This Week In Income Inequality: Feb. 21, 2025

The Madness of King Donny

Source: The White House Instagram account

Eyebrow-raising rudeness. Crazy talk. Utter gibberish that could go on for hours. Obvious mental impairment. Alarming behavior toward women trending toward sexual assault.

You may have thought I was talking about Donald Trump, but that description was of King George III, Britain’s king at the time when the American colonies decided to strike out on their own. I thought Mad King George was the last king to rule over the people who became Americans, but I guess I was wrong.

It’s been 200 years, but now there’s a new king in town. Recently, Mad King Donny has started referring to himself as a king. The White House even released a picture of him dressed as one.

As if all everything King Donny and his regent, Sir Musk-a-Lot, have done in order to increase income inequality isn’t enough, we seem to be headed straight into kings and peasants territory.

As a peasant, this concerns me

I don’t think this is a joke, and if it is, it isn’t funny. I expect my president or king or whatever kind of leader this is to have a bit of decorum, and King Donny has none.

He’s never had any. No reasonable person can respect him.

There’s a big difference between a king and a president. It doesn’t seem like Donny wants to be the sort of figurehead nations such as Great Britain have, either – he appears to want to go back in time to when a king’s powers allowed him to do just about anything he wanted. I’m a bit surprised he hasn’t already ordered the decapitation of Hunter Biden. Or maybe I shouldn’t say that until I check for updates online.

I’m not a great student of European royal history, but I’m aware that the absolute power of kings still depends on the acceptance of the people. George III was forced to cede power to his successor because apparently the rest of Great Britain was not crazy enough to keep a crazy man in power.

Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette lost the support of the public and were Luigi’d via guillotine in 1793.

We established the 25th Amendment in this country so that we could remove in an orderly manner any president who went all George III.

I’m a big fan of the rule of law, democracy, peace and civilization. We need to shut down this king bullshit immediately.

If we are to establish a royal figurehead in this country, I believe Beyonce would be a more popular choice.

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 and a great place to discover new sources to follow. If you see a newsletter you like, don’t forget to subscribe to it today!

And now, here’s the roundup:

How Musk is Cancelling the U.S. government

Robert Reich

When and if America ever wrests back control of our government, we must remember this: The combination of great wealth and great power — epitomized by Elon Musk — is destroying American democracy.

Understanding the Fury in America

Jan D. Weir, Why You Can’t Afford A Home Newsletter

As saliva rises in the mouth of a conditioned dog at the sound of a bell, an image of three families living in a three-bedroom apartment in 1950s Russia appears in the minds of the financially desperate class at the mention of the word “socialism.”

Yet, FDR’s policies were high taxes on the rich, socialism for the salaried classes, and tight regulation of the banking industry. These policies laid the basis for a fair sharing of prosperity with the middle and working classes—and a stable financial system until 2008.

Distraction Is the Whole Point

Katie Jgln, The Noösphere

People living paycheck to paycheck, drowning in debt, and unable to afford a home are being told to direct their frustration at… other people who also live paycheck to paycheck, are drowning in debt and can’t afford a home.

Assault Pays

Lauren Hough, Badreads

Sell your traumas for $200 and a free month’s subscription. There’s a point in every writer’s career when they do the math and realize those guys back in the 1920s were making the equivalent of 30k for a short story.

Wrinkled conscientious objectors

Katie Gatti Tassin, Off Days

I’m not so sure an aesthetically fancy-free adolescence would’ve gotten me “further ahead”; at least, not in the world we currently inhabit. There’s a case to be made that investing in my appearance as a young woman was actually a rational choice that paid dividends. Studies show that “attractive” women get higher grades and earn more money.

On Substack, Meritocracy Is a Myth

Noah Berlatsky, Everything Is Horrible

I think it’s important to push back against the myth of meritocracy, though, because that’s the myth that underlines and justifies much of what’s unjust and cruel in our society. If you believe that the most intelligent and the most hard working inevitably win out, then you tend to think that those at the bottom of any particular hierarchy—poor people, women, Black people, LGBT people, immigrants, marginalized people—deserve what they get.

That’s the logic at the back of our current nightmare exercise in government by billionaire. Elon Musk is rich and therefore feels he is virtuous and brilliant and is entitled to all the government’s money. Poor people, people who need help—the very fact that they need help means, in the eyes of Trump and Musk, that they are disgusting and unworthy and should be crushed.

Democrats Have an Opening on Housing

Jeff Maurer, I Might Be Wrong

Democrats need messages that speak to the challenges in people’s lives. Life, despite being generally easier than it’s ever been, is still really fucking hard. Everything costs too much. Work blows.

Efficiency – A War Against The Greater Good?

Shannon Ashley, Truthurts

My time at Ecolab taught me that an emphasis on effectiveness, efficiency and automation never really serves the workers who run the daily processes. It mostly benefits the bottom line and those at the top of the organization.

You Don’t Need A Third Space

Michelle Teheux, Untrickled

The idea is that your home is your first space and your work is your second space. The third space is everywhere else you might meet people and, supposedly, build community. That’s fine, but I think we need to bring back the old idea of having people over. That means being able to afford a home and truly living in it.

No, capitalism has not lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty

Ryan Ward, Free Market Moralism

Even if the World Bank’s flawed metrics were useable, what does it say about our society that in a day and age when global wealth is greater than $454 trillion, we still have over 700 million people living in poverty? What does it say about us as a society when the personal fortunes of the ten richest men in the world doubled during COVID, while the incomes of 99% of the rest of the world fell? What does it say about us when the first person is predicted to achieve trillionaire status in 2027 while roughly 27 million will die of hunger or hunger-related diseases from now until then?

He’s Not God.

Evan Hurst, Wonkette

The FHA — you know, your mortgage might be insured by them, it might be why you were able to buy a house in the first place — well Trump is going to fire half that agency.

Vulture Capitalism: Introduction

Grace Blakeley

Life under capitalism means life under a system in which decisions about how we work, how we live and what we buy have already been taken by someone else. Life under capitalism means living in a planned economy, while being told that you are free.

And now, on to the income-inequality memes!

Each week, I’ll share a few of the best memes that I saw on Substack in the Friday Round-up.

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. If you prefer to give a one-time tip, I accept Ko-fi.

Did you know that originally the term “bootstrapping” was used sarcastically to describe an impossible task? Yet now, the meaning has morphed into the opposite.

I invite you to give it a try. Reach back, grab your bootstraps and pull with all your might. How did that work out for you?

There’s a reason we tell people to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps even though we know it can’t be done. It’s one of the ways people in power keep the rest of us from complaining that we’re being screwed. We keep trying and trying and blaming ourselves when we have trouble. Of course we blame ourselves. Who else can we blame?

This is not a self-help book because you cannot single-handedly fix what’s wrong with the system by working harder or working smarter. There’s a good possibility that some of your problems are out of your hands.

This book was not written for the top 10 percent or for anyone who had life handed to them on a silver platter.

Instead, this book is for every working-class, lower-class and even middle-class person who has done everything right but still feels strapped.