Educators are flipping out over Donald Trump’s choice of pro wrestling exec and longtime donor Linda McMahon for secretary of education. Predictably so, since experts in just about every field are flipping out when Trump chooses some poorly qualified (yet very loyal) hack to oversee their specialty—or selects another fox to guard the henhouse.

America’s biggest union, the National Education Association, for instance, slammed McMahon as unqualified and bent on a privatization agenda:

Her chief goal for education is to promote vouchers, which drain resources from public schools and send taxpayer money to unaccountable private schools that are permitted to discriminate against students and educators. The policies she promotes are aligned with Trump’s Project 2025 plan. 

McMahon, who served as head of the Small Business Administration during Trump’s initial term, has scant education experience. She earned a teaching certificate in college and was a student teacher for a semester, but resigned from the Connecticut Board of Education in 2010, according to the Washington Post, after the Hartford Courant found that she’d claimed an education degree she never obtained. More recently, a lawsuit accused McMahon and her estranged husband, Vince, of tolerating the sexual abuse of children by an employee of their company, World Wrestling Entertainment. (A lawyer for McMahon told CNN the allegations are “baseless.”)

But hey, she likes vouchers.

Voucher-esque programs, speaking of discrimination, were first deployed across the South during desegregation so authorities could shutter public schools—the white parents didn’t want their kids mixing with Black kids—and instead provide grants to fund the private education of exclusively white children at hundreds of new private schools that popped up to serve them. This was a sordid and horribly racist enterprise, as you will glean from this history compiled by the Center for American Progress.

When states expand voucher programs, shoddy and established school operators both cash in, and public schools and their students are the losers.

And it’s still happening, de facto. ProPublica reported the other day that tens of millions of dollars in public funds are still flowing to these “segregation academies”—of the 39 schools the reporters found in North Carolina alone, more than half had reported to the federal government that their student bodies were at least 85 percent white.

Republicans have been drooling over vouchers for as long as I can remember. They were talking about them when I was in grade school, and I’m a geezer. But now the messaging revolves around school “choice,” with proponents claiming that vouchers, which a number of states have revived in the form of education savings accounts (ESAs), allow low-income parents to escape failing public schools. And this is certainly true to some extent.

But the voucher/ESA cheerleaders neglect to mention that those public schools are failing in significant part because affluent families have fled en masse, and that their budgets have been gutted by, well, the same voucher-loving politicians and/or charter school systems championed by billionaire philanthropists like Bill Gates and the Waltons, and affluent members of both parties. All this drainage leaves many public schools underfunded to the point that teachers literally have to beg for basic classroom supplies—as some did during parents’ night at the public high school my kids attended in Oakland, California.

McMahon or no McMahon, vouchers have come back into vogue recently, likely in reaction to the educational upheaval of the Covid pandemic. “In 2023 alone, seven states passed new school voucher programs and nine expanded existing plans—highlighting a push that is largely coming from red states,” notes a Brookings Institution report published last year.

And sure, some low-income families will benefit from the programs, which channel money that would have gone to the local public school into private accounts (the ESAs) that can be used for private K–12 tuition and related expenses. But there can be a lot of collateral damage, notes the Brookings report.

First, whenever you expand government payouts—and this is something the Republicans complain about in other contexts—fraudsters and opportunists will come out of the woodwork. The report cites research showing that when traditional voucher programs were enacted, a host of “pop-up” private schools would follow, of which many fail quickly. “That’s exactly what is happening with the ESA-style expansions in Arizona now,” the report notes. (Arizona, which in 2011 became the first state to offer ESAs for selected students, expanded its program in 2022 to all students—including those already enrolled in private schools—according to a subsequent Brookings paper that deems the program “a handout to the wealthy.”)

Voucher programs also lead to tuition hikes by existing private schools, according to the Brookings report, “and that is exactly what recent reports are showing with ESA passage.” So, basically, shoddy and established operators alike cash in, and public schools and their students are the big losers.

There are other consequences, too. From the report:

The last decade of research on traditional vouchers strongly suggests they actually lower academic achievement. In Louisiana, for example, two separate research teams found negative academic impacts as high as -0.4 standard deviations—extremely large by education policy standards—with declines that persisted for years. Those results were published across top journals for empirical public and education policy. Similar results in Indiana found impacts closer to -0.15 standard deviations. To put these negative impacts in perspective: Current estimates of COVID-19’s impact on academic trajectories hover around -0.25 standard deviations.

Vouchers, more broadly, are of a piece with what I’ve been calling the Plunder—the steady rigging of our economic system over the past four and a half decades to benefit people who need no government support at the expense of those who really do. This, as I argued in a recent piece, was a primary reason why Trump won a second term, as ironic as that may sound.

I wrote about the rigging of our educational system in my 2021 book about excessive wealth in America. (Chapter title: “Getting In.”) Take the tax-advantaged 529 college savings plans our government offers. Like private retirement plans—401(k)s, IRAs, etc.—these plans provide far more help to rich families than to poor ones. The example I used in my book involved two (fictitious) students living in Ohio, one rich, the other middle-class.

The middle-class family could only afford to put $6,000 a year into their daughter’s 529—an investment fund that grows tax-free over the years and can be used to pay college tuition and qualified expenses when the child comes of age.

And that’s good. They needed that assistance. But for some reason the rules also allow the rich couple in my example to frontload their son’s 529 with up to five years’ worth of the maximum contribution all at once. So, they put $150,000 into a 529 that they set up for him as a newborn, do this again during his fifth year, and then, when he’s 10, bring the balance up to maximum the state allows, beyond which they can contribute no more. With so much cash in their fund from the start, you can imagine how quickly the interest accumulates.

Rich families gained yet another lucrative perk in late 2017, when Donald Trump signed his most notable first-term achievement, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Beyond cutting taxes for wealthy folks and corporations, the TCJA stipulated that parents could now take up to $10,000 a year from their child’s 529 fund for private K–12 tuition. It’s worth noting that elite private high schools—where tuition typically runs between $40,000 to $60,000 a year—offer extensive college admissions mentoring, whereas a middle-class kid at an underfunded public school cannot use their 529 fund to cover expenses like SAT prep, college advising, or essay coaching that their school doesn’t offer in any meaningful way.

When I crunched the numbers, here’s what I found: Even assuming a conservative annual investment return of 5 percent for the students’ 529 funds, the rich family got some $117,000 in tax breaks, nearly seven times what the middle-class family received, not to mention that young Nigel (XTC fans will get the reference) had two and a half years of his private high school tuition covered by the taxpayers. He also ended up with a staggering $688,660 in his fund—likely enough to also cover the cost of law school or med school or business school should he choose any of those paths.

Small wonder that, at the time I reported these numbers, the “Ivy Plus” colleges were enrolling more students from the top-earning 1 percent families than from the bottom 50 percent. And that, compared with kids with families in the bottom 20 percent of the wealth spectrum, the children of 1 percenters were 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy Plus college. 

Vouchers only add insult to this injury. They can be marketed to sound like a good and equitable thing—a perk for all Americans—when in reality, without serious means-testing, they end up delivering the most benefit to families who need it the least. They are but one of the levers (here’s another) the Project 2025 people and Trump’s new administration may use to accelerate a plunder that has been in progress for decades, under the watch of both major parties.

One can almost hear it now: the “giant sucking sound” that the late Ross Perot used to talk about, except in this case it won’t be the sounds of US jobs going to Mexico. It will be the sound of the remaining wealth of the middle class getting sucked ever upward and into the coffers of our most privileged.

On Monday, the New York Times reported that President-elect Donald Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. has accepted a job with an investment firm called 1789 Capital. The Times described the firm as focused on “products and companies aimed at conservative audiences.” Indeed, the firm funds right-wing TV host Tucker Carlson’s media company. And its website is larded with right-wing dog whistles: It champions “anti-ESG” and “deglobalization” and firmly opposes “excessive bureaucracy.”

Those values are pretty standard conservative fare, but 1789 Capital also has deep connections to a more extreme faction of conservatism: the TheoBros, a group of mostly millennial, hard-line conservatives, many of whom identify as Christian nationalists. The founder of 1789 Capital is Chris Buskirk, who, as the Bucks County Beacon’s Jennifer Cohn reported, once served as the editor and publisher of American Reformer, the unofficial publication of the TheoBros. In the digital pages of American Reformer, TheoBro contributors have fanboyed over the authoritarian Spanish leader Francisco Franco, called Uganda’s criminalization of homosexuality “legitimate civil policy,” and declared that the United States is “not a nation of immigrants.”

Don Jr., who is as online as the TheoBros, though without the fire and brimstone, currently serves as a trustee and executive vice president of the Trump Organization. He isn’t the first person in Trump’s orbit to be connected to Buskirk. JD Vance crossed paths with Buskirk in the Rockbridge Network, a group of powerful Republican donors including Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel.

The name of the firm presumably refers to the year 1789, when the US Constitution was enacted, and, as TheoBro patriarch Doug Wilson explains in a blog post about Christian nationalism, “The Declaration acknowledged our rights are inalienable precisely because they were bestowed on us by our Creator.” Other 1789 Capital execs include Rebekah Mercer, a powerful conservative donor whose father founded the voter-research firm Cambridge Analytica, and Trump fundraiser Omeed Malik. As NewsTRACS’ Wendy Siegelman reported, in 2023, Malik’s investment company acquired Public Square, a business hub that says it “empowers like-minded, patriots to discover and support companies from a wide variety of industries that share their values.”

In addition to his new gig, the Times reports, Don Jr. will likely “still play some role in his father’s political operation.”

Correction, November 12: This post has been updated to reflect the year of the Constitution’s enactment. It was drafted in 1787, ratified in 1788, and enacted in 1789.

In the coming days, you will hear every imaginable take on why Americans voted to put Donald Trump back in office.

Pundits will say toxic masculinity was to blame—and men feeling usurped by women. They’ll say it was the Christian nationalism movement. A surprising shift in Latino voting patterns. Sexism. Racism. Transphobia. Elon Musk. Crypto bros. “Theo bros.” Housing prices. Gaza! Propaganda from Fox News and Newsmax. Misinformation on X.

Perhaps it was the cowardice of powerful men like Jeff Bezos and Jamie Dimon. The anti-immigrant frenzy—Trump’s incessant false claims about vicious murderers and rapists and mental patients swarming across the border like locusts. Property crime. Inflation. Interest rates. Lingering malaise from the pandemic. The Democrats’ failure to sell their economic wins. Kamala Harris’ inability to distance herself from an unpopular president.

Or maybe a combination of all these things. Gender and Gaza clearly made a difference. Inflation is a notorious regime killer—it was high inflation that underpinned the rise of fascism in Europe in the last century—and rising wages haven’t kept pace. When the Dems say, “Look, inflation is back to normal,” well, the price of groceries sure ain’t.

But I’m talking here about something even more basic, something that undergirds so much of America’s discontent. The best explanation, after all, is often the simplest:

Wealth inequality.

There is little that leaves people as pissed off and frustrated as the feeling that no matter how hard they work, they can’t ever seem to get ahead. And this feeling has been slowly festering since the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan and his cadre of supply-side economists launched the first salvos in what would become the great fucking-over of the American middle and working classes.

Half of the families in the richest nation on the planet have no wealth at all. Is it any wonder some of them are willing to see the system burn?

The frustration was evident in something two very different women in two very different states told me on the very same day in 2022 for a story on how America spends hundreds of billions of dollars a year subsidizing retirement plans mostly for rich people: “I’m going to have to work until I die.”

The great fucking-over commenced with President Reagan’s gutting of unions and the wealth-friendly tax cuts he signed into law in 1981 and 1986. The trend continued with George W. Bush’s tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, and culminated with the Trump tax cuts of 2017—which, like all of those other Republican initiatives, failed to generate the degreee of growth and prosperity the supply-siders promised. They did, however, make the rich richer as wages stagnated and the middle class shriveled.

We talk a lot about income inequality, but wealth and income are different beasts. Income is what pays your bills. Wealth is your security—and in that regard, most American families are just not feeling sufficiently secure.

In January 1981, when Reagan took office, the households of the Middle 40—that’s the 50th to 90th wealth percentiles—held a collective 31.5 percent of the nation’s wealth. Fast-forward to January 2022: Their share of the pie had dwindled to 25.7 percent, even as the combined wealth of the richest 0.01 percent of households soared from less than 3 percent of the total to 11 percent.

Put another way, 18,300 US households—a tiny fraction—now control more than a tenth of the nation’s wealth.

And what of the bottom 50 percent? How have they fared over the past four decades or so? When Reagan came in, their average household wealth was a paltry $944. (All figures are in 2023 dollars.) Today they have even less—just $659 on average, according to projections from Real Time Inequality, a site based on data from the Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. All told, those 92.2 million households now hold less than 0.05 percent of the nation’s wealth—which rounds down to zero. In short, half of the people living in the richest nation on the planet have no wealth at all.

They’re not doing so hot income-wise, either. In September, the Congressional Budget Office reported that average income of the highest-earning 1 percent of taxpayers in 2021 was more than $3.1 million, or 42 times the average income of households in the bottom 90 percent, according to the nonprofit Americans for Tax Fairness. That’s the most skewed income distribution since CBO began reporting this data in 1979, the group noted. Back then, the disparity was only 12 to 1.

And the billionaires? I’m glad you asked. Based on Forbes data, from January 1, 2018, when the Trump cuts took effect, to April 1 of this year, the nation’s 806 billionaires saw a 57 percent gain in their collective wealth—after adjusting for the inflation that has plagued working families.

Team Biden has actually done a good bit for the middle class, and tried to do more, but nuance is a hard sell when you’re pitching to families worried about whether they can make it to the end of the month.

“It’s a class and inequality story for sure,” Richard Reeves, the author of 2017’s Dream Hoarders, concurred when I ran my premise by him. “But it’s also a gendered class story.” (His latest book, Of Boys and Men, examines how “the social and economic world of men has been turned upside down.”) And he’s right.

But are you starting to see why the broader electorate, race and gender notwithstanding, might be just a little fed up?

I suppose, having also written a book about wealth in America, that I know enough to assert that wealth insecurity is fundamental.

But why, you might ask, would someone living on the edge vote for Republicans, whose wage-suppressing, union-busting, benefit-denying policies have only tended to make the poor and the middle class more miserable?

And why in the name of Heaven would they vote for Trump, a billionaire born with a silver spoon in his mouth who has lied and cheated his way through life? A man whose latest tax-cut plans—though some, like eliminating taxes on tips and Social Security income, can sound progressive—will be deeply regressive, giving ever more to the rich and rationalizing cuts that will hurt the poor and middle class and accelerate global climate chaos.

The reason, my friends, may well be that those on the losing end of our thriving economy don’t see it as thriving. Historically, every election cycle, when reporters fan out to ask low-income voters in swing states what they are thinking, the message has been roughly the same: Presidential candidates, Democrats and Republicans, come around here every four years and talk their talk, and then they leave and forget about us when it comes to policy.

Now that’s not entirely fair, because the Biden administration actually has done a good bit for working people and families of color, and has proposed all sorts of measures to make the tax code fairer and reduce the wealth gap (both the racial one and the general one)—including increasing taxes and IRS enforcement for the super-rich. But one can only get so far with a split Senate, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema on your team, and a rival party that would just as soon throw you into a lake of fire as support your initiatives.

And nuance is a hard sell when you’re pitching yourself to families worried about whether they can make it to the end of the month. Roughly half of the population barely gets by, has no stocks, no wealth, no retirement savings, and can’t imagine how they’ll ever afford a house—certainly not at current interest rates. Meanwhile, the billionaire techno-dicks are strutting around, publicly flexing their wealth and power with Democrats and Republicans alike.

In courting Americans who, fairly or not, feel like the system has never done them a bit of good, Team Trump has the rhetorical advantage, because he says he’ll destroy that system—even if that really just means he’ll subvert it to further enrich his buddies. “Populist Revolt Against Elite’s Vision of the U.S.” was one of the New York Times’ headlines after the race was called on Wednesday morning. And that’s absolutely right.

Because when the Republicans say, “The economy is a nightmare under Biden and Harris, and illegal immigrants are committing heinous crimes and taking your jobs and we’re gonna cut your taxes,” and the Dems counter, “Hey, none of that is really true and we actually did a lot and we feel your pain and the economy is going gangbusters and Trump’s tariffs will destroy it,” well, whom do you think a person struggling from paycheck to paycheck might be more inclined to believe?

Sure, the economy is doing great—if you own stock. If you have a well-paying job and a retirement plan. If you are in the top fifth of the wealth and income spectrums.

If not, even if you rightly suspect that the Republicans won’t do a damn thing to improve your lot, you might just be tempted to say, “Fuck it.”

And watch the system burn.

As Donald Trump campaigns to be a dictator for one day, he’s asking: “Are you better off now than you were when I was president?” Great question! To help answer it, our Trump Files series is delving into consequential events from the 45th president’s time in office that Americans might have forgotten—or wish they had.

President Donald Trump was lying profusely about his administration’s most notable achievement, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), even as he sat down to sign the bill into law in 2017, a few days before Christmas.

“As you know, we had the largest tax cuts in our history just approved,” he remarked at the “rush-job” Oval Office signing ceremony, from which the usual gaggle of fawning Republican legislators was excluded—the souvenir pens were instead offered to the lucky few reporters on hand. “This is bigger than, actually, President Reagan’s.”

Uh, not even close—though it was the biggest corporate cut. Thanks to his tax bill, Trump went on, corporate America was already “making tremendous investments. That means jobs; it means a lot of things. And we’re very happy. So that’s AT&T, Boeing, Sinclair, Wells Fargo, Comcast, and now many other companies.”

The rich are feasting on America’s economic pie. Republican tax cuts have set them on a steep upward wealth trajectory, far and away from the “little people.”

The executives sure were happy. The legislation slashed corporate income taxes dramatically, from 35 percent to 21 percent. Not surprising, given that, according to the nonprofit Public Citizen, more than 7,000 lobbyists—on behalf of a who’s who of Corporate America—helped hammer out the bill’s details. That’s 13 lobbyists per lawmaker.

And what did these joyful companies do with their windfall? Build new factories? Hire more workers? Raise wages? Stimulate economic growth? There was some of that, sure. But the cuts came “nowhere close to paying for themselves,” the New York Times later reported, and have added more than $100 billion a year to the deficit.

Just about every Republican president since Reagan has relied on the same debunked theory to advance tax cuts for corporations and wealthy Americans. It’s called supply-side (or “trickle-down”) economics. The idea is that if we give rich folks more money, they’ll invest, build companies, and create good jobs. The economic benefits will then trickle down to what the late New York heiress Leona Helmsley—whom the press nicknamed “Queen of Mean”—allegedly called the “little people.” (That fun fact emerged during testimony at her 1989 trial for tax evasion—where she was found guilty. Helmsley died in 2007, famously leaving $12 million to Trouble, her pampered little dog, but nothing to two of her four grandchildren.)

Trump’s corporate cuts, predictably, trickled not down but up. As I wrote in my 2021 book, Jackpot, the first instinct of executives and board members after Congress passed the TCJA was to enrich themselves:

S&P 500 firms spent a record $806 billion in 2018 buying back their own shares on the public markets. The Harvard Business Review notes that senior executives, paid largely in stock and stock options, use buybacks to manipulate share prices “to their own ben­efit” and the benefit of “investment bankers and hedge-fund manag­ers” who are further enriched “at the expense of employees, as well as continuing shareholders.”

Buybacks are indeed marvelous for executives and Wall Street bankers. By reducing the number of outstanding shares on the market, they drive up the stock price to the benefit of major shareholders. But they’re bad news for workers, who have traditionally benefitted from excess corporate profits and their reinvestment in operations and equipment, which tends to strengthen the business and bring new jobs. Buybacks also can be bad for long-term investors, because they encourage a short-term mindset in the C-suite and can be used to mask a firm’s underperformance.

Notably, every one of the firms Trump praised by name during the signing ceremony notched major buybacks soon afterward: Sinclair’s board greenlit $1 billion in the months to follow. Boeing’s board approved $19 billion, and numerous reports have blamed the company’s aircraft safety fiascos in part on its lust for buybacks. (Late last week, the company announced it would lay off roughly 17,000 people, or 10 percent of its workforce.)

On Trump’s watch, Congress doubled the gift and estate tax exemption. A rich couple can now leave their kids $27.2 million without paying one dime in tax.

AT&T repurchased $692 million worth of its stock in 2018 amid reports that it had been laying off workers and closing call centers—and completed nearly $2.5 billion in buybacks the following year. Wells Fargo was in for almost $41 billion, and Comcast shelled out $8.4 billion for buybacks and dividends (which it juiced by 10 percent).

“We give stock to corporate managers to convince them to create the kind of long-term value that benefits American companies and the workers and communities they serve,” Robert Jackson Jr., who then served on the Securities and Exchange Commission, declared in a June 2018 speech. “Instead, what we are seeing is that executives are using buybacks as a chance to cash out their compensation at investor expense.”

Even when wealthy businesspeople are incentivized to “create value,” results may vary. “A friend of mine, Bob Kraft, called me last night, and he said this tax bill is incredible,” Trump remarked at the signing.

“He owns the New England Patriots,” Trump said, “but he’s in the paper business too. And he said, based on this tax bill, he just wanted to let me know that he’s going to buy a big plant in the great state of North Carolina, and he’s going to build a tremendous paper mill there.”

I looked up that “tremendous” paper mill. Trump, as usual, botched the details. The plant is in Catawba, South Carolina. Kraft’s company, New-Indy, took it over in September 2018, after which it became a total nightmare for the community—generating more than 47,000 complaints of noxious odors “similar to rotten eggs, dirty diapers or other foul smells,” including from people in North Carolina.

The Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy released an analysis of whom Trump’s new tax proposals would benefit. Guess what: It probably isn’t you!

Another big deal, Trump said, were the estate tax changes in the tax bill: “Something very important to me,” he said (if you can imagine anyone not named Trump being important to Trump), were “the family farmers and small-business owners who lost their business because of the estate tax. Most of them won’t have any estate tax to pay. It will be a great thing for their families. You can leave your farm to your family. You could leave your business, your small business to your family—not even so small, because the numbers are pretty big here.”

They are big! The TCJA doubled the gift and estate tax exemption and pegged it to inflation, which means, as of 2024, a well-heeled couple can leave $27.2 million to their heirs without paying one dime in tax.

But that won’t save any “family farms.” That’s a well-worn Republican talking point that amounts, fittingly enough, to a heap of cow manure. Back in 2017, a researcher with the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) pointed out that only 50 small farms or businesses would be on the hook for federal estate tax that year (a “small” business can have up to $40 million in annual revenues and 1,500 employees), and most would likely have other assets, such as stock, that could be liquidated if need be to cover the tax. Existing law, she also pointed out, allows estates “to spread their payments over a 15-year period at low interest rates.” America’s farmers were never in danger.

The Reagan tax cuts enacted in 1981 and 1986 added up to biggest break for wealthy Americans since 1920. The top marginal rate owed in 1981 on the uppermost income tier of the nation’s highest earners—anything exceeding $215,400 for a couple (about $760,000 in today’s dollars)—was slashed dramatically, from 70 percent when Reagan took office to 28 percent the year he left. Congress also reduced the gift/estate tax, more than tripled the lifetime exemption—the amount parents can leave their offspring tax-free—and trimmed taxes on capital gains and corporate profits.

And what was the outcome of all this largesse? Another snippet from Jackpot:

In 2012, a researcher at the nonpartisan Congres­sional Research Service sought to determine whether the Reagan cuts and other reductions in marginal income tax rates over the prior sixty-five years had benefited the overall economy. He came up short. The tax cuts did not appear to be correlated with more robust saving, investment, or productivity growth. They did, however, appear to be associated with rich people making a lot more money than before. There was no evidence that the cuts expanded America’s economic pie, the report noted, “but there may be a relationship to how the eco­nomic pie is sliced.”

You might even say the very rich pigged out on the pie. The Reagan cuts set America’s most affluent citizens on a steep upward wealth trajectory, soaring them far and away from the “little people.”

Supply-side economic arguments would later enable George W. Bush to slash taxes further. Among other provisions, the 2001 and 2003 bills he signed reduced the top income tax rate, then 39.7 percent, to 35 percent—lower even than today—and began phasing out the estate tax, which Congress briefly repealed in 2010, only to reinstate it the following year.

“High-income taxpayers benefitted most from these tax cuts, with the top 1 percent of households receiving an average tax cut of over $570,000 between 2004-2012,” explains a CBPP analysis. By 2010, the report notes, the Bush cuts resulted in a 1 percent bump in annual after-tax income for the poorest fifth of US families, whereas the top-earning 1 percent enjoyed a 6.7 percent increase.

Unfair? Sure. But did the Bush cuts ever deliver the economic results supply-siders promised? Nope. “Evidence suggests that they did not improve economic growth or pay for themselves, but instead ballooned deficits and debt and contributed to a rise in income inequality,” notes the CBPP.

Fast forward to 2024, when Trump told a crowd of “rich as hell” donors he’ll give them more tax cuts if elected to a second term. They cheered! Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders made a Facebook video.

Trump has said he wants to cut the corporate income tax further, too—to 15 percent. (Kamala Harris proposes raising it to 28 percent, still well below the pre-Trump rate of 35 percent.) And he keeps introducing new, ill-conceived, tax proposals on the campaign trail—mostly regressive—adding to a haphazard plan that the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget projects will cost the federal government, depending on economic conditions, anywhere from $1.5 trillion to $15.2 trillion over a decade. (The Harris plan, the group projects, would cost between zero and $8.1 trillion.)

On October 7, the nonpartisan Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy released an analysis of whom Trump’s tax proposals would benefit.

It’s probably not you.

Love it or hate it, at least now you better understand the Republicans’ dirty little secret: Supply side economics, cutting taxes on the wealthy, doesn’t work. It has never worked. It’s complete bullshit. But alas, it’s the sort of bullshit that refuses to be composted.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

On October 7, as Hurricane Milton was just days away from making landfall in Tampa, Florida, the city’s mayor, Jane Castor, issued a dire warning to residents in evacuation zones: “If you choose to stay…you are going to die.”

But leaving one’s home to avoid the Category 5 hurricane is not possible for everyone.

When people don’t flee their homes due to weather crises, despite warnings from government officials, there are typically two reasons why, according to Cara Cuite, an assistant professor in Rutgers University’s department of human ecology. They either don’t believe they’re at risk or that the risk is overblown, or there are situational or structural elements that prevent them from doing so.

In the case of Hurricane Milton, which was set make landfall near Tampa Bay on Wednesday evening, Cuite said the former group is probably pretty small, as Castor and other trusted officials have been unequivocal about the dire consequences of staying. But for the second group, here’s what they might be up against:

The Cost of Travel

A 2023 estimate by the Federal Reserve indicated that nearly 40 percent of Americans couldn’t cover a $400 emergency expense in cash, and a 2021 study found that people who evacuated from the Texas Coastal Bend during Hurricane Harvey spent about $1,200 on average on evacuating—more if they had to stay in hotels.

To evacuate via personal car, residents need to be able to pay for gas, a hotel, food and any other relevant necessities, assuming their car is in workable condition. If they evacuate via plane, they would need to pay for the aforementioned costs, along with the cost of a plane ticket, assuming they can reach an airport. Though some airlines were accused of price-gouging as people attempted to flee Florida, others say that they have since capped their prices.

Cierra Chenier, a writer and historian from New Orleans, said that inequalities were only exacerbated by emergency situations. “Any socioeconomic disparity that exists on a day-to-day is only going to be heightened during disaster,” she said. “It’s always those, the communities that are most vulnerable, that suffer the most.”

Before Hurricane Milton, the Florida department of health deployed nearly 600 emergency response vehicles to support evacuations, while the Florida division of emergency management is also offering free evacuation shuttles to shelters. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is currently providing some financial relief to victims of Hurricane Helene, the category 4 storm that ended on September 27 and killed more than 225 people throughout Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas. But everyone who needs help may not receive it in a timely manner, or at all.

Nowhere to Go

Many of the shelters, hotels and rentals that people in Florida would typically flee to are already full because of Hurricane Helene.

Stacy Willet, a professor in emergency management and homeland security at the University of Akron, said that a lack of pre-established places to evacuate can prevent people from leaving.

“Evacuation by invitation is one of the strongest ways to get people to leave,” she said. “If they have a place to go, if they know that they have a house in a safe zone—just sometimes knowing and offering that place to that person in that disaster zone is enough to get them to move earlier.”

But some people have to figure out accommodations without having the support network of family or friends. If shelters within a reasonable distance are packed and hotels are full, those people must either travel extreme distances or simply try to ride out the storm.

Disability

For people who are able-bodied, the specific needs of disabled or ill people during evacuations may not be front of mind. But a disability or illness may prevent someone from being able to leave their homes, much less travel elsewhere.

“If you have a disability and you don’t have an accessible place to evacuate to or you don’t have a vehicle, that’s extra difficult,” Cuite said. “You have to find help moving that can actually accommodate, let’s say, a wheelchair or whatever you might need for your disability. So these things can compound on each other when you fall into multiple categories.”

Pets

Some shelters are not pet-friendly and those that are may have a cap on the number or types of pets they accept, so many people will stay behind and avoid evacuation to care for their pets.

“Sometimes people stay to protect their home, to protect their animals that they can’t take with them,” Cuite said. “In more rural areas maybe not pets, but farm animals. People feel responsible for staying behind to take care of things and their animals that they’re in charge of.”

Fear of permanent displacement

An estimated 1.5 million people evacuated Louisiana before Hurricane Katrina, but many of those people were unable to return. For some, especially those who have experienced natural disaster caused displacement before, the fear of leaving and either not being able to return or returning to nothing is enough to attempt surviving a hurricane by staying put.

“It’s great that you might have busloads of people that you’re able to get out very quickly, but who knows how they make it separated from their families, which we know happens. How long are they going to be gone? We don’t know what the impacts are gonna be from these different storms,” Chenier said. “And so what is the strategy around ensuring that people have a right to their homes and have a right to return?”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

On October 7, as Hurricane Milton was just days away from making landfall in Tampa, Florida, the city’s mayor, Jane Castor, issued a dire warning to residents in evacuation zones: “If you choose to stay…you are going to die.”

But leaving one’s home to avoid the Category 5 hurricane is not possible for everyone.

When people don’t flee their homes due to weather crises, despite warnings from government officials, there are typically two reasons why, according to Cara Cuite, an assistant professor in Rutgers University’s department of human ecology. They either don’t believe they’re at risk or that the risk is overblown, or there are situational or structural elements that prevent them from doing so.

In the case of Hurricane Milton, which was set make landfall near Tampa Bay on Wednesday evening, Cuite said the former group is probably pretty small, as Castor and other trusted officials have been unequivocal about the dire consequences of staying. But for the second group, here’s what they might be up against:

The Cost of Travel

A 2023 estimate by the Federal Reserve indicated that nearly 40 percent of Americans couldn’t cover a $400 emergency expense in cash, and a 2021 study found that people who evacuated from the Texas Coastal Bend during Hurricane Harvey spent about $1,200 on average on evacuating—more if they had to stay in hotels.

To evacuate via personal car, residents need to be able to pay for gas, a hotel, food and any other relevant necessities, assuming their car is in workable condition. If they evacuate via plane, they would need to pay for the aforementioned costs, along with the cost of a plane ticket, assuming they can reach an airport. Though some airlines were accused of price-gouging as people attempted to flee Florida, others say that they have since capped their prices.

Cierra Chenier, a writer and historian from New Orleans, said that inequalities were only exacerbated by emergency situations. “Any socioeconomic disparity that exists on a day-to-day is only going to be heightened during disaster,” she said. “It’s always those, the communities that are most vulnerable, that suffer the most.”

Before Hurricane Milton, the Florida department of health deployed nearly 600 emergency response vehicles to support evacuations, while the Florida division of emergency management is also offering free evacuation shuttles to shelters. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is currently providing some financial relief to victims of Hurricane Helene, the category 4 storm that ended on September 27 and killed more than 225 people throughout Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas. But everyone who needs help may not receive it in a timely manner, or at all.

Nowhere to Go

Many of the shelters, hotels and rentals that people in Florida would typically flee to are already full because of Hurricane Helene.

Stacy Willet, a professor in emergency management and homeland security at the University of Akron, said that a lack of pre-established places to evacuate can prevent people from leaving.

“Evacuation by invitation is one of the strongest ways to get people to leave,” she said. “If they have a place to go, if they know that they have a house in a safe zone—just sometimes knowing and offering that place to that person in that disaster zone is enough to get them to move earlier.”

But some people have to figure out accommodations without having the support network of family or friends. If shelters within a reasonable distance are packed and hotels are full, those people must either travel extreme distances or simply try to ride out the storm.

Disability

For people who are able-bodied, the specific needs of disabled or ill people during evacuations may not be front of mind. But a disability or illness may prevent someone from being able to leave their homes, much less travel elsewhere.

“If you have a disability and you don’t have an accessible place to evacuate to or you don’t have a vehicle, that’s extra difficult,” Cuite said. “You have to find help moving that can actually accommodate, let’s say, a wheelchair or whatever you might need for your disability. So these things can compound on each other when you fall into multiple categories.”

Pets

Some shelters are not pet-friendly and those that are may have a cap on the number or types of pets they accept, so many people will stay behind and avoid evacuation to care for their pets.

“Sometimes people stay to protect their home, to protect their animals that they can’t take with them,” Cuite said. “In more rural areas maybe not pets, but farm animals. People feel responsible for staying behind to take care of things and their animals that they’re in charge of.”

Fear of permanent displacement

An estimated 1.5 million people evacuated Louisiana before Hurricane Katrina, but many of those people were unable to return. For some, especially those who have experienced natural disaster caused displacement before, the fear of leaving and either not being able to return or returning to nothing is enough to attempt surviving a hurricane by staying put.

“It’s great that you might have busloads of people that you’re able to get out very quickly, but who knows how they make it separated from their families, which we know happens. How long are they going to be gone? We don’t know what the impacts are gonna be from these different storms,” Chenier said. “And so what is the strategy around ensuring that people have a right to their homes and have a right to return?”

The first thing the neighbors on Newport’s Bellevue Avenue complained about was the helipad.

The 2-mile stretch of Rhode Island coast has long been a playground for America’s billionaires, lined with lavish, historic mansions. But for as long as most could remember, old money had meant an untouchable kind of peace, not the thunderous noise of a chopper. Now the New Yorkers who’d bought 646 Bellevue—a Gilded Age estate known as Miramar—had turned a patch of grass on their 8 acres of oceanfront land into their very own LaGuardia, and folks weren’t happy about it.

“Having Sikorskys land in the neighborhood does seem contextually off, noisy, and potentially unsafe,” one neighbor emailed to another, referring to a brand of helicopter. They didn’t even ask Newport’s zoning board, she’d heard. Her concern, she emphasized, was “the character, livability, and safety of the neighborhood.” This wasn’t about begrudging the mansion’s new owners, Wall Street titan Stephen Schwarzman and his wife, Christine; by all accounts, they were “very nice people.”

Schwarzman, the 77-year-old CEO of private equity giant Blackstone, had purchased Miramar the year before, in the fall of 2021. The mansion, which boasts 44,000 square feet of living space, including 22 bedrooms, 14 bathrooms, and a seven-bed, seven-bath guesthouse, was completed in 1915 for a streetcar magnate who later died on the Titanic. Within months of buying Miramar, Schwarzman also acquired the residence next door, Ocean View, which has 15 bedrooms, 12 bathrooms, and a six-car garage. Together, they cost $43 million—making Schwarzman’s megaproperty among Newport’s most expensive home purchases ever.

A slice of Schwarzman’s fortune has gone to indulging his famously extravagant tastes. Another chunk has gone to the GOP and Donald Trump.

Schwarzman’s pandemic splurge came just as his firm decided to double down on scooping up rental housing. During the housing crash of the Great Recession, Blackstone had snapped up underwater homes for cheap and eventually made a fortune. The Covid collapse offered Blackstone another bite at the apple. In 2021 and 2022, it bought up 200,000 new units of rental housing at bargain-basement interest rates, adding to a portfolio of more than 150,000 rentals and making Blackstone the nation’s biggest corporate landlord. The firm’s real estate arm is core to its business, worth about $337 billion—about a third of its total investments—and its rental portfolio has seen a healthy return of about $11 billion over the last decade, hiking rent on some of its properties by nearly 80 percent.

A slice of that fortune has gone to indulging Schwarzman’s famously extravagant tastes, such as the $5 million bash he threw in 20o7 to celebrate his 60th birthday, or the roughly $200 million worth of vacation homes he’s purchased in England; Jamaica; Palm Beach, Florida; St. Tropez, France; and the Hamptons in New York. Another chunk has gone to the GOP and Donald Trump. A longtime Republican megadonor, Schwarzman said in 2022 that he’d no longer support the former president, having called the January 6 insurrection “an affront to democratic values.” But when the abstraction of “values” bumped up against the reality of money, money won. Schwarzman is a major donor again this election cycle, giving more than $20 million to Republican candidates—with the GOP’s tax cuts for the superwealthy set to expire less than a year into the next president’s term.

It’s not only the roar of helicopter blades irritating Schwarzman’s neighbors: His massive renovation at Miramar has incensed local residents, not for its opulence—this town is used to the wild construction demands of wealthy out-of-towners—but for its Marie Antoinette level of disregard for the community. And as the drama of his Petit Versailles has irked Schwarzman’s neighbors, it has also offered a window into what happens when he throws his might and fortune behind a goal—be it a Rhode Island palace or a potential president.

Not as scene-y as the Hamptons or as flashy as Palm Beach, Newport is only a three-hour drive from Wall Street and, for a relative bargain, offers extravagant manors situated along hundreds of miles of idyllic coastline. But the city of 24,000 is squeezed into the corner of an island on Narragansett Bay, which means that less-affluent residents living in the nearby North End, including military families on its naval base, couldn’t ignore the rich and powerful if they tried.

“When I go to a barre class, I’ll just see [US Sen. and multimillionaire] Sheldon Whitehouse outside of Le Bec Sucré, you know, standing in line to get his croissant,” says North End resident and Newport Public Schools activist Amy Machado, drawing out the pronunciation: kwaa–SOHN.

Nowhere is the gap between rich and regular more acute than Bellevue Avenue, where the homes that surround Schwarzman’s Miramar are lousy with opulence and the sort of melodrama that only the moneyed set have time for. There’s a replica of a 17th-century chateau built for King Louis XIV and his mistress, along with several of the Vanderbilts’ former summer homes—one made of marble and another a 70-room Italian Renaissance-style palazzo. There is also the mansion once home to an alleged murderer, a billionaire tobacco heiress who almost definitely killed her interior designer. On the southern end of the street, old money gives way to nouveau riche: Oracle’s Larry Ellison, currently the world’s second-richest man, has spent more than $100 million renovating his estate and landscaping the grounds with a maze of shrubs and boulders so ugly it has become something of a local pastime to ridicule it. Nearby is a villa owned by another Wall Street CEO that was once home to a Nazi collaborator’s son who was convicted and later acquitted of twice trying to murder his heiress wife.

Schwarzman is spending at least $7 million to add, among other things, a pool, a tennis court, bronze windows, pergola and lattice pavilions, a fountain, and a guard house.

It’s all gorgeous and gossipy until you start thinking about the source of all this money, a nagging feeling almost as old as the town itself: “There is something in the air that has nothing to do with pleasure and nothing to do with graceful tradition,” Joan Didion wrote of Newport in 1967. “[A] sense not of how prettily money can be spent but of how harshly money is made.”

Schwarzman is, indeed, using harsh money to make pretty things. Specifically, he’s spending at least $7 million to add a pool, a tennis court, two bathrooms, a full guesthouse renovation, bronze windows, pergola and lattice pavilions, a fountain, a guard house, a skylight, a generator, a state-of-the-art geothermal HVAC system, and a modern iteration of the estate’s early 20th-century gardens.

And that would all be fine—normal, even, for the area—if it weren’t for what happened on nearby Yznaga Avenue. A short, leafy dead-end road right off Bellevue, Yznaga leads to Miramar’s service entrance. Schwarzman’s contractors soon lined the street seven days a week with dozens of trucks, from early dawn well into the night—sometimes past midnight.

The single homeowner on Yznaga, Mark Brice, often found himself unable to get out of his driveway. He asked the city for a parking ban that would stop Schwarzman’s crews, and anyone else, from parking on the street and blocking his route. (Brice did not respond to requests for comment.)

Banning parking on a single street may not sound like a big deal. But Yznaga Avenue, named after a 19th-century slave-owning sugar merchant, is one of the only streets where people from less-affluent parts of town can park for free and walk to some of Newport’s most beloved green spaces: Rovensky Park, the Cliff Walk, and “Rejects Beach”—a public beach next to Newport’s most exclusive beach club, Bailey’s.

The street has been a local battleground for years, with some wealthy neighbors insisting it is private, even going so far as to put up “No Parking” signs. (Newport’s zoning office confirms that Yznaga has always been city owned.) With Schwarzman’s arrival, the street remained public in theory, but in practice, it had become his construction staging area, with little room for Newporters to park and regular blockades for the one unlucky neighbor. 

“The level of construction that is happening there is hidden away from view but quite stunning when you see it.”

When Brice’s parking proposal went before the city council last spring, residents were furious that the city was considering a parking ban on Yznaga to solve a problem created by a billionaire. They flooded council members with angry letters: “It is both elitist and selfish to move forward,” one resident wrote. “A thinly disguised effort to enhance the exclusivity of that neighborhood,” opined another. “This has been a benefit forever for residents in an area that is mostly conceded to the uber-rich,” wrote a third person. “There’s a reason the beach there is called Rejects.”

The council held two hearings on the bill. From their dais at City Hall, they marveled at how sprawling the construction was. One council member said he analyzed Google satellite photos of Miramar and the project’s spillover onto Yznaga, and even drove down to the area himself. How bad could it really be? “It’s bad,” he concluded. “It is actually unprecedented. I haven’t seen anything that bad in this city. The level of construction that is happening there is hidden away from view but quite stunning when you see it.”

The council member whose district includes Bellevue agreed. “There is an unfathomable amount of construction,” he told his colleagues. His constituents had taken to sending him videos of the construction vehicles “entering up and down and up and down” Yznaga as early as 4:30 a.m.

Every local who testified spoke against the ban, except Brice, the homeowner on Yznaga. For council members, the central question became how to balance public beach access against the needs of a man who couldn’t exit the driveway of his $5 million house. But no one seemed to consider, out loud at least, addressing the root of the problem: the man with the $43 million property who messed up the street in the first place.

Eventually, the council voted for a full ban, contrary to the advice of the fire chief and traffic department, both of which recommended prohibiting parking on just one side of the street. So, by inconveniencing his neighbor, Schwarzman got a private driveway where his workers never have to compete for a spot. When I visited in August, I saw six trucks parked bumper to bumper, in violation of the ban. No one from the city seemed to mind.

The fight over Yznaga Avenue, it turned out, was just the tip of the iceberg. About six months after moving in, Schwarzman inquired with the Rhode Island Airport Corp. about registering his Miramar helipad with the Federal Aviation Administration. But Schwarzman abandoned the application, according to the RIAC, and never filed it. That didn’t stop him from having a helicopter land on the property regularly—sometimes multiple times per week. (A Schwarzman spokesperson told Mother Jones that the RIAC’s chief aeronautics inspector visited the site and approved it and that registration is now pending with the FAA. The RIAC told Mother Jones that after the inspector’s visit, no application was ever filed or approved. The FAA also told Mother Jones there is no pending application.)

One neighbor in Schwarzman’s flight path wondered why he sometimes opted to fly low right over the neighborhood instead of the water, which would be less intrusive and easy to do, given that Miramar’s landing pad is next to the ocean. “I thought, ‘This is really annoying,’” the neighbor said. “And why is he flying looking down on everybody? Of course, you couldn’t do that to him.” (Schwarzman’s spokesperson denied that the helicopter’s flight path went over the neighborhood.)

Then, in January 2022, Schwarzman’s team reached out to the city of Newport for permission to dig up a chunk of Bellevue Avenue to install a fiber-optic cable. Internet in the neighborhood is notoriously slow, and according to emails obtained from the city, it appeared they were planning on installing a private line just Schwarzman’s estate could use. Only after a city official intervened did the team notify neighbors of the upcoming construction and install a public line instead.

When a sinkhole suddenly appeared in the Cliff Walk this past April in front of Miramar’s fence, Newporters were pretty sure they knew who had caused it.

In August 2023, a Bellevue resident called the city manager to complain about the relentless construction and noise that never let up, with work and deliveries going on 24/7. The office contacted Newport zoning to ask when the construction was permitted and got a curt email in response—it was far from the first time it had fielded complaints about Miramar. “Yes the hours are 7am-9pm I will call her the owners of 646 seem not to care about anyone but there [sic] construction project,” the official wrote.

And there was more to aggravate neighbors, including drilling for geothermal wells. Workers also dug up the slope that stretches from the mansion to the iconic Cliff Walk, leading piles of soil to tumble onto the pathway.

When a sinkhole suddenly appeared in the Cliff Walk this past April in front of Miramar’s fence, Newporters were pretty sure they knew who had caused it. The scenic bluff overlooking Easton Bay, beloved by locals and tourists, is one of the only places in the world where you can go for a hike surrounded by stunning shoreline views on one side and eye-candy mansions on the other. The city eventually closed a quarter-mile of the walk for repairs—they’d found cracks in a portion of the walk behind Miramar and deterioration in the seawall footers that protect from erosion. The sinkhole’s cause was never confirmed, but a few months later, Schwarzman paid for the entire repair. (Schwarzman’s spokesperson called the implication that construction at Miramar had caused the sinkhole “unfounded,” citing “preexisting natural erosion issues.”)

Maybe it was a tacit apology. Or maybe it was a way for Schwarzman to make nice with his neighbors and Newport’s high society, whom he’d been courting with large donations to local charities, like the $20,000 he gave to a soiree benefiting homeless animals run by a local animal league and the approximately $100,000 he gave to Newport’s powerful preservation society.

In a town where famous titans—the Vanderbilts, the Astors, the Dukes—live on forever through palaces constructed in their image, it seems as though Schwarzman is vying to be the next immortal name. In August, he unveiled plans to turn Miramar into a public museum upon his death, saying it would be owned by a foundation and maintained with a special endowment.

Not mentioned in the statement is how the move would benefit Schwarzman himself: Without remotely changing his lifestyle, it will help him uphold the philanthropic promise he made in 2020 by joining the Giving Pledge, a club of billionaires who promise to donate at least half of their wealth to charity. The pledge isn’t binding, and it allows any giving to happen after death. Even better: Turning over the home to a foundation could lower future taxes, as would the museum designation—a common tactic used by the ultrawealthy.

A month before the 2016 election, a leaked Access Hollywood video showed Donald Trump bragging about grabbing women “by the pussy.” As the presidential candidate’s lurid remarks ricocheted across the airwaves, Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, was en route to Miramar, where he was scheduled to headline a campaign fundraiser. (The home was then owned by a different Wall Street tycoon.)

Local GOP leaders issued statements condemning Trump’s words, then walked through Miramar’s stately gates and joined guests to donate more than $500,000. One Republican state representative explained the decision to proceed with the fundraiser despite the national uproar: “If you want to see this revolution happen, you have to get past the man and go with the ideas he represents.”

Schwarzman has done exactly that: Grit his teeth and support the guy he thinks will help his business.

In late 2022, Schwarzman vowed to get behind someone else in the GOP primary. But after more than a dozen candidates fell short, he returned to supporting Trump.

Schwarzman didn’t back Trump initially, but shortly after the 2016 election, he donated $250,000 to Trump’s inaugural committee and later agreed to work with the new president as an economic adviser. That connection opened some lucrative doors: On a trip to meet with Saudi officials with Trump in 2017, Schwarzman’s firm announced a $20 billion commitment from the kingdom for a new investment fund. He also advised Trump on China policy, encouraging the president to soften his anti-China rhetoric, which would benefit Blackstone’s extensive holdings in the country. On the campaign trail, Trump had promised to end “carried interest,” a decades-old tax break for private equity executives. But with Schwarzman on the team, Trump’s campaign promise never materialized. (Last year, Schwarzman earned about $79.5 million in carried interest.)

In late 2022, nearly two years after Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol and after Trump-backed candidates in several states lost in the midterms, Schwarzman finally decided he wouldn’t back Trump anymore. This wasn’t the revolution he’d signed up for. He called for “a new generation of leaders” and vowed to get behind someone else in the Republican primary.

But after more than a dozen GOP primary candidates fell short, he came back into the fold. In May, with Trump’s Manhattan felony trial in full swing, Schwarzman announced that he would support his bid to defeat Joe Biden.

In August, three weeks after Kamala Harris stepped in as the Democratic nominee, rumors swirled that Schwarzman was set to host a Trump fundraiser at Miramar.

A spokesperson for the billionaire denied there was ever such a plan. But on a warm summer Thursday, Schwarzman did throw a bash at Miramar for about 200 people—the same afternoon that Harris’ running mate, Tim Walz, hosted a fundraiser a few blocks down Bellevue. 

Schwarzman’s event featured greeters dressed in 18th-century garb and a carnival setup. Bright structures carved to look like castle spires dotted the grounds and guests wandered among them, prohibited from walking through most of the actual palace, which, by now, Schwarzman’s decorators had adorned with a bounty of impressionist paintings and antique French furniture, including a desk that once stood at Versailles. Men in straw boat hats and suspenders ferried attendees to and from nearby parking in golf carts.

Walz, meanwhile, went to Ochre Court, a mansion owned by a local Catholic university, Salve Regina. His event had little of Miramar’s pomp: no costumed greeters, no pinstriped chauffeurs, no carnival set. Walz spoke for 17 minutes in the three-story atrium, then sped off to his next event in the Hamptons.

By fundraising metrics, the Walz event was a success, raising $650,000. Politically, it stirred up a minor controversy. Nearly half of Rhode Islanders are Catholic, and many, including the state’s powerful diocese, bristled at a Catholic venue hosting a campaign that vocally supports abortion rights.

As it turned out, the Walz event organizers had sought out a different space, Belcourt—the third-largest Bellevue mansion. But it wasn’t available. Not because there was an event happening at the 60-room chateau, but because Schwarzman had rented it. He needed a place to store construction equipment during his yard party—and given the dearth of public parking, he would need a spillover lot.

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Donald Trump presidency—you know, that document he knows nothing about even though 140 people from his first administration, including six former Cabinet members, helped create it—is full of delightful little Easter eggs. One provision that has attracted almost no public notice, perhaps because it seems so reasonable, is the authors’ call for the government to create “universal savings accounts” (USAs).

Heck, it even has a patriotic name!

All taxpayers should be allowed to contribute up to $15,000 (adjusted for inflation) of post-tax earnings into Universal Savings Accounts (USAs). The tax treatment of these accounts would be comparable to Roth IRAs. USAs should be highly flexible to allow Americans to save and invest as they see fit, including, for example, investments in a closely held business. Gains from investments in USAs would be non-taxable and could be withdrawn at any
time for any purpose. This would allow the vast majority of American families to save and invest without facing a punitive double layer of taxation.

But let’s think about this. Over the past few decades, Congress passed a series of bills to help Americans save for old age privately via government-subsidized pensions, 401(k)-type plans, and individual retirement accounts—of which Roth IRAs are one type. These tax breaks and program expansions have all been bipartisan, and all have passed with flying colors, because they sound pretty good—much like these universal savings accounts—until you examine them more closely.

And then you have to ask: Good for whom?

Taken collectively, the various retirement subsidies are mind-bogglingly expensive. They are, in fact, the federal government’s single largest tax expenditure, projected to deprive the Treasury of almost $2.5 trillion over five years (2023–2027), according to the bipartisan Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT)—mostly, as I’ve written, to the wildly disproportionate benefit of our most affluent.

In the most extreme case reported thus far (by ProPublica), the Silicon Valley entrepreneur and political puppet-master Peter Thiel used a $1,700 contribution to his Roth IRA—Roths are intended for middle-class savers—decades ago to purchase 1.7 million “founder’s shares” of PayPal at one-tenth of a cent each. Because of that, by 2002, the year eBay purchased PayPal, ProPublica reported, the balance in Thiel’s Roth was up to $28.5 million, with all of those gains nontaxable. He then repeated this cycle with other fledgling companies, culminating in a Roth IRA containing north of $5 billion in assets.

Thiel was an outlier, but ProPublica identified others with IRAs worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Indeed, in 2021, at the request of Senate Finance Committee chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the JCT counted more than 28,000 taxpayers with traditional or Roth IRAs with balances exceeding $5 million—497 of the accounts contained $25 million or more.

What does this have to do with Project 2025? Well, USAs would be Roths on steroids. The $15,000 annual contribution limit is more than twice what people under 50 are allowed to contribute to a Roth. And even the highest earners could contribute to a USA—with Roths, you can only make the full contribution if your income is $146,000 or less. The fact that one needn’t wait until retirement to withdraw funds make USAs all the more compelling.

Heck, if you can afford to put $15,000 a year into an investment fund and let it take a tax-free ride—which the majority of Americans cannot—there would be no reason not to. “High bracket taxpayers would get the biggest tax benefits and could find the disposable savings to participate most easily,” says Steven Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center who has written about the retirement system’s income and race disparities.

Roth IRAs cost taxpayers relatively little, mainly because most people play by the rules. USAs would obliterate the rules, and cost the government a pretty penny.

But the real poison pill is this line: USAs should be highly flexible to allow Americans to save and invest as they see fit, including, for example, investments in a closely held business.

That sounds an awful lot like what Thiel did. Or, for example, a private equity fund manager could put his “carried interest” in a USA at the outset of a project. A CEO could contribute tens of thousands of shares of cheaply acquired stock options before the company goes public. A garage inventor—like Bill Gates once was—could value his company initially at $15,000 and put all of the stock into his USA. It’s not worth much now, but wait 10 years—Jackpot!

“Their tax avoidance potential would be infinitely greater. They would have the potential to exempt multibillion-dollar gains, even trillion-dollar gains, from taxation,” tax attorney Bob Lord and Morris Pearl, chair of Patriotic Millionaires, wrote in a Fortune commentary.

“Allowing taxpayers to invest ‘as they see fit,’ could fuel stuffing…when an individual uses a tax-free account to acquire non-publicly traded assets at prices below fair market value,” Rosenthal told me in an email. (He and New York University law professor Daniel Hemel have written to the Senate Finance Committee, urging lawmakers to crack down on the practice.)

Whether Thiel’s Roth magic trick violates current IRS rules on “prohibited transactions” is a private matter for him and agency lawyers to hash out—but legal minds who have thought it through see some potential red flags. What’s more, the IRS has issued guidance that deems similar-sounding strategies “abusive” and says it views them as “tax avoidance transactions.”

Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris regularly asks Americans to imagine Donald Trump without guardrails. Well, imagine Roths without guardrails—larger contributions, no income cap, and no rules about how the funds can be invested. Roth IRAs in particular cost US taxpayers relatively little—about $14 billion a year—mainly because most people play by the rules. USAs would obliterate the rules, and in doing so, cost the government a pretty penny.

But this isn’t just about tax revenues. The bigger problem is how wildly inequitable America’s wealth and income distributions have become over the past four decades, a shift that started with the wealth-friendly tax cuts of the Reagan era. Just this week, the Congressional Budget Office reported that the average 2021 household income for the top-earning 1 percent of taxpayers was more than $3.1 million—42 times the average for the bottom 90 percent, according to an analysis of the data by Americans for Tax Fairness. That’s the most skewed income distribution since CBO began reporting on the data in 1979. Back then, the income disparity was 12 to 1.

America has ceased to be recognizable as a land of opportunity—or rather, one must now ask, a land of opportunity for whom?

USAs would be worth considering if Congress limited them to people with few assets who earn less than $100,000, for example, and imposed strict rules to prevent wealthy investors from gaming them for tax avoidance. As proposed by that nonprofit Trump knows nothing about, they would make our class divisions even worse. And that would truly be unaffordable.

Do you have $100 million? I don’t. Heck, I don’t even have $50 million! Which is why I’m not worried about the likes of President Joe Biden and maybe-president Kamala Harris and Rep. Barbara Lee and Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden, and Bernie Sanders—all of whom have proposed various levies on excessive wealth over the past five years—taxing my unrealized capital gains.

I do have unrealized capital gains. Maybe you do, too. My wife and I bought our house in Oakland, California, almost 20 years ago, and it’s worth more now than when we bought it. We also own shares of some stock funds that have appreciated over the years. Those paper gains are “unrealized” because we haven’t sold the assets. Unless they are sold, and the profits “realized,” they won’t be taxed under current law.

This gives America’s richest families a convenient way to avoid income tax. If you, like our thousand-ish billionaires, have vast stock holdings, you can have your tax lawyers and accountants arrange your affairs so as to minimize your realized income. Then, instead of selling long-held assets to fund your lavish lifestyle—and paying a capital gains tax of 20 percent plus a 3.8 percent surcharge known as the Net Investment Income Tax (NIIT)—you simply borrow against your holdings at a few percent interest, tops.

Guys like Bezos and Bloomberg and Buffett (who needs first names?) take advantage of this tactic, which is why ol’ Warren can accurately say he pays a lower overall tax rate than his secretary does. Per ProPublica‘s analysis, the wealth of the 25 richest Americans totaled $1.1 trillion at the end of 2018, but their combined 2018 tax bill? A scant $1.9 billion.

Several of the aforementioned wealth tax proposals, including Biden’s (which Harris generally supports), aim to shrink our obscene wealth gap by taxing the unrealized gains of the super-rich. But the $100 million Biden-Harris cutoff means that fewer than 10,000 people would be affected.

TikTokkers are having fun with this...

@mayagouliard

They arent talking about us. The capital gains tax has nothing to do with us. Aside from trying to reign in the uber greed of the already mega wealthy in our country. Trickle down economics failed. #harriswalz #capitalgainstax #taxtherich #99percent

♬ original sound – theshamingofjay

The TikTok dad below, Dean, sums up the situation nicely: Taxing unrealized gains “sounds really ridiculous, and it’s very, very complicated,” he says. “But the key thing everyone needs to know, which is why I don’t care about it,” he says, is the cutoff: “I’d love to have this problem. It means I’m freakin’ worth $100 million!”

@alexisanddean

Should we be worried about the proposed capital gains tax by Kamala Harris? #capitalgains #capitalgainstax #kamalaharris #harris2024 #tax #taxes #capitalgains #uspolitics #politics #trump #trump2024 #taxcuts #taxpolicy #economics #useconomy #ustaxes #taxation #econ101 #fintok #finance #finance101 #financialfreedom #financialliteracy #financialeducation #financetiktok #invest #investing #investor

♬ original sound – Alexis and Dean

The people who are freakin’ worth $100 million oppose such a tax, of course. The New York Times reports that a group of venture capitalists calling themselves VCs for Kamala has been whispering in her ear to dissuade her from trying to tax unrealized gains. In a survey, 75 percent of the group’s members reportedly agreed that doing so would “stifle innovation.”

Bob Lord, a tax attorney who advises Patriotic Millionaires, a group of affluent people seeking fairer tax policies, isn’t buying it. Wouldn’t that innovation-stifling argument “apply equally to their realized gains? And to their tax rates?” he asks in an email. “The logic would justify them having a negative tax rate, so we could spur innovation.”

“As I see it,” adds Lord (who helped write Rep. Barbara Lee’s Oligarch Act of 2023, and who has contributed to this publication) “any tax on the ultra-rich is significant to them only for how it impacts their wealth. Taxes don’t impact their spending decisions, their career decisions, college affordability, retirement decisions, or whether a spouse needs to work full time.” 

Those taxes also won’t affect you if you have the following issue:

@dadified

Just a quick PSA #capitalgains #taxes #kamalaharris #repairs

♬ original sound – Freddie

VCs for Kamala did not respond to questions I sent via their media contact, but those rich kids may not have to worry either. Congress has thus far been unwilling to touch unrealized gains, in part because, as Dean noted, it sounds ridiculous—even un-American—when applied to ordinary people.

I know. These aren’t ordinary people. But remember how, when Congress passed $80 billion in funding so the IRS would finally have sufficient resources to go after wealthy, sophisticated tax cheats? And remember how Republican lawmakers, including Donald Trump, widely (and falsely) shrieked that the Biden administration was hiring 87,000 new IRS agents to fan out and harass regular people just like you? Yeah, that was hogwash. But it was politically effective hogwash that helped set the stage for the GOP to claw back tens of billions of that funding as part of a subsequent debt ceiling deal.

Something similar would almost certainly happen if Congress got close to imposing a tax on unrealized gains. It’s simple politics: “We don’t feel in general that it’s fair to tax people when they don’t have the ability to pay,” explains Harvey Dale, an attorney who advises ultra-wealthy clients on tax matters. “Suppose I am a farmer. My family has owned this 1,000-acre spread for four generations, and in a good year I make $30,000 farming. But the land, wow, that could be worth $10 million now.”

(Note: That farmer, lacking $100 million in assets, would be unaffected by the Harris plan.)

The Supreme Court “is all but certain to strike down a tax on wealth, and the wealth transfer tax system we have has effectively been neutered through avoidance strategies.”

One could, of course, write exceptions into the law, “as long as you could figure out what all of those kinds of issues are,” Dale says. Or you could take a different approach: “Why don’t you say, in general, we won’t tax unrealized gains, but we’ll make exceptions and tax them—for example, if the asset in question is freely marketable, like securities, and we won’t do that for people below a certain level of wealth or income.”

As things stand, investors already get a sweetheart deal. When you profit from the sale of an asset today, you pay a far lower tax rate than you would if you made the money by working. Sometimes you pay no tax at all: Uncle Sam, for instance, lets a married couple pocket the first $500,000 in gains from the sale of their primary residence. (Sorry, renters.)

Stock is different. If you sell shares you’ve held at least a year, any profits are taxed at a rate based on your overall income. For 2024, a couple making up to about $94,000 pays no capital gains tax. From there up to $583,750, the rate is 15 percent plus that 3.8 percent NIIT on incomes north of $250,000. Families raking in even more pay 20 percent—23.8 percent with the NIIT.

That’s a great deal for people whose incomes derive largely from investments. It means that a couple with wage income of $1 million in 2024 owes the IRS about $321,000, whereas a couple with $1 million in investment income owes only $181,000. (These simple figures ignore tax credits, deductions, etc.)

Why structure our tax code this way? Some people say it’s to incentivize investment, but I’m skeptical. As long as the government isn’t taking 90 percent of your profits, people will keep investing. What else are you gonna do—shove your excess cash under the mattress? Bury it in the yard?

Another rationale, says Dale, who has taught tax at New York University’s law school for decades, involves “bunching.” If my job pays $100,000 a year and I work for five years, I pay 22 percent annually to the federal government. But suppose capital gains were taxed the same as wages. If an investor who’s held a bunch of stock for four years then sells that stock the fifth year for a $500,000 profit, their income is the same as mine, but because it came all at once, their tax rate would be closer to 28 or 29 percent. “So if you want the theoretical justification, it is to average out the bunching,” Dale told me.

For people who make more than $1 million a year, Biden has proposed taxing capital gains at the same top rate as ordinary income—currently 37 percent. Last week, Harris softened that proposal, saying she’d only raise the rate to 28 percent. She and Biden also both seem to support raising the NIIT to 5 percent on incomes north of $400,000. Which means wealthy investors would pay a total of 33 percent on realized gains.

But you don’t make $1 million a year, so never mind.

Trump hasn’t specified his plan for capital gains—maybe, as with health care, he only has a “concept of a plan.” But Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation blueprint created by conservatives from Trump’s first administration, proposes cutting the top rate to 15 percent and eliminating the NIIT. If that happens, America’s one-percenters will pay a tax rate on investment profits that’s less than half the rate they pay on their salaries. And it means wealthy families whose income comes largely from investments will pay a lower tax rate than workers who bring home the nation’s median pay: roughly $60,000 a year.

For hectomillionaires, people with $100 million or more, the Biden-Harris plan would impose a minimum tax of 25 percent on all income, realized and unrealized. But that faces long odds, because even if Congress passes it, the Supreme Court might slap it down.

As the Tax Policy Center’s Steven Rosenthal has written, in the case of Moore v. United States, four of the justices “expressly declared that realization is a constitutional requirement” for taxation. If either Chief Justice John Roberts or Justice Brett Kavanaugh joins with their fellow conservatives, most of those wealth tax proposals would be in trouble.

Lawyers specializing in trusts and estates have long been engaged in “an ongoing, very complicated game to reduce the taxes paid by the wealthy.”

Tax attorney Lord sees a window: “The court is all but certain to strike down a tax on wealth, and the wealth transfer tax system we have has effectively been neutered through avoidance strategies,” he says, “so that leaves a tax on true economic income [including unrealized gains] as the only plausible option.” 

Dale says he likes the Harris plan, and “it’s not clear that SCOTUS would declare unconstitutional a 25 percent tax on unrealized gains of people whose net worth is over $100 million, but it’s also not clear that SCOTUS would approve or sustain such a tax.”

That uncertainty, he adds, will affect how Congress views the proposal: “At least some senators and representatives would decide to vote against it because of its possible unconstitutionality. Others in Congress will vote against it because they will dislike such a tax.”

Dale’s NYU colleague, former Biden Treasury official and tax expert Lily Batchelder, is more optimistic about the Supreme Court sustaining a minimum income tax for extremely high-wealth individuals: “The majority in Moore expressed concern about how the petitioners’ arguments would deprive the government and the American people of trillions of dollars in tax revenue by eliminating a vast array of existing provisions, including multiple provisions that already tax unrealized income,” she notes in an email. “I think the case educated the justices about the ‘blast radius’ that would result if they read some sort of realization requirement into the Constitution.”

It’s always been somewhat of a challenge to effectively tax the superwealthy, who wield political power and guard their hoards as jealously as Smaug, the Tolkien dragon. But Congress isn’t without options. It could, as Sens. Wyden and Angus King have proposed, restrict abusive trusts that allow billionaires to transfer massive sums to their heirs without paying a dime in tax. And lawmakers could cap federally subsidized retirement accounts to prevent wealthy retirees from taking excessive government handouts.

They also could do away with carried interest once and for all and strengthen the rules for Roth IRAs—retirement accounts meant for the middle class—that have famously allowed Silicon Valley’s Peter Thiel to parlay a $1,700 retirement fund contribution into billions of tax-free dollars.

And they could, as Biden has proposed, eliminate the socially corrosive “step-up in basis” rule: Suppose your father bought $5,000 worth of stock in 1960 and now it’s worth $5 million. If he dies and leaves it to you, under today’s rules, the “cost basis” of the stock—what it cost him originally—resets to the current market value. Boom! Your family just sidestepped taxes on almost $5 million in investment profits.

His estate wouldn’t have to pay any tax on that transfer, either: As of 2024, the IRS lets a couple give their kids up to $27.2 million, free of any gift or estate tax. This generous exemption is yet another rule that Congress could target. In fact, it’s set to revert to half that amount at the end of 2025, so I guess we’ll see whether our lawmakers will stand up to the oligarchs.

“There are $5 trillion of offsets in the president’s budget that raise revenue exclusively from large corporations and individuals earning more than $400,000 in income,” Batchelder points out. “Every member of Congress has different views about which of these options are most appealing, so the most doable reforms will depend on who are the marginal votes in Congress after the election, but there are many, many options.”

Dale figures the best way to shrink the wealth gap is to target inheritances—closing loopholes, restricting trusts, and generally strengthening the rules on intergenerational wealth transfers, which are taxed at only about 2 percent overall, per Batchelder’s 2020 analysis. The wealth industry will find workarounds, and you’ll never get a perfect system, he says, but you could make inheritance taxes harder to circumvent.

“A nontrivial portion of my practice was estate planning,” a field that has long engaged in “an ongoing, very complicated game to reduce the taxes paid by the wealthy,” Dale says. “It would be sweet, I suppose, to say, here is one simple thing that could be done that your readers can understand. But the loopholes are very, very sophisticated. If I tell you that the right thing to do is to repeal 664(c)(1), your eyes would glaze over. But there are trillions of dollars in that simple thought.”

It’s fair to say that Michelle Obama stole the show at the Democratic Convention on Tuesday. (Husband Barack was on point in noting how hard an act she was to follow.) And to a journalist like me who covers wealth and inequality, one line in particular stood out. Listen:

Michelle Obama: She understands that most of us will never be afforded the grace of failing forward. We will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth. pic.twitter.com/ywBjdwZl3E

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 21, 2024

The affirmative action of generational wealth. That’s a smart reframing of a longtime conservative hobby horse.

Republican politicians and right-wing media have regularly attacked programs designed to counter the generational impacts of government-sanctioned discrimination in housing, education, and veterans benefits. Now they’re targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion programs—see JD Vance’s recently introduced “Dismantle DEI Act“—and trying to brand Kamala Harris a “DEI hire.” That’s a laughable assertion. (New York Times columnist Lydia Polgreen argues that the moniker applies more aptly to Vance.)

But the critics of DEI and affirmative action want to have their cake and eat it too. For example, if you, like our Supreme Court, think the use of race as a factor in college admissions should be illegal, that’s your prerogative. But I hope you are similarly inclined to outlaw the practice of elite colleges giving an admissions boost to children of alumni and to students (like Jared Kushner) whose parents are major donors. Because isn’t that, too, a kind of affirmative action?

In just a handful of words, Michelle Obama managed to convey a simple truth, says Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Washington think tank that focuses on the racial wealth-and-opportunity gap: “It is not those asking to break up concentrated wealth and opportunity that are asking for an unfair advantage, but rather those who are hoarding concentrated wealth.”

“Most of us,” as Obama noted, “will never benefit” from generational wealth. And that’s true of everyone, but even truer when you are Black or Hispanic. In the Federal Reserve Board’s 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF)*, about 47 percent of white respondents said they’d either received an inheritance or expected to receive one. Their median inheritance expected was $195,500 (in 2019 dollars).

Only 16 percent of Black respondents had received or expected an inheritance—and their median expectation was about half the white figure. Less than 12 percent of Hispanic respondents had received or expected an inheritance.

The disparities are similar when you look at federally subsidized retirement savings, which, according to the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), will cost US taxpayers a whopping $1.9 trillion from 2020-2024. Most of that cash goes to the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans, who tend to be, yep, pretty white.

In 2021, the JCT identified 8,000 Americans with Individual Retirement Account (IRA) balances in excess of $5 million who were still getting tax breaks for their annual contributions—which is “shocking but not surprising,” noted Senate Finance Committee chair Ron Wyden. Peter Thiel, ProPublica reported, even managed, using questionable tactics, to amass a Roth IRA worth $5 billion.

Affirmative action for the rich.

According to the latest (2022) SCF, only 35 percent of Black families and less than 28 percent of Hispanic households even had a retirement account, compared with 62 percent of white families. The accounts of those white families were worth over $380,000 on average, more than triple the Black and Hispanic savings—and again, these numbers don’t account for the fact that a large majority of Black and Hispanic households have no private retirement accounts at all.

Then there’s land ownership—see “40 Acres and a Lie,” our acclaimed multimedia package exploring how the few Black families who received land reparations after the Civil War then had their acres cruelly rescinded a year and a half later. And consider these passages on the Homestead Acts, from a chapter of my 2021 book, Jackpot, titled “Thriving While Black.”

The two acts, passed during and after the Civil War, granted 160-acre parcels of public land—a foundation for generational wealth—to families willing to stake out the plots and make improvements. But the timing and circumstances made it extraordinarily difficult for Black Americans to participate:

It was a once-in-a-lifetime bonanza for white fortune-seekers. “The acquisition of property was the key to moving upward from a low to a higher stratum,” wrote author Everett Dick. “The property holder could vote and hold office, but the man with no property was practically on the same political level as the indentured servant or slave.” […]

Between the two acts, about 270 million acres of farmland—14 percent of the total landmass of the continental United States—was granted to 1.6 million white families, but only 4,000 to 5,000 Black families. [University of Michigan professor Trina] Shanks calculates that more than 48 million living Americans are direct descendants of those Homestead Act beneficiaries. Which means there’s a greater than one-in-four chance your forebears benefited directly from the biggest public-to-private wealth transfer in American history—if you’re white, that is. 

Affirmative action for the rich.

Obama hit the nail on the head. Asante-Muhammad says he was struck by her simple acknowledgement “that affirmative action for the privileged happens,” though “I wish there could have been a follow up to re-emphasize why programmatic affirmative action to advance more equal opportunity is necessary.”

But “it felt good,” he adds, “to hear a political speech that connects so personally with my political ideals, and to the challenges of the racial wealth divide and the action and ideals needed to bridge it.” 

*I used 2019 numbers here because the 2022 inheritance data was only available in raw form.