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Workers Absorb the Danger

Farmworkers, construction crews, postal workers, roofers, and delivery drivers are disproportionately Latino and immigrant, and a significant share are undocumented or working on temporary visas. That status shapes everything about how heat risk lands on migrant and immigrant farmworkers. Workers who fear retaliation, job loss, or immigration enforcement are far less likely to report a missed water break or push back on an unsafe pace, even when they recognize the early signs of heat illness in themselves or a coworker. Piece-rate pay (where more work means more money), common in agriculture, adds its own pressure: workers are paid by the bucket or the row, not the hour, which quietly punishes anyone who stops to rest or drink water.

The science is quite clear that extreme temperatures are bad for human health. , climate scientist and author of Climate Brink says, “Outdoor workers will experience increased risk of short- and long-term health impacts. We also know that this reduces worker productivity, hurting businesses in turn. The hope is that our society will adapt and help workers out with water breaks, reducing exposure to mid-day sun and other fair practices. However, legislatures in TX and FL have actually prohibited cities from passing ordinances to protect workers. This is the opposite of what we need to do in the face of extreme heat.”

David Leathers, Climate & Extreme Weather Lead at Health Action Alliance says, “Extreme heat is the deadliest climate hazard for American workers, and the hardest to see. Fewer than 4% of employers have ever assessed their workforce’s vulnerability to climate risks, according to Marsh.” There is still no federal workplace heat standard in the United States. OSHA proposed one in August 2024, but the rule has stalled through more than a year of hearings and public comment, with no target date for finalization. In the meantime, the agency’s main tools are a heat inspection program that was recently extended and enforcement through the General Duty Clause, which analysts have described as a limited substitute for a comprehensive standard.

How States Hinder Progress

Where federal protection has failed, some cities tried to fill the gap, and some states moved to stop them. Texas passed a sweeping 2023 law, critics call it the “Death Star” bill, that preempted local ordinances in Austin and Dallas requiring water breaks for outdoor workers. Florida followed in 2024 with a law barring cities and counties from adopting their own workplace heat protections, killing a heat ordinance Miami-Dade County had been close to passing after farmworker deaths in Florida.

Researchers have warned that Florida’s law could disproportionately affect Hispanic and noncitizen immigrant workers, while labor policy observers note that worker heat protections have become a growing front in state preemption battles. Only a handful of states, including California, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, and Minnesota, have their own heat safety rules.

Amazon has become one of the worst offenders for heat risk to workers in the nation. At a fulfillment center in Suffolk, Virginia fans inside the building were not working for 3 months and ambulances were called almost weekly due to heat illnesses. The temperatures in the building were recorded as frequently above 85 degrees. One of the longest workers at the site, Jasmine Saunders said, “People pass out, and an ambulance comes, and nobody talks about it. It’s just normalized.” She contracted OHSA multiple times. “I don’t understand why it takes months to fix something so simple,” she said.

In the summer of 2019, Jeremy worked in an Amazon Fulfillment Center to try to see what life was like inside one of these behemoths. 3 years later, a man died due to heat exhaustion in the same building Jeremy was assigned to. The heat back then was overwhelming, especially for anyone working inside the trucks, which Jeremy often had to do when the lines got backed up.

Recently, we came across an agenda by the Federation of American Scientists that lays out possible steps policymakers can take to better protect our workers, with some really concrete actions. Over 150 organizations and governments, representing 40+ states. In addition, there’s a state explorer that shares what each state is doing around heat policy. This is top of mind in cities, states and among different companies looking for answers on how to address extreme heat.

What Workers are Doing in the Absence of Laws

Where legislatures have failed, workers have organized their way toward protection anyway. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a Florida farmworker group, pushed major buyers like Walmart and McDonald’s to source only from farms that meet worker-protection standards, including heat safety. The Coalition’s goal was to put pressure on the supply chain to make up for state level failures.

In Miami-Dade, organizations including WeCount led campaigns for local heat standards that many advocates led before the state preemption law took effect. Labor advocates and farmworker organizations have continued to argue that heat protections are a basic workplace necessity, while critics of Florida’s law warned that the ban arrived amid record-breaking temperatures and growing heat risks.

The Path Forward

Jeremy and Zoe are New Yorkers and can attest to this absurd heat. The subway platforms have the same level of humidity as the Amazon rain forest, but we have access to air conditioning all the time, mandated and provided by our employers. Instead of asking how hot it got this summer, we should be asking who is left unprotected. The answer so often depends on a immigration status, pay structure, zip code, or which state line someone happens to live south of.

The reality is that extreme heat is increasingly exposing deeper inequalities across American society, from housing and infrastructure to labor protections and public health, a trend documented by both The Guardian and public health leaders alike.

Employers can recognize heat as a safety issue, assess exposure, establish heat action plans now, and of course, when it’s not safe for the employees, the work needs to be stopped.

Climate scientists warn that what feels like an anomaly today will soon be unremarkable. Dessler puts it:

“Extreme heat is now a common feature of summer. While not every summer will be record breaking, enough will be that a record-breaking summer is going to become a normal occurrence. And, in a few decades, the 2020s will look like average summers. A few decades later, the 2020s will look downright cool. So enjoy it while it lasts.”

However brutal these days feel now, they are now the new baseline that we are rising above, not a new peak we’re moving away from.

Interesting on the web

• In Massachusetts, White families have a median net wealth of $549,000. For Black families, it is just $7,800 - LINK

• Arizona has unenrolled 180,000 children from SNAP and statement enrollment overall is down 50% due to harsh cutbacks - LINK

• An affordability dashboard showing the true picture of how bleak things have gotten, from - LINK

• I’ve never seen a better density of the perfect charts showing how challenging it has become to rise up the economic ladder and why we are more and more obsessed with money, from - LINK

• I had two Substack Lives: One with to discuss what we’re missing on public opinion polling and another with to explore the politics of an unfair economy - Elliot, David

Books We’re Reading

Man in the Mirror, by . In 2023, the lives of two men—Jordan Neely, a homeless man and Daniel Penny, an ex-Marine—collided tragically in a New York subway car. In this book, Anand renders this deadly encounter and its aftermath as a propulsive crime story that opens onto a larger human drama of belonging, homelessness, and hardship. LINK

A Thing with Feathers, by . Behind the sometimes grim inequality statistics are individual people faced with a choice between hope and despair. Jim’s book is a propulsive novel about the roads that individuals so often must take to overcome the odds. LINK

*****

If you think your book aligns with this work and our audience, submit this form and we’ll share it with 25,000 people.

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As Democrats have tried to position themselves as the champions of the working class and have long promised to tax the rich, their legislative efforts to target extreme wealth have repeatedly stalled.

Welcome to American Inequality where we map the divides shaping our lives.

These visuals are all interactive on web and available with more information below.

A coordinated effort by progressive lawmakers in 7 states to introduce wealth taxes has yielded little results.

• In Washington State, Senate Bill 5486 attempted to establish a narrowly tailored property tax on extreme wealth, but ran directly into state constitutional barriers and resistance from business-aligned Democrats.

• In Illinois, where Democrats hold a supermajority, House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch recently confirmed that a binding constitutional amendment to implement a 3% surtax on income over $1 million had failed to gain enough traction to even be called for a vote.

• In New York, Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul has repeatedly resisted progressive packages from her supermajority like the Fair Share Act that seek to aggressively raise income taxes on the state’s ultra-wealthy residents to close looming budget gaps.

An analysis of 280,000 emails candidate fundraising emails traces the rise of anti-billionaire populism in the Democratic party. As explains, 2025 was an inflection point in the Democratic narrative. Billionaire mentions in emails have tripled that year from the prior one, peaking above 20% of all fundraising emails sent and holding around 15% into 2026. “Anti-billionaire fundraising tactics are now a mainstay of Democratic messaging,” Hall writes.

So what’s causing the impasse? Are these politicians just beholden to wealthy donors? Are these bills really not the right ones to tackle wealth inequality? Is something else stirring under the surface at the local level?

Faulty Arguments Flowing from California

California is currently ground zero for this wealth debate. On November 3rd, voters will decide whether to pass a one-time 5% wealth tax targeting residents with a net worth exceeding $1 billion. Known as Proposition 40, this ballot initiative applies to approximately 200 billionaires and is designed to offset federal healthcare funding cuts. Yet the future of the bill remains uncertain, despite a democratic governor, a 75% majority in both the assembly, and legislature, and strong support from unions, leading economists, and members of Congress.

Opponents and moderate leaders have pushed back with three main arguments against the initiative, but a closer look at the data shows these fears are largely unfounded.

“The billionaires will leave my state, thereby drastically cutting future revenue.”

• This argument is wrong because Prop 40 was created in a way that the billionaires wouldn’t have had time to move before it got on the ballot based on the period that it calculates their wealth from

“Billionaires may not leave, but businesses will because founders don’t want to launch their companies here.”

• This argument almost never shows up in the data. Since the ballot initiative was announced, venture capital funding flowing to California, far from falling, has surged. According to Pitchbook data, California attracted nearly 90% of the value of all venture capital deals made in the US in the first quarter of 2026.

“Don’t tax my state, we need a national wealth tax.”

• Newsom’s claim that “the fight to make the wealthiest Americans pay more in taxes is not one we should be fighting state by state… the fight belongs at the federal level” gets the history completely backward. Local policy replication is exactly how we got the federal income tax in the first place—progressive states proved the model worked at the turn of the 20th century long before Washington codified it in 1913.

This Time is Actually Different

Across both parties, billionaire spending has skyrocketed since the Citizens United decision, now accounting for 15% to 20% of all federal election funding in the United States. But a report from the Brennan Center found that nonprofits, shell companies, and Super PACs plowed more than $1.9 billion into the 2024 presidential race, nearly doubling the amount from the 2020 race. $1.2 billion of that $1.9 billion went to Democrats.

But there are now also more wealthy people in America to be giving more money. This meteoric rise in wealth largely comes from a roaring stock market. 9 of the 10 wealthiest people in America all made their money in tech (Buffet being the only exception) and all have seen their net worth rise more than $100 billion each in the last 12 months.

But billionaires are not the only ones that have seen their wealth rise.

The US added 1,200 millionaires PER DAY in 2025! Over 440,000 people became millionaires in the US last year, accounting for nearly half of the world’s new millionaires. In a new analysis from UBS published on June 30, financial assets like stocks and bonds accounted for 79% of gross wealth in the America, putting it near the top of the rankings for that metric.

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Focus On Outcomes, Not Process

When a rising tide lifts all boats, Americans everywhere benefit. But unfortunately we are living in a time when only a few are seeing their wealth rise dramatically and the masses are falling behind. This does not have to be a zero sum game, and America is a nation where we have proven time and again that we can find prosperity for all.

At a time when Congress is passing only 5.5% of bills introduced, and is one of the least productive Congresses we’ve ever seen, pointing to the federal government to take action can feel like kicking the can down the road. So who can take the lead?

As state and federal officials seem unable to act, the battlefield shifts entirely to the local level. Progressive cities and municipalities are increasingly realizing that they do not have to wait for governors or statehouses to act—they can build localized, targeted revenue models that are more designed at funding the social safety net than they are at broad based narratives about chipping away at extreme wealth.

In Los Angeles, organizers circumvented a divided state legislature by passing Measure ULA, a targeted real estate transfer tax that levies a 4% tax on property sales above $5 million and a 5.5% tax on sales above $10 million. In its first year alone, Measure ULA secured tens of millions of dollars to fund direct tenant protections, emergency rental assistance for low-income seniors, and the construction of permanent supportive housing.

San Francisco went directly after elite corporate structures with its Overpaid Executive Tax, which forces companies operating within city limits to pay a tax surcharge if their top executives make more than 100 times the median salary of their local workers.

The governor may be unwilling to act in California, but these issues matter a lot for people. When small-scale stages take the lead, they prove that the ultra-wealthy can contribute to the shared infrastructure of the cities where they made their fortunes.

INTERESTING ON THE WEB

• My Substack Live with , founder of Run for Something, was a hit on Monday and I’ve got another one coming up next week with - Register here or check out the recording.

• I spoke with the Washington Post about the Great Generational Wealth transfer and whether it is going to increase inequality - GIFT LINK

• The Department of Commerce is trying to sneak by a new policy that will likely shrink the Census and other public data - LINK (only for data nerds)

• Awesome map to see historical pictures of basically every single intersection in NYC - LINK

As Democrats have tri…

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The Crisis of the Gerontocracy [00:00 - 06:45] American politics is currently gripped by a historical deviation where the average age of Congress is nearly 60, leaving a massive representation gap for the next generation. While previous eras saw leadership ages dip, we are now ruled by a “boomer” status quo that has dominated the presidency for nearly three decades. Run for Something is aggressively disrupting this trend by exclusively backing candidates 40 and under who are ready to trade “waiting their turn” for leading right now. These young leaders aren’t just new faces; they are the necessary response to a political system that has become a retirement home for the powerful. It is time to stop defending positions of power and start making a compelling argument for the future.

The Knowledge Gap and Modern Reality [06:45 - 11:30] There is a dangerous disconnect when the people regulating our future, like Jim Clyburn, admit they only learned about tools like ChatGPT a week ago. This isn’t just about tech; it’s about a leadership class that hasn’t paid a childcare bill or a rental deposit in over half a century. For a young parent, childcare is no longer an “issue”—it is a second mortgage payment that makes the American Dream feel like a hallucination. We don’t need moral superiority from our leaders; we need the functional competence to understand the sticker shock of modern life. When our representatives are out of touch with the basic economics of being a 20-something, the legislation they pass will never meet the moment.

Impact Over Ideology [16:20 - 24:10] The most successful candidates have realized that voters don’t go to the polls to support a rigid ideology; they vote for the person who will make their lives suck less. Most people aren’t looking for a political philosopher; they want someone who will fix the brown water in their taps and pave the potholes in their streets. High-level pundits try to “puppet master” the electorate with Mad Libs consulting, but voters are smarter than the scripts we give them. Real change happens when we stop talking about abstract “democracy” and start talking about the dignity of a well-funded school or a safe sidewalk. If you want to win, stop selling a “product” and start solving the problems people can see and feel every single day.

The Generational Housing Warfare [24:10 - 32:45] Housing has become the front line of a modern generational war, serving as the single biggest nut to crack in the affordability crisis. While millions of young renters feel locked out of generational wealth, our tax codes continue to privilege homeowners over those just trying to survive the month. We are facing a surreal reality where 19 million people live in overcrowded homes while millions of empty bedrooms sit unused in houses owned by boomers with no incentive to downsize. This isn’t just an economic hiccup; it is a systemic failure that is driving young people toward high-risk gambling and crypto out of pure desperation. To fix inequality, we must name the tension: you cannot have affordable housing while treating homes as the primary vault for generational equity.

Winning the Digital Gatekeepers [32:45 - 40:00] The next generation of voter contact isn’t happening on a doorstep; it’s happening in the quiet conversation between a voter and an AI chatbot. As people increasingly snap photos of their ballots and ask robots who to vote for, candidates must ensure their true message isn’t lost in the algorithm. Tools like Campsite are helping pro-democracy candidates fight misinformation by making sure their actual policy positions are what the “robots” ingest and repeat. AI actually loves nuance and deep-dive policy papers, forcing candidates to put more substance into the digital echo chamber. We cannot ignore these new surfaces; we have to meet voters exactly where they are getting their information, even if that place is a chat window.

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Welcome to the The Dividing Line from American Inequality.

These visuals are all interactive and available with more information below.

Interactive Data Story

At least 744,445 people experienced homelessness in the US on a given night in 2025, a 3.3% decrease from the record-breaking high of 2024. This is the first time homelessness has gone down year-over-year since 2016, outside of the 2020 pandemic that saw an influx in emergency programs as well as challenges for actually counting the homeless population.

But even with these published national numbers, HUD has completed erased gender data. In previous Annual Homeless Assessment Reports (such as the 2023 report), HUD broke down homelessness demographics by gender, showing exact statistics for men, women, transgender, gender-questioning, and non-binary individuals. In the 2025 report, HUD scrubbed all references to gender entirely. National advocacy groups, like the National Alliance to End Homelessness, pointed out that this omission hides the stark levels of disparity and rising homelessness rates among women.

The headline HUD heavily pushed was that homelessness decreased by 3.3% nationwide, but one of the most significant measures—chronic homelessness—rose to its highest figure on record (+2.1%). By focusing heavily on the collective 3.3% drop, HUD managed to downplay the fact that individual and chronic homelessness are worse than they have ever been.

One of the most shocking numbers found buried in the report is that 1 in 5 of all homeless people in America are under the age of 18. The number has increased 20% since 2023 and the number of homeless students has more than doubled in the past twenty years. A huge reason family and child homelessness is spiking is that families with kids are being actively squeezed out of federal housing assistance. In 2009, 52% of all federal Housing Choice Vouchers (Section 8) went to households with children. By recent counts, that number has plummeted to just 39%.

But young people are not alone. Older adults and seniors (64+ population) are one of the fastest-growing segments of the unhoused population. Inadequate support from Medicare or senior housing programs, underemployment, and lack of savings have left many aging seniors with few financial safety nets.

Location and Restrictive Housing Supply

Over the last decade, California (66K homeless people), New York (57k), and Oregon (14K) have seen the largest raw increases in homelessness numbers. But in terms of percentage growth, the biggest increases occurred in Vermont (122%), Rhode Island (114%), and Oregon (106%). Adjusted for population Oregon , New York, and Vermont, show the largest increases per 10,000 people. 2 out of 3 states since 2015 have seen a percent increase in homelessness, reflecting rising rents, slashed federal safety programs, and an affordable housing supply that can’t keep up with demand.

One of the leading factors causing homelessness to rise is a lack of new housing supply. Housing development is at its lowest since 1975, and rents continue to be unaffordable for a record-high 22.7 million Americans. Ownership is now out of the question for many. Historically, a typical American home would cost 5 times the median household income to purchase. But today that baseline has shattered to an unprecedented 7.12 times income—leapfrogging even the height of the catastrophic 2000s housing bubble.

On a more local basis, different states point to different reasons beyond a limited housing supply and rising housing costs. Each state in the HUD report was asked to provide details on the causes of why homelessness rose in those areas. 5 core themes emerged.

1. Housing Market Pressures: Areas with restrictive zoning laws, lack of low-cost unit construction, and high demand experienced the sharpest rises in homelessness. The GAO notes that every $100 median rent increase in a region correlates to a 9% rise in homelessness.

2. Economic Inequality & Job Loss: Regions heavily impacted by localized job losses, underemployment, and economic inequality lacked the financial buffers necessary for lower-income residents to avoid displacement.

3. Migration and Displacement: Rapid influxes of international migrants or climate refugees often strained local municipal resources, temporary shelters, and housing capacity before individuals can secure permanent work and housing.

4. Weather and Geography: Unsheltered homelessness was statistically higher in urban areas with temperate climates, which drew unhoused individuals seeking to survive outdoors year-round.

5. Policy and Service Enforcement: Local fluctuations reflected the strictness of vagrancy ordinances, eviction execution, and the availability of emergency, transitional, or permanent supportive housing.

Out of Left Field

However, in HUD Secretary Scott Turner’s report that he wrote to accompany the HUD data, the Secretary decided not to focus on rising rents and a desire to build more housing, but instead about another issue. “The data is clear that the status quo of ‘housing first’ has failed to meaningfully reduce homelessness, resulting in crisis levels of people living on the streets,” Turner said. “HUD is restoring its programs to advance recovery and self-sufficiency and to ensure that taxpayer-funded benefits serve American families.” The HUD announcement also took the time to note that homelessness is up 27 percent since January 2013 and that any decreases in the 2025 report were “attributable to decreases in Sanctuary Cities.”

The words “sanctuary,” “sanctuary cities,” or “housing first” do not appear in the HUD report. These are conclusions that Turner decided to draw himself.

Breaking Down the Trend

Depending on how you slice the numbers, whether by raw counts or per capita rates, the story of American homelessness shifts dramatically. When we break out the scatter plot, we can see 3 distinct clusters.

• The Flashpoints: Hawaii, New York, and Oregon. These 3 states have staggering per capita numbers and sharp homelessness rate increases. Hawaii presents a unique paradox: while its overall trajectory is technically dipping, its per capita crisis remains painfully elevated above almost everywhere else.

• The Rising Tide: Massachusetts, California, Vermont, Washington, Alaska, and Colorado. Right in the middle of the plot, a dangerous second tier emerges. These handful of states that are largely left-leaning form a tight cluster. Their unhoused populations may sit in the mid-range, but they have seen a massive, post-2015 surge.

• The Cool Down: Georgia, Wyoming, and South Carolina. Down in the bottom-left corner sits a rare glimmer of hope. This cluster of blue states highlights where homelessness has been driven down significantly over the last decade.

  

Who’s Making Progress?

Houston, Texas is one city that has significantly decreased their homelessness population – down 64% in the last dozen years. Prior to this success, Houston was designated as a “priority city” by HUD, and is now the poster-child in the fight against homelessness. Its success rides on The Coalition for the Homeless, an organization that consists of over 100 non-profits, Houston & Harris County, and neighboring counties that work together to offer housing and connect people to employment opportunities. Houston also has less zoning laws then other cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, making it possible to build affordable housing without NIMBY opposition. More housing development, along with collaboration and communication between multiple organizations is the key to Houston’s success.

Denver, Colorado is another city that’s successfully decreased homelessness, moving more than 800 people indoors and cutting street homelessness by 45% last year. They used a highly strategized approach with real-time data to match specific people to specific housing resources. Also Minnesota, who was able to pass new legislation that helped loosen strict zoning laws that allowed for more development and multi-family homes.

Evictions, Mental Health, and a System Designed to Fail

Public perception often treats homelessness as a moral failing, assuming the people on the street are there because of severe mental health issues, or addiction caused by poor personal choices. But in reality, it’s often the system that leaves them behind, starting a chain reaction of complications. Every single year, roughly 3.9 million people—including 1.5 million children—are hit with an eviction judgment. A full-time worker earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour cannot afford a two-bedroom apartment in any state. 53% of people living in shelters are working but are unable to afford housing.

For those who don’t have a job, there’s even more of an uphill battle before even thinking about affording rent. Not having a permanent address when employers require one to apply, having access to technology and facilities to prepare for an interview, or the ability to afford transportation to a job location all are unique issues.

Data from HUD comes from a point in time estimate where volunteers gather together on a single night in January and walk around on the street to count as many unhoused people as we can. We’ve written about our experience participating in this wild process. The agency then uses these inputs to estimate an overall count for the country. Each city has a limited number of volunteers, which limits the ability to find unhoused individuals and creates inconsistent data collection.

A HUD report on point-in-time count inconsistencies cites a study of shelter users in New York, and found 31% of people unhoused slept in places classified as “Not-Visible” the night of the count. HUD also does not permit the inclusion of people that are staying with friends or family due to economic hardship or being “doubled up”. The Department of Education estimated there are possibly over 1 million unhoused students in the US, drastically lower than the HUD estimate of 133,962 people under the age of 18 who are unhoused.

Transparency and accountability

Our cities are deliberately designed to shield us from poverty, creating bubbles of comfort that obscure the struggles of others. Instead of reacting with fear or judgment towards someone unhoused, we should look for solutions. Homelessness is a societal failure, not an individual one, and ignoring the most marginalized people only deepens the systemic issues we all live within. More affordable housing, increased wages, and strong support systems are all proven ways we can fight homelessness. The downward trend this year is a positive sign of progress, and let’s hope we can ride that wave going forward.

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Highlighting Rising Authors

I’m launching a new initiative to help authors showcase their work. I have a book coming out next year and saw how much it takes a village to really pull one off. We’ve highlighted ’s recent book, How to Now Know, and now we’re excited to share ’s upcoming book, The House That Family Money Built. The book is about how the American legal system actively engineers wealth inequality. It exposes how credit and debt laws extract money from low-income families to enrich dynastic ones—tracing the rules, geographies, and narratives that make this exploitation appear natural.

If you want to feature your book in an upcoming newsletter, fill out this form.

I spoke with Rachel Lerman at the Washington Post this week about the Great Generational Wealth Transfer and why billions of dollars from Boomers are going to pass down to those who are already wealthy, likely embedding inequality even further in this country. Gift link.

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Where is God in America? We’re currently living through a time of two conflicting themes: on one hand, we’re seeing an escalation of institutional support for faith based organization. The current administration established an official White House Faith Office in the West Wing (the first of its kind) along with faith liaisons in every agency and a Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias. Conservative judicial decisions have promoted mandatory displays of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. A rise in funding for school choice programs has increased private school enrollment (often in religious institutions) by 25%.

On the other hand, Americans are less religious than they’ve ever been in recorded history. Over the last decade, US religiosity has fallen 17 percentage points, the largest decline in the world. For the first time less than 50% of Americans say that religion is an important part of their daily lives.

The role of religion has a deep impact on American inequality. It often shapes the types of policies that we pursue, the “God-given rights” we defend, the donations that we make, and the community-driven narrative to love thy neighbor as thyself. When religion disappears, what happens to the social and economic fabric of the nation?

A nation grows more secular in its habits, while growing more religious in its politics

My initial hypothesis was that Republicans today were ramping up religious language and policies because they saw the importance of religion in swing states. The theory was that they believed that religion could be a winning strategy to convince local voters to join their platform, much like it was in the mid-1970s under the auspices of the “Moral Majority.” 50 years ago, conservative Christian leaders mobilized in response to cultural and legal shifts like school desegregation rulings (affecting religious academies) and the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade (affecting a woman’s right to abortion). The Moral Majority back then explicitly fused evangelical activism with Republican politics, and the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 proved the formula’s success. Perhaps America was returning to this formula once again.

But the data reveals that my hypothesis was largely wrong. Of the 207 pivotal counties in the 2024 election—the specific battlegrounds that had flipped from Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016—These critical regions are actually less heavily populated by religious adherents than the deep-red strongholds of the American South or the rural Midwest that were almost always going to go Republican. In other words, the most important counties in America for presidential elections don’t seem to care much about religion at all.

The Religious Keyword Index (RKI) helps shed light on this paradox. The RKI is a quantitative tool used to systematically measure the density of faith-based language across state and national party platforms and presidential speeches. The RKI data shows that Democratic politicians have progressively moved toward more secular or pragmatically inclusive language, while the Republican Party has exponentially increased its RKI score, using language much more heavily laden with words like “scripture” or “Bible” or “God” or “Christian”. If religion didn’t seem to be so important in pivotal voting counties, why were Republicans ramping up this language?

Economic historians published research using the RKI and RNC speeches to show that the transition is less about religion itself and more about a spiritual mandate grounded in Christian nationalism.

Christian Nationalism

A 2025 PRRI national survey highlighted the depth of this rhetorical alignment, finding that nearly 70% (69%) of white Christian nationalism adherents and sympathizers voted for the Republican presidential candidate. The share of U.S. adults who now say the federal government should declare Christianity the nation’s official religion has risen from 13% in 2024 to 17%. In the critical swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizon, nearly one-third of voters are Christian national “adherents” or “sympathizers” according to the PRRI data.

The language of Christian Nationalism frequently centers on sweeping concepts like “God-given rights” and protecting America’s “founding Judeo-Christian heritage.” In his very first speech as House Speaker, Mike Johnson (who many often describe as a Christian National) proclaimed, “I believe that scripture, the Bible, is very clear that God is the one that raises up those in authority.” Prominent figures frame political battles in communities, families, the internet, as existential moral conflicts—using phrases like “safeguarding us from sin” against an overreaching “radical left”—effectively transforming standard policy debates into decrees from God to do what is right (those it is worth noting that those views are often not grounded in Biblical teachings at all).

But Christian nationalism is not only about values, it is also about who has power in America. In a paper released in late April, researchers from the University of Oklahoma found that “As Americans affirm Christian nationalist views, they are more likely to (1) affirm that it is just and right that rich Americans can afford education for their children and healthcare that poorer Americans cannot and (2) approve of economic inequality in the abstract.” The richest Americans not only support more Christian nationalist views, they also “feel less angry when thinking about differences in wealth between the rich and the poor in America, disagreeing that differences in income in America are too large, and viewing the income distribution in America as mostly fair.”

A certain flavor of religiosity is starting to dominate American politics, engendering views of inequality that go far beyond income - but stretch to the way we treat women’s bodies, who has the right to get married, who can serve in the military, who deserves the death penalty, and the decency we owe to those escaping violence and seeking shelter in our great nation.

There is a reason we have enshrined a separation of church and state in our constitution.

Religion creates community, and community buffers people against poverty

Religion can act as a protective shield for poverty in America, not because of any godly intervention, but because of the role of communities. A longitudinal study published by NBER tracked the long-term upward mobility of highly disadvantaged youth over 15 years. Researchers looked at 168 distinct socioeconmic metrics including high school dropout rates, repeating grades, smoking, and divorce rates. The data showed a statistically significant relationship between how community religious participation operates as a profound structural buffer against childhood poverty and improves economic conditions along many of the 168 metrics.

Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone offered one of the most powerful voices in showing the economic mobility and social capital benefits of religion. Putnam explicitly argues that faith communities serve as the bedrock of American civic infrastructure and social connection. His extensive research provides a framework for understanding how a decline in local religious participation erodes the very networks that foster upward economic mobility.

Houses of worship are one of the few places that can bring people together from rich and poor communities to lift each other up. A well-resourced local church or community parish creates cross-class social networks where a working-class teenager might secure a mentorship, a job recommendation, or college advice from a high-earning professional sitting in the same pew. Those types of interactions don’t emerge in most 3rd spaces. Not to mention there are 24x as many religious establishments as there are Starbucks in America.

Where are the Good Samaritans?

Religious giving in the U.S. is also experiencing a significant, long-term decline in its share of total philanthropic donations, dropping from 34% in 2011 to 23% in 2024. Median giving per household to a religious organization declined from $910 in 2021 to $600 in 2024. 1 in 3 dollars of all charitable donations was to a religious organization in 2011, but in 2024 it was just 1 in 4. For the ultra wealthy though, religious giving has gone up by 25% from 2018 to 2022. Several reports show that the ultra wealthy give to religious groups much more often than any other cause.

But churches are also core pillars of America’s social safety net When people start attending church or volunteering with religious groups, these benefits to the disadvantaged disappear.

• 58% of beds for the homeless are provided by faith-based organizations

• 66% of of emergency food pantries after a natural disaster are affiliated with a faith-based organization

• 63.2% of local food pantries operate with a faith-based affiliation.

• Americans who attend church weekly are nearly twice as likely to volunteer

• Religious observant Americans are 2.5x more likely to adopt a child than unaffiliated Americans

This is the dilemma of religion in America - religious connection can promote economic mobility, but religious views can also be weaponized to widen inequality. As a religious person myself, I like to believe in the power of religion to unite communities, to promote acts of loving kindness, to urge us to repair the world, and to give both time and money to those less fortunate.

We are living in a time where institutional religion wields significant power over public policy. Those real-world communities that could insulate Americans from poverty are rapidly disappearing. While the solution does not have to be grounded in bringing religiosity back into America, it does have to be grounded in the ideas of looking after one’s neighbor and trying to lift people up through local connections. We may be losing our faith, but we cannot afford to lose each other.

INTERESTING ON THE WEB

• Voting rights mapped across the world and a downloadable dataset for deeper analysis, showcases that the U.S. is an outlier in really bad voting rights (“Unlike 82% of OECD countries, the US does not automatically register voters nationwide.” - Equal Futures

• Some of my favorite stats on inequality are covered in this article (lending, wages, productivity, consumer concerns) - Better Markets

• Fascinating new study relying on the phased global rollout of the iPhone via AT&T from 2007-2011 showing that 33–52% of the decline in the general fertility rate among women aged 15–44 - NBER

• We know the Trump administration is deleting data, but this report reveals the core ways that data deletion hurts real people - The Guardian

• I’m launching new perks for the newsletter, and if you are an author working an upcoming book and think it will be interesting to the American Inequality audience - Check this out

Welcome to The Dividing Line from American Inequality.

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Education is not considered a ‘fundamental right’ in America

Before the mid-1900s, property tax was mostly a relatively flat tax and public school funding was highly localized, small-scale, and supplemented by various state funds. But after World War II, the GI Bill and massive federal highway investments triggered a suburban boom, fueled by redlining and the systematic exclusion of minority families. Wealthy White homeowners concentrated their growing home equity into self-governing suburbs, creating tax-revenue goldmines for their local schools while hollowing out urban and rural budgets.

By the late 1960s, parents and civil rights lawyers realized that this funding system was wildly unfair. In San Antonio, Texas, parents in the low-income, predominantly Mexican-American Edgewood school district pointed out a stark reality: even though they taxed themselves at a much higher rate than their wealthy neighbors in Alamo Heights, they could only raise $37 per student, while Alamo Heights raised $413 per student.

They sued, arguing that this violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court as San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez (1973) and in a devastating 5–4 decision (nearly 20 years after Brown v. Board of Education mind you), the Supreme Court ruled against the parents. The Court held that:

• Education is not a “fundamental right” explicitly guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

• Socioeconomic status (being poor) is not a “suspect classification” (unlike race), meaning the government didn’t have to prove a compelling reason for the funding disparities or protection under the 14th Amendment

• Local control over schools was a legitimate state interest, even if it resulted in massive funding gaps between rich and poor neighborhoods.

The Rodriguez decision effectively shut the door on using the federal courts to force equal funding across school districts. It institutionalized a zip code trap for education, ensuring that states were legally permitted to let a child’s educational funding be determined by the market value of the houses around them.

State funding closes the gap, until it can’t

Defeated at the federal level, civil rights lawyers pivoted to state courts. In 1990, the dam broke open when a court found that Kentucky’s entire public school system was unconstitutional because it failed to provide an adequate education to poor children. Civil rights lawyers used this “adequacy” strategy in dozens of other states, allowing more state tax dollars to flow into low-income districts, helping to overcome the inadequate funding from local property taxes. NBER data shows this specific influx of cash directly caused a gradual, steady rise in reading and math scores for disadvantaged students throughout the decade.

By the early 2000s, state governments were providing the largest single share of public education funding (roughly 49%), while local property taxes had dropped to about 43%.

For over two decades (1990 to 2013), American math and reading scores marched steadily upward. But between 2013 and 2015, that progress abruptly flattened, turned negative, and began a decade-long slide that left eighth-grade students roughly 60% of a school year behind in reading and 40% of a school year behind in math compared to a decade prior.

Researchers point to three major structural shifts during the mid-to-late 2000s and early 2010s that explain this decline:

1. The Financial Aftershocks of the Great Recession (2008)

When the housing market crashed in 2008, local property taxes and state revenues plummeted. Because schools operate on a lag, the deepest cuts to education budgets didn’t hit until roughly 2010 to 2013. School districts across the country executed massive layoffs, increased class sizes, eliminated counselor positions, and cut academic intervention programs. Students in the mid-2010s were learning in severely under-resourced classrooms compared to students in the early 2000s.

Even though state budgets for education had increased dramatically, when the housing bubble burst state income and sales tax revenues fell off a cliff. Facing massive budget deficits, 31 states slashed their state education aid per student by an average of nearly 10%. By 2014, the share of education funding coming from local property taxes had climbed right back up to its pre-1990s highs.

Student performance since 2009 has declined in almost every state, with math scores down in 83% of school districts and math scores down in 70%. Well before phones fully penetrated the life of children and households, math and reading scores really plummeted in large part when the housing market fell away.

2. The Dismantling of Accountability Standards (2015)

During the 1990s and 2000s, federal policies like No Child Left Behind (NCLB) forced school districts to hyper-focus on standardized test scores. While NCLB was heavily criticized for causing teachers to “teach to the test,” the intense federal pressure kept math and reading proficiency scores rising.

In 2015, Congress replaced NCLB with the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which dramatically scaled back federal penalties and test-based accountability, handing power back to the states. The data shows that the moment this strict, test-based federal pressure evaporated, student performance in core subjects began to drift downward.

3. The Screen Explosion and Social Media Disruption

The collapse of student focus directly correlates with a massive cultural shift in the mid-2010s: the absolute saturation of smartphones, the rise of algorithmic social media (like Instagram and Snapchat), and the school-led push toward 1-to-1 personalized laptops in classrooms.

Higher property values, higher grades

The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford recently released new data on student testing performance across the US and the results are concerning. Almost every state in the country showed a decrease in testing performance, but poorer communities have been hit much harder.

Student performance has declined in almost every state, but local districts reveal a more complex picture. Only 9 states since 2009 have shown an increase in scores, and all improving states are still below the national average. The regions that saw the smallest decline in performance were also the wealthiest regions. The wealthiest districts declined less than middle-class and poorer districts. This highlights a long occurring trend in the American education system that hinders upward mobility and strongly relates income to educational success.

Historically, White families moved from urban neighborhoods into suburban ones, but as minority residents have joined the middle class, the phenomenon of White flight has shifted and segregation continued. Instead, wealthy White families are moving out of more diverse suburban regions into less diverse ones. The demographics of the top 1% of districts are striking. The communities are 72% White, 12% Hispanic and 5% Black. By contrast, the bottom 1% of districts, as measured by school funding, are 51% White, 25% Hispanic, and 15% Black.

Between 2000 and 2010, 150 of the largest metro areas lost at least 20% of their White populations. Areas with strong home values and median incomes show the wealthiest White families leaving as they become more diverse. Over time, these disparities have compounded and the schools with the most funding became havens for majority-White communities. Since 1988, segregation between White and Black students has increased 64 percent in the 100 largest school districts, and 50 percent by economic status since 1991.

The Lower Merion district located in the suburban Philadelphia Main Line boosted its education funding 87%between 2000 and 2015 to more than $23,000 per student. That’s more than double the amount that Philadelphia, one of the poorest cities in America, spent on its students. The school funding gap between a top 1% district and an average-spending school district at the 50th percentile widened by 32% between 2000 and 2015.

Sprawling away from low-income communities

Do rich families just have more means to move to areas where better teachers are already located? Are the schools established in a place and then wealthy families congregate around those institutions? The data shows a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. More money definitely improves how those schools perform, but wealthy families are constantly monitoring where good school districts are and moving to those.

A 2025 study analyzed a 2011 “information shock” in Chicago, when the city publicly released new school safety and support ratings for the first time. In the very next quarter, home prices zoned to the highest-rated schools experienced an immediate 9% to 21% price premium, while incoming buyer incomes in those exact zones jumped by 16%. This indicates that affluent families actively track school quality and possess the immediate capital to outbid middle-class buyers for homes the moment a neighborhood school is verified as “elite.”

In a complementary study from the Federal Reserve, researchers found that parents were willing to pay a 2.5% premium on home prices for every 5% increase in elementary school test scores.

Urban neighborhoods aren’t avoiding school segregation either. Young affluent White families in recent years have moved into urban neighborhoods as well, but urban public schools still have high poverty rates and lower test scores than suburban schools. This is primarily due to wealthy families in urban cities sending their kids to private schools at higher rates than wealthy suburban families. Private school enrollment for high-income families living in urban regions since 1970 has relatively stayed the same, but middle-class families are disappearing.

Even in gentrifying neighborhoods, demographic change does not equate to integration. One study found that among urban neighborhoods that experienced gentrification between 2000 and 2014, student enrollment declined rather than becoming more integrated, primarily when incoming residents were White. In New York City, the White school-aged population in the fastest gentrifying neighborhoods increased from 10% to 29%, yet White elementary school enrollment only increased from 5.7% to 10.4%, suggesting many incoming affluent families remained disconnected from neighborhood schools.

Research also shows that schools with less diversity have worse test scores than more diverse schools. Integrated classrooms encourage critical thinking, problem solving, and exposure to new ideas. Students in integrated schools are more likely to enroll in college, less likely to drop out, and more likely to seek out integrated settings in adult life.

Private Schools are Increasingly for the Ultra Rich

In 1970, 13% of middle-class families enrolled their children in private schools. By 2011, that number plummeted to just 7%. Private schools have become exclusively for the ultra-wealthy, but historically private schools were for the ultra-religious.

K-12 private school fees have increased 553% since the late 1990s, while average incomes grew only 217%, causing the tuition-to-income percentage to rise dramatically for families.

85% of elementary school students in the US who were enrolled in a private school in 1970 were attending a Catholic school. With the decline in religious attendance since then, non-sectarian private schooling increased, along with the price. Between 1970 and 2011 and adjusting for inflation, the average cost for Catholic private schools increased from $873 to $5,858 in 2011 as they lost enrollment and funding, and non-sectarian schools rose from $4,120 in 1979 to $22,611 in 2011.

High income families increasingly secure educational advantages either through expensive suburban housing or elite urban private schools, while middle-class families are excluded from either option and pushed towards more affordable suburban districts. Lower-income students are left concentrated in underfunded school districts with fewer opportunities and limited upward mobility.

The problem is bigger than the phones

We have allowed public education and the real estate market to become so intertwined that it has begun to choke learning outcomes for our children. The classroom crisis in America is now so strongly mapping to the housing-wealth crisis in America, which is actively starving public education based entirely on zip codes.

We cannot continue to blame smartphones or pandemic hangovers for a systemic crisis that we have legally institutionalized. Before screens ever fractured student attention spans, the 2008 housing crash delivered a far more devastating blow to American education, tying test scores directly to a collapsing real estate market.

America needs to ensure that home property values and student success are not attached at the hip. Boston, Denver, New York and other school districts have started using a system where families rank preferred schools. This is put into an algorithm along with schools’ enrollment priorities, student type and random lottery numbers. The output matches students to their highest ranked school with constraints that help to increase integration.

The wealthy are hoarding public resources behind exclusive zoning laws and private school tuition moats all while the middle class is squeezed out and low-income students are left stranded. True educational equality will never be achieved until excellent schools are treated as a fundamental right for every child.

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This is without a doubt my proudest professional accomplishment and I’m beyond thrilled to publish this revelatory account of American inequality and prosperity.

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As some of you have seen in the pictures that I’ve been sharing on Substack, I had the chance to descend into coal mines in West Virginia, to meet with pastors in Mississippi, to eat lunch with small-town mayors in struggling border communities. What I uncovered in the +200 interviews I conducted for this book is that the most effective solutions to our country’s seemingly intractable solutions may just be found in our own backyards. This book at its core is one of hope and opportunity, driven by the incredible stories of individuals who further the resiliency and ingenuity of their communities.

Here are a few ways to get involved if you’re interested:

1. Leave a comment to learn more: If you want to learn more about the book or just want to talk about inequality and opportunity in America leave a comment or shoot me a DM.

2. Add your name: For those who want some more behind the scenes information about the book (finding an agent, hiring fact checkers, designing a cover, how to land great interviews) you can add your name here.

3. Email me to get involved: If you want to help out in the book launch process (speaking events, sending you copies of the book, organizing something with your company, a talk with an organization that you’re a part of) reply to this email or text me if you have my number and I’ll follow-up with you to keep things moving.

I’m working on another piece too about the Substack-to-published-author pipeline that I’ll be sending out in a few weeks so stay tuned with the American Inequality newsletter for that. Thanks to so many of you for your support in this journey because it certainly takes a village. More to come!

Most sincerely,

Jeremy

• My recent article, Why Philanthropy is Silent in the Golden Age of Wealth

• David’s recent article, A Man Who Dies Rich Dies In Disgrace

Transcription summary from NotebookLM.

0:00 - The Death of Duty

We have traded the moral weight of the first Gilded Age for a secular scorecard where wealth is the only metric that matters. Unlike Carnegie or Rockefeller, today’s titans lack the religious fervor that once commanded them to give back or face the flames of judgment. In our modern metric-oriented society, billionaires watch their ranking on the Forbes 400 like authors obsessing over subscriber counts. Wealth has become an end in itself, stripped of the historic expectation that the ultra-rich must serve as moral role models. To whom much is given, it seems, nothing is currently expected.

3:00 - Marketplaces Aren’t Miracles

Building a global marketplace or launching rockets to Mars should never be a hall pass for avoiding philanthropy. While we can applaud entrepreneurial brilliance, we must ask why that success is not twinned with behavior that serves the public good. Being a single-minded entrepreneur is one thing, but it does not automatically make someone a compass for the next generation. Wealth should not just be about personal “looks maxing” or individual attributes; it requires a sense of responsibility to the human family. True leadership demands more than just a massive payroll—it requires a soul.

4:45 - The Personal Math of Justice

Tracking your spending is not just about financial planning; it is a reflection of your values and your vision for the world. For every $2.50 spent on family, there should be a dollar dedicated to repairing the fraying edges of our society. Giving is not merely a transaction of cash; it is an investment of time, networks, and the skills built over a lifetime. This is not just charity; it is a pursuit of justice that connects us to our ancestors and our future grandchildren. When you back grassroots leaders at a local food pantry, you are not just giving money—you are fueling a more hopeful future.

11:00 - The Philanthropy Power Trap

We have entered a dangerous era where billionaires get to play God with global health and social priorities. While eradicating malaria is a triumph, the public never voted for it, and we should not rely on the whims of the ultra-wealthy to fix our world. Government triumphs like PEPFAR prove that stable, elected institutions can save millions without waiting for a donor’s permission. When the social safety net is left to private “pet causes,” we risk leaving massive holes where public funding once stood. Philanthropy is a powerful tool, but it should never be a replacement for a functioning, accountable democracy.

15:00 - Closing the Billionaire Loophole

To save the social safety net, we must dismantle the legal loopholes that allow extreme wealth to remain untaxed across generations. It is time to tax capital gains at the same rate as the hard-earned wages of every other American. Ending the “stepped-up basis” ensures that massive fortunes finally contribute to the country that made their accumulation possible. We need a federal tax system that prioritizes the many over the few to avoid a fiscal catastrophe. Paying taxes is the ultimate incentive for a society that wants to see every citizen succeed.

Question for the comments: What are some of the most frustrating parts about how government operationalizes the social safety net or nonprofits execute their missions? Is the tax system incentivizing the right actions?

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Top-Heavy Philanthropy

About 20 years ago, nearly two-thirds of American households donated to charity. Today, the share of Americans donating to philanthropy has dropped to just 41%. Most philanthropies, however, are dependent on large donors and government grants to support their operations. It is often much easier for them to secure a $200,000 donation or grant than to receive 10,000 donations of $20. In 2024, donors giving over $50,000 accounted for nearly 78% of total dollars. Those top-heavy donors have started to disappear from the philanthropy landscape, despite huge accumulations of wealth in those households.

A study from Bank of America found that in 2024, 81% of affluent households made charitable contributions, with donors giving an average of more than $33k, more than 10 times the giving level of the general population. And even among this cohort with the most means, participation in charitable giving has declined from 91% in 2015.

So why is philanthropy silent in the golden age of inequality? The answer is less a matter of total dollars and more a crisis of participation and misplaced incentives. For the general public, the price of eggs and gas has simply priced many out of their traditional $50 or $100 donation habits, while the ultra-wealthy are increasingly prioritizing family needs and legacy preservation over broader social welfare. Trump era tax cuts have it far easier for them to accumulate wealth without further incentivizing the ultra wealthy to donate. They can now collect more money without the additional benefit that a donation may have for them. On a psychological level, with so many cuts across the social safety net, it can be hard for both middle income and wealthy families to know where to start. Decision fatigue creeps in which can lead to overall paralysis, limiting any given at all.

Ultimately, in a society where wealth is highly concentrated, the wealthy often become more isolated from the very communities in need, leading to a generosity gap where the perception of necessity—and the empathy that drives giving—diminishes as one moves further up the economic ladder.

This disconnect marks a stark departure from the Gilded Age, when titans like Carnegie and Rockefeller viewed philanthropy through the lens of the “Gospel of Wealth”—a philosophy that treated their fortunes effectively as a public trust, one that recognized was a deeply intertwined with the systems that helped give them that wealth. They believed they were morally obligated to redistribute within their own lifetimes to ensure social stability. Unlike the “hands-off” or tax-optimized approach of today’s ultra-wealthy, these early industrialist donors were driven by a fear that extreme inequality would lead to total social upheaval, prompting them to build physical, permanent civic infrastructures like thousands of public libraries that mandated ongoing community engagement rather than just passive, digital capital transfers.

Like most issues of inequality in this country, these divides can be traced back to incentives. The reality of our tax code means that the deductions offered to donors are far more valuable the higher your income is. If you are in the 12% bracket, a $1,000 deduction saves you $120. If you are in the 35% bracket, that same $1,000 deduction saves you up to $350. The tax code treats a billionaire’s dollar as three times more “valuable” than a teacher’s dollar when it flows toward a nonprofit. The very wealthy donate stocks or real estate, which creates a massive tax loophole. They don’t have to pay capital gains tax on the profit the asset made, but they still get to deduct the full current market value of the asset from their income. When the government subsidizes billionaire giving through these deductions, it is essentially allowing private individuals to decide how “public” money is spent, all while those families have their names on the wings of museums, hospitals, and libraries.

The direction money flows has great consequences. Research finds that donors of varying income strata give to very different types of causes. Wealthier donors give to higher education and arts, while lower and middle income donors focus more of their giving on basic human needs around direct services, such as food banks or shelters. And as discussed, with a donor base shrinking, the distribution of where the funds go shift duly. When philanthropy concentrates with a certain few, it shifts who decides where resources belong, which communities are served, and which problems are deemed worth solving.

Nonprofits face existential crisis

In spring 2025, about one in three communities serving nonprofits in the US reported losing federal, state and local funding. The Center for Effective Philanthropy found that 61% of nonprofits say the current environment poses moderate to significant risk to their continued operation and a majority of nonprofits have seen staff reductions and programming cuts. That same report notes that 87% of foundation leaders report increased demand for grant funding. These funding restraints have downstream effects on many very real societal issues - homelessness, hunger, access to health care, education, fair and equal access to trial, etc.

Nearly $100m in housing contracts to nonprofits were canceled just this past winter alone. These are meals unserved, rooms sitting vacant, and our most marginalized left without a meaningful community.

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How do we decide what is funded?

Philanthropy, at its best, complements public investment and fills the gaps that communities have long depended on. At its worst, it becomes a surrogate for democratic accountability, allowing the private preferences of a privileged few to make decisions that should belong to everyone. Bill Gates decided that Malaria is the disease that we need to eradicate from the world, but where was the vote or public policy choice for that? In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg went on Oprah and pledged $100 million to “fix” Newark’s public schools, despite the need being far greater in many other parts of the country. As Caitlin Cosgrove, co-founder and partner of Effective Philanthropy Advisors, observes“ the biggest shift isn’t just how much money is in the system, it’s who gets to decide where it goes. Philanthropy is being asked to fill gaps in public systems it could never replace, even as giving and influence concentrate in fewer hands.”

Will Young Donors Change the Game?

How do we address the gaps in philanthropy at the same time that the federal government is refusing to fund the organizations that need it most?

Younger donors have different expectations of what they want to see in the world and from institutions they support or causes they care about. A 2025 national study by the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy found that 64% of next-gen donors “support causes, not institutions.” Their donations go to social justice, racial equity, mental health initiatives, and climate far more than traditional charity. Gen-Z gives at lower levels, but show high rates of engagements with social causes, mutual aid networks, and prefer direct giving platforms to remove the traditional institutions from the mix.When it comes to where that money goes, 57% of Gen Z believe giving directly through platforms like GiveDirectly, GoFundMe, and mutual aid networks has more impact than traditional nonprofit donations. Young donors are more cognizant of supporting the recipient and their mission, thereby creating a more balanced relationship between the donor and the nonprofit. It’s more about the impact than the establishment. A great wealth transfer is underway with over $84 million in assets changing hands between generations through 2045 and the donors inheriting that wealth have different philosophies than the generation before.

Philanthropy for the people

As Cosgrove puts it, “wealth and need are both growing, and philanthropy is, in many ways, standing still or pulling back as many of the old norms around large-scale giving fall away. This is fundamentally undemocratic, raising real questions about which needs get prioritized and who gets to make that call.” Instead of asking “how much are people giving,” we need to ask who controls where that money goes, and whether it’s reaching the communities that need it most. This is critical given that the safety nets have been removed overnight and the philanthropic sector is being asked to carry that enormous weight. MacKenzie Scott donated over $26 billion to more than 2,700 non-profit organizations since 2019. While admirable and morally right given the amount of money she has, it should not be required for much of our necessary social services to run and nonprofits to function.

Figuring this out requires much more than analyzing donor trends. We need to reform our tax incentives and engage in a dialogue about what it means to fund the common interest. Our goal ought to be to collective action instead of relying on a few very wealthy individuals who can prop the system up. That system falls apart when those people stand on the sideline, or when they fund personal projects that leave millions behind.

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INTERESTING ON THE WEB

• Guaranteed income helps people leaving jail and prison, and that helps everyone - Prison Policy Initiative

• How an inclusive community for people living with mental illness offers an alternative to hospitals and social isolation - Progressive Magazine

• Your brain on inequality, with Hanna Horvath - Substack

• The American Inequality life expectancy map soared around the internet again this past week - The internet

• Paul Peterson interviewed Jeremy on Harvard’s Education Exchange about disability in higher education - Education Exchange

• The most impactful inventions of all time - WSJ

• I’ll be live with talking about many of the topics from today’s article on Monday (5/4) at 4pm ET - Register for the event

My friend has a new book coming out next week that I think readers of American Inequality will love. It’s called How to Not Know and it’s about how to get better at dealing with uncertainty. I found it fascinating—not to mention that one of the chapters is about my old team at the Federal Reserve so I’m excited that he is showing them off. It’s a book that couldn’t be coming out at a better time. Check it out: https://www.amazon.com/How-Not-Know-Uncertainty-Demands/dp/1324089458

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The proliferation in accommodation plans, known as 504 plans (after a section of federal law that prohibits discrimination based on disability), has made even the most academically rigorous universities more welcoming to students with disabilities. Those 504 accommodations include extended test time, note-taking services, and special testing rooms, but many students have reported that it also has given them priority housing, ability to live in a single, and meal plan benefits. The most common diagnoses in these 504 plans are ADHD, neurodivergence, and mental health conditions including severe anxiety.

There’s a real tension at the heart of this data - on one hand, critics say that students are gaming the system. No formal evaluation is required for a 504 accommodation, only a documented physical or mental impairment from a doctor’s note. Parents submit a request to a school administrator and most schools get to decide what types of materials they request, according to the Department of Education. On the other hand, advocates say that the rise is a sign of progress. They say that the underlying mental and physical disabilities were always there for students, but only now are medical professionals, schools, and parents doing a better job of actually diagnosing the disabilities.

At the University of Chicago, the number has more than tripled over the past eight years; at UC Berkeley, it has nearly quintupled over the past 15 years. Only 14% of Americans below 35 have a disability, but at schools like Amherst, 34% of students report a disability.

Who Really Benefits from the ADA?

What is clear is that wealthy families tend to benefit most from this system. The rates of students claiming disabilities seems to be far higher in places with higher median household incomes. In Weston, Connecticut, where the median household income is $220,000 nearly 1 in 5 students claims a disability. Just 30 minutes north in Danbury, Connecticut where the median household income is $83,000, the rate is 8-times lower.

Still, the system remains open to abuse by those who know how to game it. The Varsity Blues college-admissions scandal showed that there are wealthy parents who are willing to pay unscrupulous doctors to provide disability diagnoses to their non-disabled children, securing them extra time on standardized tests. Studies have found that students exaggerate symptoms when they go in for these tests, making it hard for doctors to evaluate the children.

The wealthiest students across America claim the most disabilities.

Students in every ZIP code are dealing with anxiety, stress and depression as academic competition grows ever more cutthroat. But the sharp disparity in accommodations raises the question of whether families in moneyed communities are taking advantage of the system, or whether they simply have the means to address a problem that less affluent families cannot. While experts say that known cases of outright fraud are rare, wealthy parents who want to give their children every advantage in life are spending tens of thousands of dollars on tests and finding doctors who may offer the neuropsychological diagnosis they think their child needs.

The Cleveland Metropolitan School District, one of the poorest in the country, had a 504 rate of less than 1 percent. One mother in Montgomery County, Maryland transferred her son, who has A.D.H.D. and a reading disability, from a public high school to a private one that charges $45,000 per year in tuition. When the boy arrived, the staff at the new school told his mother about ACT accommodations she had not known about. Her son scored a 33 after taking the exam over multiple days, and is now considering applying to Ivy League schools.

Buying Time and Abandoning the Meritocracy

Many companies are now making millions off this side-door cottage industry that both gives students more time on tests and helps them do better once they are enrolled in elite universities. “Get ACT Extra Time,” reads one blunt web advertisement from the Cognitive Assessment Group. Dr. Wilfred van Gorp, who runs the company, says he assesses 24 patients a month and charges $6,000 per patient (amounting to $1.73M per year). About 70 percent of the patients he sees leave with a diagnosis. But Dr. Gorp has a checkered past himself. Dr. Gorp once testified that the Genovese crime boss Vincent Gigante was mentally impaired, though years later Mr. Gigante admitted that he had feigned his mental illness . Dr. Gorp says that he was tricked.

The shift began in 2008 when Congress amended the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to restore the law’s original intent. The government broadened the definition of disability, effectively expanding the number of people the law covered. In response to the 2008 amendments, the Association on Higher Education and Disability (AHEAD), an organization of disability-services staff, released guidance urging universities to give greater weight to students’ own accounts of how their disability affected them, rather than relying solely on a medical diagnosis. Schools began relaxing their requirements. A 2013 analysis of disability offices at 200 postsecondary institutions found that most “required little” from a student besides a doctor’s note in order to grant accommodations for ADHD.

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Welcome to the The Dividing Line from American Inequality.

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Interactive Data Story

Almost half all wealth in America is owned by Boomers, while half all debt is owned by Millennials. Expensive housing markets, growing debt, increased cost of living, and slow wage growth all are factors at play in the struggle to accumulate wealth for younger Americans. As younger, more diverse, and more educated generations compete for a larger hold on the country’s attention and power, it may be too hard of a climb for many. While Boomers came of age in an era of ‘opportunity for the taking,’ successive generations are finding those gateways to the American middle class have been bolted shut. The upward climb feels less like a journey and more like a treadmill, yet so many Boomers still race ahead.

Between 1946 and 1964, approximately 76 million babies were born in America, a surge that increased the nation’s population by more than 50%. On average there were 4 million births per year during the Boomer years, but today there are only 3.6 million births per year, despite the fact that the country is 2.5 times bigger today. In order for birth rates today to be comparable to birth rates during the Boomer years, we would need to have 3x the current amount.

As families grew in size, consumer demand grew too. Families had to purchase new diapers, baby shoes, toys, and more at rates the country had never seen. Televisions in homes became mainstream when Boomers were young children and teens, changing advertising to target young kids. Children were generating $33 billion in retail sales annually. California was building one school a week in the 50’s, and Los Angeles alone was spending over $1 million on new schools. In the fall of 1952, 2 million new students were entering schools across America.

As they grew older, Boomers were leaders during the Civil Rights movement and were the majority on college campuses in the 1960s. Many key historical events of the U.S. in the 20th Century were defined by the Baby Boomer Generation.

1976 marked the first year Boomers were eligible to run for Congress, and immediately a visible shift was apparent. The average age of a member of Congress was 55 in 1965, but fell to 49 in 1981. The then-young Boomers took over D.C. From that point on, many of those members of Congress hung onto their seats for decades. Congress aged as Boomers aged. By 2001, they made up the majority of Congress, and 60% at their peak in 2013, even though they made up only a quarter of the US population. Today, the average age of a Congress member is 60 years old. As we can see from the chart above, almost all members of Congress are older than the districts they represent (as shown by the green dots). Only in a handful of areas (orange dots) are they younger than their districts. In the Senate, not a single senator is younger than the average age of the state they represent.

Of the last 5 presidents, 4 were boomers. Over a 35-year stretch from 1993 to 2028, 31 of those years will have been led by a Boomer president (Clinton, Bush #2, Obama, & Trump). Notably, the Silent Generation was nearly skipped over entirely, with Joe Biden standing as its only representative in the Oval Office. The sheer dominance and quantity of children being born during this era is also apparent when comparing the four Boomer presidents’ birthdays – 3 of the 4 were born within 66 days of each other. That grip on power is beginning to loosen and in 2019, Millennials surpassed Baby Boomers as the largest voting population, and Gen X is projected to follow suit by the 2028 election.

Those older members of Congress passed legislation that reflected the priorities of the older, more powerful majority in America. They placed limits on new housing development, created tax structures that favored the accumulation of wealth, and bolstered retirement protections that younger generations may never see.

Boomers grew up in an America that looks very different from the America we have today. Immigration was at an all-time low just as the boom began, and the immigrants who did emigrate were mainly from western Europe. In 1945 there were only 38,000 immigrants entering the US. In 1970, only 4.7% of Americans were foreign born, compared to 15.4% in 2025. Immigration since then has grown significantly – mostly from Asian and Latin American countries in the latter half of the 20th Century, and Central/South America countries in the 21st Century. The world Boomers grew up in was dominated by one universal demographic that’s begun to decline.

At the heart of the immigration debate lies a profound generational disconnect over what it means to ‘feel at home.’ For a segment of older Americans, the rapid shift toward a more globalized society feels like a departure from the America they had grown up with. In contrast, younger and more educated generations tend to see a pluralistic future not as a threat, but as an evolution. A 2012 Pew Research Survey showed that more than half of White baby Boomers and seniors view the rise of newcomers from other countries as a threat to traditional American values and customs, while this view was the minority of younger generations.

Income inequality has grown significantly since the 1970s, and within the generation itself the majority of wealth is concentrated at the top. In 2022, Boomers owned in total $77 trillion in assets, but the top 10% held 71% of that total wealth. Along with an uneven distribution of wealth, added problems have compounded on top for younger generations. While boomers own the majority of wealth, millennials own about half of all debt (41%) – almost double Boomers (22%).

Debt has primarily come from higher education costs, which are 9 times the cost they were in 1989. Other causes of increased debt are rising inflation, slow wage growth, higher childcare costs, and rising cost of living. One surprising and growing source of debt is from credit cards. In 2025, Millennials ($6,961) surpassed Boomers ($6,795) in credit card debt. Americans under 60 continue to accrue credit card debt while older Americans are slowing down. Gen X has an average credit card debt of $9,600 – almost 1.5x higher than any other age group.

Housing is another major discrepancy between older and younger generations. Home prices are rising while single family construction is falling. America is building fewer homes per 100,000 than it did in 1975, and the majority of Americans who are buying homes are Boomers. 41% of all real estate wealth is owned by Boomers, and the homes they own are large homes with few people living in them. More empty-nester boomers own homes with 3 or more bedrooms than Millennials with children. Larger homes also make up the majority of homes being built. In 2022, nearly half of all new construction were homes with four bedrooms or more, compared to 1 in 5 homes in the 1970s. Homes today are on average 1,000 square feet larger than they were in 1973, and space per person has doubled. Bigger homes, and less homes overall has compounded the problem of need and affordability.

The average home price in 1976, when the oldest boomers were turning 30 was $42,800 and when adjusted for inflation would be $242,000 today. The average home at the end of 2025 was $405,300 – 1.5x more expensive when adjusted for inflation. During the Boomers prime earning years, America had extremely strong economic growth, lower tuition and healthcare costs and favorable tax policies that brewed the perfect conditions for growing personal wealth, compared to younger generations with higher costs, more debt and more volatile markets i.e. the dotcom bubble burst and the Great Recession.

There is no question that a transition is underway – Boomers are aging, $84 trillion in wealth is being transferred through 2045, and young Americans are maturing in their voice for change. Boomers grew up in a world of abundance, and rightfully took advantage of it. Somewhere along the way, that abundance became guarded rather than shared. This moment is an opportunity to change that – to build an America with more housing development, affordable education, increased wages, and more pathways into the middle class. There’s no guarantee positive change will come. Wealth often stays in the hands of those most privileged. It’s on us to work for the greater good so all can aspire for the American dream.