is not enough. Alongside love and praise they simultaneously want you to think they’re normal. They want to be richer than entire nations, adored, and seen as just regular dudes all at once. Just chill guys buying elections, funding fascism, and driving you back into serfdom.
So we should be clear — they’re not normal. Elon Musk might get his hoards of incels to sing his praises and make AI images of him, but he’ll never actually be one of us. He’ll never be cool, or regular, or likeable. Zuck will never find the right chain to make him hip or chill. Bezos will never pull off that stupid cowboy hat. These men are sick, profoundly distorted people who view the rest of humanity as beneath them, and they should never get the satisfaction of thinking we don’t understand these dynamics.
More importantly, they should know that we’re coming after their wealth and power. We must be aware that our system will not check them; it created them. We, the people, are the only check remaining.
‘When I say “I understand,” I truly do because I have been in financial situations that made me uncomfortable, anxious or avoidant’
Dana Miranda, Healthy Rich
Money is more than just numbers in a bank account or spreadsheet. In fact, I often wonder whether our relationships with money have anything to do with the numbers at all. Our experiences with money, the choices we make about how to use money, what we believe about money in our culture — all of these are emotional, not financial. But these are the variables that determine the numbers we’re dealing with.
My Working Class Kitchen Secrets: Here’s How To Get More From the Grocery Store
Michelle Teheux, Untrickled
Everyone but the wealthy is wincing at grocery prices right now, and it’s time to face facts: These prices are not going down. The person voters put back in the White House doesn’t care about you and everything he is doing is likely to actually increase food prices.
So if you are having trouble buying food or prefer not to devote so much money to your food bill, you’ll need to change how you shop and cook.
Confirmed: Unions Squandered the Biden Years
Hamilton Nolan, How Things Work
Of course Biden was infinitely better for unions and workers than the alternative scenario of Trump winning in 2020. That is common sense, a question not even worth dwelling on. The question is not, “Should unions support Republicans or Democrats?” The real question is: Has achieving electoral political power translated into the growth of union power? Have the dollars spent on politics rather than on union organizing paid off? Does organized labor have its priorities in order?
Today, we can definitively say the answer is “no.” That’s because, this morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its annual measurement of union membership in America, the best statistical measure of the total strength and size of unions. In 2024, union density in America fell to 9.9% of the workforce.
Walking Away from Should — A Money Story
Kim Doyal, Women, Wisdom & Wealth
What if the traditional approach to financial education and planning isn't broken just for me but for many women? What if that disconnect is actually pointing us toward something better?
When Your Career Coach Lives Out of Her Car
Sara Eckel, It’s Not Just Us
Around the 1980s, a number of things changed that lead to rising power for employers and declining power for workers as a class. One of these big things is the decline of union power. So the shift away from manufacturing into services and the globalization of various industries undermine union power. This sets wages and standards for job security well beyond actual union places. Those effects rippled out at other workplaces.
You Will Never Be A Billionaire You Stupid Fuck
Antonio Melonio, Beneath the Pavement
You wake at dawn, hustle to two or three jobs, and blame yourself when it doesn’t pan out. You internalize every self-help seminar, every YouTube “guru” telling you to “manifest that dream,” because if you fail, it must be your fault, right? You just need more grit, more devotion. Guess what? None of that hustle is going to breach the golden gates. Their wealth is compounding at obscene rates, while you’re drowning in monthly bills, credit card debt, and groceries that used to cost half of what they do now. Wages barely rise an inch, but the cost of everything else skyrockets like a fucking rocket fueled by your regrets. They humiliate you, keep you down, and yet you keep licking those delicious boots, slowly turning into what you always wanted to be: a fascist. The ultimate power fantasy of the weak man.
The US is especially adept at selling these lies. The American Dream is the biggest farce of them all. It’s a centuries-old propaganda machine perpetuated to keep you docile, keep you striving. Because the moment you realize you’re not actually going to make it into their exclusive club, you might do the unthinkable:
Link arms with others in your position, your sisters and brothers in arms, start asking uncomfortable questions, start demanding real change, start tearing this shit down!
Dark Times Are Coming
Hamilton Nolan, How Things Work
For many years my basic thesis about American society has been: the half-century-long inequality crisis is at the root of most of our issues, and increasing the power of organized labor is the best way to reverse this crisis, and therefore growing unions is absolutely central to solving America’s political and economic problems. The decline of unions enabled the crisis that got us here and the revival of unions is the most direct path to restoring our national balance of power. Though organized labor is seen as a niche topic by most people, I have long argued that it is actually of central importance, and have subjected readers like you to innumerable screeds to that effect.
About Michelle Teheux
I’m a writer in central Illinois. If you like my work, subscribe to me here or on Medium. My new book is The Trailer Park Rules. Tips accepted here at Ko-fi.
All wealthy families are alike; each poor family is poor in its own way.
— Leo Tolstoy, if he had written about a trailer park
For residents of the Loire Mobile Home Park, surviving means understanding which rules to follow and which to break. Each has landed in the trailer park for wildly different reasons.
Jonesy is a failed journalist with one dream left. Angel is the kind of irresponsible single mother society just shakes its head about, and her daughter Maya is the kid everybody overlooks. Jimmy and Janiece Jackson wanted to be the first in their families to achieve the American dream, but all the positive attitude in the world can’t solve their predicament. Darren is a disabled man trying to enjoy his life despite a dark past. Kaitlin is a former stripper with a sugar daddy, while Shirley is an older lady who has come down in the world and lives in denial. Nancy runs the park like a tyrant but finds out when a larger corporation takes over that she’s not different from the residents.
When the new owners jack up the lot rent, the lives of everyone in the park shift dramatically and in some cases tragically.
Welcome to the Loire Mobile Home Park! Please observe all rules.
And AI isn’t truthful
Yes to the whole article