My undergraduate thesis at Hampshire College was ambitiously titled, “The Recurring Red Nightmare: Anti-Communism in American Culture.”

I typed the 400-page double-spaced tome on a Smith-Corona typewriter. Three drafts. I wrote the first chapter on a newfangled Apple computer in an unadorned concrete bunker that served as the Hampshire College computer lab –and then promptly lost it to the ether. So I returned to the typewriter as both trustworthy (documents didn’t vanish) and I could sit in the living room of my apartment, see daylight, and greet my housemates. Much more pleasurable.

I believe a copy of this artifact is in my barn somewhere. That’s the problem with barns.

My thesis compared the post-World War I “Red Scare” and the 1950s era McCarthyism. I learned that the real threat to the people who promoted these red scares was not an actual insurgency but the fear that radical ideas like trade unionism, social security, or public housing might become popular. McCarthyism was about rolling back the New Deal and both red scares were about the policing of dissident thought.

Enter the modern moment. You’ve got a morally bankrupt Republican Party with no ideas, other than tax cuts for the rich and immigrant-bashing. And you’ve got corporate Democrats who are freaking out because progressive populists are winning the battle of ideas and now elections. Hence the return of the “Red Scare”! Lions and Tigers and Socialism! Oh my!

I jumped at the invitation to write a syndicated commentary for Inside Sources, a counterpoint to a commentary that I didn’t see ahead of publication, titled “Socialism Doesn’t Work, and History Proves It,” by Eric Ventimiglia from the Pinpoint Policy Institute, dedicated to “promoting and defending the essential pillars of American prosperity.”

My article, “Pundits Call It Socialism, but Many Americans Call It Common Sense,” is my response to this moment. It’s running in newspapers like the Arizona Daily Star, The Billings Gazette, and the Omaha World Herald.

***

Counterpoint: Pundits Call It Socialism, but Many Americans Call It Common Sense, Inside Sources, August 2026.

The debate over capitalism vs. socialism often looks like a battle of cartoon caricatures: Monopoly Man versus the Marx Monster.

Across the planet there are countless flavors of capitalism and socialism, unique mashups of free markets and government policies. Into this muddle wade the right-wing ideologues who fear the red “socialist” demon hiding in every corner.

If Fox News existed in the 1950s, they would’ve labeled Republican President Dwight Eisenhower a socialist for taxing the wealthy and making broad public investments to expand homeownership, enable debt-free higher education, and build infrastructure and technology that expanded the modern middle class.

Yet, what do these labelers call modern-day China, a country that mints hundreds of billionaires a year and dominates global markets with private production? Are they socialist or capitalist?

Meanwhile, social democracies, like Canada and the northern European countries, have progressive tax systems and strong social safety nets. Sweden, with its generous welfare state, has higher rates of entrepreneurship than the United States.

These countries also have higher rates of social mobility than the United States — meaning it’s easier for lower-income people to escape poverty and become stable. The American Dream, apparently, has moved offshore.

These welfare states, with their higher taxes on the wealthy, exist comfortably alongside healthy market economies. However, in the United States, whenever a politician proposes that billionaires pay their fair share of taxes so we make public investments in opportunities for everyone else, they are labeled socialist or even communist.

These criticisms conflate a set of policy proposals, most of them quite popular, with an economic system where the government owns the means of production. However, this well-trod attack doesn’t seem to be working anymore, especially for younger generations.

Younger voters see the grotesque inequalities of wealth and power that distort the economy and block opportunity for the non-rich. They witness how large corporations have captured Congress and blocked popular reforms to defend consumers and counter monopolies.

They watch with alarm as billionaire-backed private equity firms buy up healthcare facilities and squeeze consumers in every corner of the economy. They see how both major political parties have been captured by the billionaire donor class and failed to address stagnant wages and rising basic costs.

All generations now understand that the old American Dream has expired, with seven in 10 experiencing economic insecurity. These folks still hope hard work could lead to a decent life — to own a home, take a vacation, pass opportunities to their children, and retire before they die. They feel the constant stress of knowing they’re one job loss, illness, disability or divorce away from living in their car.

Without a strong party representing working people’s concerns, political realignments are happening in both parties. A new generation of progressives and a handful of self-described democratic socialists argue the economy should work for everyone, not just the billionaire class.

They believe new technologies — such as AI — should serve everyone, not just billionaire tech bros and their global conglomerates. They believe the government has an important role in expanding healthcare, blocking oligarchy and breaking up big corporations.

They advocate for expanding affordable housing to aid people struggling to find decent housing in a hyper-speculative market. Instead of subsidizing private developers, they advocate for housing owned by nonprofit organizations, resident cooperatives, and — egads! — government entities, like housing authorities.

These progressives believe we should stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry and end tax breaks to the Jeffrey Epstein class. They support investments to help us transition to sustainable energy, lower energy costs and reduce climate disruption.

The right-wing pundits — and some so-called moderates, too — are hoping that when they trot out the “socialist” bugaboo, your mind will freeze and you’ll start frothing at the mouth. They’re afraid that you will ask why the current system isn’t working and wonder if there are alternatives. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

When someone brandishes the word “socialism” like it’s a stink bomb, take a courageous look at the actual ideas — higher taxes on the rich? Medicare for All? A raise for working people? — being proposed. There might be more common sense than you thought.

As you may know, I’m very focused on the intersection of climate disruption and extreme wealth inequality. Private jets are symbols of both excessive wealth and pollution.

At the Institute for Policy Studies, we just formally launched the Private Jet Accountability project (see www.taxprivatejets.org) and a new jet tracking system.

We deployed it to document the increased private jet traffic from the FIFA World Cup, played across 16 cites in the U.S., Canada and Mexico. It was a pollution bonanza, as the super-rich took 92,000 private jet flights and emitted an extra 147 kilotons of carbon, the equivalent of 34,000 gas cars operating for a year. Our report got an exclusive report in The Daily Mail. And here’s my commentary recently published in The Hill.

Red card: World Cup fans and the public subsidize private jet polluters

Originally Published on 7/29/2026 in The Hill

It’s time to issue another red card — for private jets at the FIFA World Cup.

During the month-long tournament, a great deal of scrutiny focused on the excessive private jet consumption by FIFA president Gianni Infantino. He flew an estimated 60,400 miles on a Gulfstream luxury jet provided by World Cup sponsor Qatar Airways, spewing almost 600 metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

But Infantino wasn’t the only one committing a foul. Over 92,000 private jets flew in and out of World Cup host cities during the days around matches, according to a new tracking system created by the Institute for Policy Studies. This contributed over 147 kilotons of excess carbon emissions, the equivalent of driving 34,000 gas-guzzling cars for a year.

Rutherford, N.J., the host for the finals and seven other matches, experienced the most private jet pollution, with 21,289 private jets generating 39.4 kilotons of excess carbon emissions.

The new Private Jet Emission Tracker measured the carbon pollution from private jets touching down in match-host cities and contrasted it with activity on similar dates over five previous years, documenting the additional spike in carbon dioxide emission during World Cup matches.

WRIC: VA Assault Weapons Ban Latest v2

Compounding the injustice, ordinary fans and the flying public subsidize the pollution spewing activity of the high-flying private jet class. Private jets don’t chip in their fair share of the cost of airspace, let alone their environmental impact. And last year, the U.S. Congress slathered on more tax breaks for private jets and their ultra-wealthy users.

Ordinary fans and those traveling on commercial flights pay a 7.5 percent ticket tax. This revenue contributes to airport infrastructure and services, along with other taxpayer dollars and fees. Private jets avoid most of these fees, shifting the costs onto everyone else. Private jets and other forms of non-commercial aviation account for 16 percent of flights but only chip in 2 percent of the costs of operating their air traffic system.

The private jet lobby, led by the National Business Aviation Association, have lobbied Congress to keep the subsidies flowing. As part of the President’s 2025 budget bill, private jets secured additional tax breaks, including a provision allowing corporations to expense 100 percent of the purchase of a private jet in one year — that could mean $20 million or more in tax deductions in one year on a single luxury jet purchase. In contrast, most businesses buying vehicles, trucks or equipment will deduct those costs over five years. Other FAA changes have enabled private jets to stiff local airport operators of basic use fees.

These tax breaks don’t even address the biggest subsidy — the ability of private jets to avoid any responsibility for the health and environmental costs of their pollution impacts.

It was a close call as the World Cup final match bumped up against stifling heat and a shroud of wildfire smoke that blanketed the eastern U.S. If that match had been played a day or two earlier, we would have been watching Spain defeat defending champion Argentina through a smoky haze. Fortunately for the players, fans, and public, a thunderstorm scrubbed the air the night before the finals.

These pollution conditions should be juxtaposed with images of extremely wealthy fans arriving in thousands of private jets, the most pollution intensive form of transport, being chauffeured to MetLife Stadium in black SUVs and escorted to their private boxes.

Research shows that wildfires are made worse by global climate change, as forests dry out and atmospheric rain cycles are disrupted. Human-caused climate change — to which private jet setters are huge contributors — is driving increased wildfire and smoke that all of us across the U.S. and in many parts of the globe are experiencing real time.

In our assessment, “Red Card for Private Jets at the FIFA World Cup,” we document the excessive emissions and the costs to everyone else. We call on FIFA to ban private jets at matches and live up to its pledge to be carbon neutral by 2040.

FIFA should also stop designing tournaments that span continents and cater to the ultra-wealthy private jet class and not to ordinary fans. The 2030 FIFA World Cup will be played in six different countries, with most matches in Morocco, Portugal, and Spain. But in honor of the World Cup’s 100th anniversary, the opening matches will be played in the South American nations of Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay.

FIFA is clearly competing to produce the world’s most polluting sport competition. They must do more to protect the players, the fans, and our planet. The World Cup belongs to everyone, not just the private jet class.

I’m often asked questions like: Does excessive wealth make people anti-social? Are those with great wealth more likely to engage in sociopathic behavior?

I understand the rage that people feel toward the ultra-wealthy. I really do. But I also believe it worth understanding what turns some extremely wealthy people into monsters –while others stay grounded, empathic and generous.

I was recently interviewed for a terrific BBC Science article, “From Epstein to Wall Street: The dark psychology of how money makes monsters,” by Dr. David Cox. The article draws from several studies and gives a thoughtful picture as to what is going on. As the article poses: “One look at the news cycle would have you thinking that wealth and crime are inevitably linked. But what does science have to say?”

Check out the whole article at the BBC. Here I’m including some of my quotes from the piece..

***

Chuck Collins was always acutely aware of how money can distort a person’s perspective on the world.

Growing up as a direct descendant of the business magnate Oscar F Mayer, a figure who made a fortune in the meat-processing industry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, money’s distorting effects were unavoidable.

“Extreme wealth is a disconnection drug,” says Collins, now in his early sixties. “It separates you from a world of reciprocity, of connection, of vulnerability, which I think is part of the human experience.”

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As an heir to the Mayer fortune, Collins became familiar from a young age with the shadowy web of advisers and managers who assist the ultra-rich in preserving and increasing their wealth.

He describes this as an industry that, whether through investments or identifying suitable loopholes in the tax system, is dedicated to widening the disparity between the rich and the rest of society.

Such disparities were all too visible to him as a teenager in 1970s Detroit, a Midwestern American city with a visible and burgeoning gulf between the affluent suburbs and the rest of the population.

It was a time when ‘the great wealth boom’ of the past half-century, as Collins describes it, was already underway.

Yet despite being born into money, he felt unease and discomfort when listening to justifications of tax avoidance and societal disparities.

“I could see how the numbers affect a person’s internal values,” he says. “Extreme wealth can undermine the humility check that most people have, which is having some doubt.

“Instead, there are people who feel that since they have all this money, they must be the smartest person in the world. And you see people who believe they’re superior to others, even though they simply inherited their wealth.”

Collins vowed to opt out of the system when he became an adult and went on to make headlines by publicly renouncing his inheritance.

Instead, he launched his lifelong career in inequality research, starting in housing reform before becoming a key figure in the Patriotic Millionaires movement.

This network brings together rich Americans to campaign for greater wealth and inheritance taxes, along with a higher minimum wage.

“It’s people saying, ‘We should pay our fair share as opposed to dodging our taxes,’” Collins says. “It’s not in anyone’s interest to keep going down this road [of greater inequality].”

He describes this mission as more important than ever, especially in a world where the wealth of billionaires jumped by over 16 per cent in 2025, despite a widespread cost of living crisis.

“When there’s this sense of unchecked power, this happens,” he says. “Without any societal checks, you can come to think you’re above the law, and so you behave differently.”

Collins’ depictions of the societal disconnect caused by extreme wealth have been backed up by various studies over the past two decades.

***

In Collins’ view, a critical determinant of whether a wealthy person is more likely to display dark triad traits is the extent to which they recognize the element of good fortune in their path to riches.

Luck, he notes, has played a significant role for all the world’s billionaires, whether it’s being in the right place at the right time to exploit a market trend or being part of the ‘lucky sperm club’ of inherited wealth.

***

Yet people with narcissistic, Machiavellian or psychopathic traits are less likely to accept that and instead attribute their accumulated wealth more to their own innate genius.

“The wealthy are not monolithic, but I think the first step towards corruption is that you believe you’re worth more than other people,” says Collins.

“That you deserve your wealth because of hard work, intelligence and sacrifice. [Similarly,] if you’re poor and struggling, well you deserve your sorry state.”

***

For Collins, such discoveries simply add more weight to what he views as the need for a more progressive tax system, one that works harder to prevent extreme wealth inequality.

“The wider public needs to understand how concentrated wealth and power really undercut everything we care about, whether that’s health, democracy or the environment. I think that awakening is happening,” he says.

“The next two years are going to be really interesting. Our job as Patriotic Millionaires is to encourage and champion that discussion.”

Check out the whole article at the BBC.

The red emergency light is flashing on America’s democracy dashboard, like a damaged aircraft teetering toward a mountain. Elon Musk becoming the planet’s first trillionaire should make us tremble for the future of self-governing republics. It’s as if we’re bringing back modern pharaohs to dominate our societies.

Musk’s SpaceX company recently went public with a (probably inflated) market capitalization of $2 trillion. SpaceX’s IPO increased Musk’s net worth by an estimated $188 billion, and the stock’s first-day surge subsequently pushed his fortune to roughly $1.1 trillion, according to Forbes.

The concern here isn’t with wealth per se. It’s the tremendous power of concentrated wealth to distort markets, politics, and society. When you have Musk’s level of wealth, you’re no longer just buying another mansion or private jet (of which he already has several). You’re buying a media outlet, a senator, and maybe, in the case of Musk, elevating a president.

Musk has no inhibitions about deploying the power of his considerable wealth. He bought Twitter, one of the public squares of our time, and transformed it into X, a partisan and disinformation platform rife with hate speech and extremism.

In the 2024 election cycle, he donated $291 million to President Trump and Republican candidates, according to Open Secrets. As Michael Mechanic wrote in Mother Jones, “Musk expended 0.1 percent of his wealth in the process and got far more in return.” Mechanic notes “The Trump administration promptly shelved dozens of investigations into Musk’s companies.”

Musk was rewarded with a rogue government agency — the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), named for a crypto meme coin Musk invested in — to advance a self-interested data grab and chainsawing away at government capacity. Public Citizen found that 70 percent of the agencies that were targeted by DOGE had conflicts of interest for Musk’s businesses. For example, Musk directed DOGE to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which would have overseen X’s move to become a payment processor.

More dire still, DOGE cuts to USAID and other humanitarian aid programs have contributed to an estimated 750,000 lost lives. The projected deaths from these cuts run into the millions.

Musk was further rewarded with lucrative government contracts for SpaceX, Starlink, and other Musk-companies. In early 2025, The New York Times reported on a boost in multi-billion-dollar contracts for Musk’s companies as the Trump administration took power.

That was Musk as a “mere” centi-billionaire. What other power might Musk be able to wield as the world’s first trillionaire?

But it’s not just Musk. America’s 16 centi-billionaires (including Musk) have a combined wealth of $4 trillion. And the 977 billionaires on the Forbes U.S. wealth list now own a combined $9.24 trillion, according to analysis by Americans for Tax Fairness.

This isn’t a partisan concern. Whether it’s liberals like George Soros and Tom Steyer or right-wingers like Musk and Peter Thiel, this concentration of power and influence should trigger the flashing red light. It’s never a good thing for anyone to have the power of modern-day pharaohs. Musk was the top political donor in 2024, but five other billionaire households gave over $100 million to candidates.

Billionaires — and soon trillionaires as well — are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to influence our elections while working Americans struggle to afford food, housing, and health care. It’s clearer than ever that those two facts are connected. We need to get serious about curbing this billionaire influence and supporting regular people — starting with a wealth tax.

Oxfam observes Musk could give $100 to every person on earth and remain one of the 10 richest people on earth. A 10 percent wealth tax on Musk’s fortune alone, they estimate, could end global extreme poverty and lift 800 million people above the extreme poverty line. Imagine the revenue and investment possibilities of a global wealth tax on all billionaires.

The planet’s first trillionaire is not a sign of economic health. It’s an indicator of extreme inequality and the dangers of concentrated power.

One of the most frustrating aspects of economic inequality in this country is how easily the rich avoid the meager systems we do have in place to check runaway wealth. Tax evasion, shell companies, and tricks with charitable giving abound.

But, it turns out, the rich aren’t just dodging their obligations under our tax code. They’re actually using it to amass even more wealth.

Ray Madoff, now a professor at Boston College Law School, and I have worked together for 20 years on defending the estate tax, charity reform, and tax policy. We don’t always agree.

For example, I’m a supporter of wealth taxes and Ray is more skeptical. But we love working together, and this past week we sat down to discuss her excellent new book The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Ray also recently spoke with Ezra Klein on his podcast.

Chuck Collins: When you were growing up, did you say, “I want to grow up and be a tax nerd?”

Ray Madoff: I thought I was going to run an orphanage — even though I think the orphanage system was already long gone by then!

CC: So, like a Jewish Mother Teresa?

RF: Hah! Later, when I went to law school, I thought I was going to be like a litigator that focused on battered women or saving the whales. I was kind of shocked to find that what I really liked was taxes. I studied philosophy in college, and a friend of mine has a theory that all philosophy majors that go to law school become tax lawyers, because it’s a certain type of analytic thinking.

CC: What do you think about the statistic that says, “the richest 1 percent pay 40 percent of the taxes,” and “46 percent of Americans then don’t pay taxes?”

RM: The reason those figures are misleading is that when they refer to the top 1 percent, they’re referring to those with the most taxable income. People with the most taxable income do pay a lot of taxes, but the problem is the wealthiest Americans — those with huge assets — are able to avoid taxable income. They are just as likely to be in the 46 percent of non-income taxpayers as they are in the top 1 percent of payers. That statistic makes it sound like a whole bunch of the country is getting off scot-free. It’s failing to account for payroll taxes, which are quite burdensome, and they have gone up as other tax rates have come down over time.

CC: In your book you talk about how the tax code constantly needs to be enforced and updated to address avoidance and loopholes.

RM: Yes, any tax system requires enforcement. It’s been well proven that a small investment in the IRS enforcement produces tremendous revenue for the country. There is absolutely no justification for the current state a defunded IRS. It only provides an additional benefit to the wealthiest who would otherwise be required to pay taxes. It’s troubling for the country that we would allow flagrant tax avoidance to occur due to a lack of enforcement.

In addition to enforcement, it also needs constant legislative and regulatory oversight. I would say that the income tax has been somewhat regularly revised but where we really see the problem is the estate tax. So, if we start with the fact that wealthy Americans can avoid taxable income because they don’t take salaries and they don’t sell their assets. They instead borrow, and then on top of it, they inherit great wealth, and under our just basic tax rules, any money received by inheritance or gift is free of income taxes, also life insurance, entirely free of income taxes. You don’t even have to report it. Somebody who is given $10 million or $100 million doesn’t have to tell anyone that they’ve received that money. What we count on instead is the estate tax system, and that’s where we’ve seen a huge problem in terms of lack of upkeep.

We should get rid of the estate tax and instead expand the base of the income tax to include investment gains and inheritances as taxable income. It’s critically important that we have systems that feel fair to people.

CC: I’m curious, what do you think of an annual wealth tax?

RM: I can totally understand why the wealth tax is so appealing and attractive, and why it seems like the obvious solution to the problem. However, I worry about the practical limitations of such a system insofar as it counts on annual valuation. The problem is particularly acute with respect to the enormous amounts of wealth owned through complex partnerships and other assets that are difficult to value. What you’re going to have is the whole estate planning world hiding value.

In addition, wealthy people would be incentivized to move their money out of the easy to value stock market and instead invest in privately held interests that are more difficult to value, and this would impose significant hardships on the tens or hundreds of millions of Americans who count on the stock market for their retirement and other savings. While it would work great in theory, it is ultimately both unworkable and unwise.

CC: In terms of building support for taxing the very wealthy, how about this scenario. We say to save the earth, we need to tax the climate destructive behaviors and concentrations of wealth that are causing the most harm”?

RM: My problem with this approach is that it seems to describe the status quo as one where the rich are already paying taxes and we need for them to pay more. But a far bigger problem is how the wealthy have been able to write themselves out of the tax system altogether.

I think that our first step in tax policy is bringing the wealthiest Americans into our tax system. Our total government revenue in 2024 was $5 trillion and we had a deficit of about 2 trillion because we spent almost $7 trillion. And then you realize that the wealthiest 1 percent owned $50 trillion it matters whether this group pays taxes. It matters because our growing debt is a problem.

CC: Well, if only the message could get out further, then people could shift that narrative.

RM: I feel so urgent about my project, which is really a project about public awareness. How do we grow public awareness? And my concern is that politicians across the political spectrum have effectively spread a message that you don’t need to understand taxes. And that is baloney.

The Second Estate is available now from University of Chicago Press.

How can the U.S. reverse democracy-distorting concentrations of wealth and power? A federal annual wealth tax must be part of the equation.

The richest 0.1 percent — the top one-thousandth of households, who are all worth over $50 million — have seen their wealth surge since the beginning of the 2020 Covid Pandemic. U.S. billionaires have seen their wealth double since 2019, with the top 19 U.S. billionaires adding $1 trillion to their wealth in 2024 alone.

Politicians and the public are waking up to the disruptive impact of billionaires, as chronicled in my recent book, Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power are Ruining Our Lives and Planet. But most policy prescriptions fall short of truly addressing the accumulated wealth and power of the richest 0.1 percent.

While Congress was busy passing an enormous tax cut for the ultra-wealthy, campaigners from Massachusetts to Washington State have put forward several state-level “millionaire taxes” that are essential ways for states to build fairer tax systems with or without federal participation.

Hiking top income tax rates collects more revenue from the “working rich” — those with high incomes like doctors, lawyers, and CEOs. Those with substantial asset wealth have found countless ways to play shell games and reduce their income taxes, including their capital gains tax burden. (Ray Madoff’s new book, The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made An American Aristocracy, covers their crafty avoidance mechanisms).

California’s proposed emergency one-time 5 percent wealth tax on billionaires is the boldest of the state initiatives. It has the vulnerability of any progressive state level policy: The global billionaire class moves their money around the planet into tax havens that compete for business. Even mere threats billionaires make that they’ll move have rattled state voters. (It’s important to note that post-millionaire’s-tax Massachusetts has seen notably low attrition — there was some bluffing going on.)

There is no taxation silver bullet because America’s wealthy hire phalanxes of “wealth defense industry” attorneys and money managers with ample tax avoidance tools at their disposal. (See my book The Wealth Hoarders for more.)

The U.S. needs an “ecosystem” of tax reforms including patches to the income tax, a robust inheritance tax (to replace the porous estate tax), and meaningful oversight enforcement — so billionaires can’t wriggle their way past borders to avoid paying their fair share.

An essential cornerstone of reducing extreme wealth inequality is a federal annual wealth tax with severe penalties for billionaires that renounce their citizenship to avoid taxation. Two bold proposals have been introduced in the last few weeks that should be celebrated and supported.

Senator Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) have introduced the “Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act” that would levy a 5 percent wealth tax on households with over $1 billion, mirroring the California billionaire tax initiative at the federal level. The tax would raise an estimated $4.4 trillion over ten years, though the conservative Tax Foundation estimates avoidance will reduce the revenue to closer to $3.3 trillion. The tax proposal invests 1 percent of revenue in strengthening enforcement and levies a 60 percent “exit tax” on billionaires renouncing their U.S. citizenship.

The bill includes a number of popular provisions including a $3,000 direct payment to every person earning less than $150,000 a year, in the first year (or $12,000 for a family of four). Other provisions include a reversal of Trump budget cuts to Medicaid, expanded health coverage, investments in affordable housing, and a minimum salary of $60,000 for all public school teachers.

Senator Elizabeth Warren has reintroduced an updated version of her 2021 “Ultra-Millionaire Tax”, with lead House sponsors Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-PA). This proposal would levy a 2 percent annual wealth tax on households and trusts valued at over $50 million. It would add an additional 1 percent annual surtax on wealth and trusts over $1 billion.

While Sanders-Khanna wealth tax would focus entirely on the estimated 950 U.S. billionaires, the Warren tax proposal would levy taxes on the wealthiest 260,000 households, excluding 99.85 percent of taxpayers. The Warren wealth tax would raise an estimated $6.2 trillion over ten years. As David Dayen writes in The American Prospect, “Inequality has boomed so much in the 2020s that a 2 percent wealth tax on multimillionaires initially introduced in 2021 would yield more than twice as much revenue today.”

The revamped Warren-Jayapal-Boyle proposal responds to the aggressive tax avoidance by the wealthy and their “wealth defense industry” enablers, which our disinvested oversight systems struggle to respond to. The legislators suggest levying taxes on wealth in trusts and assets held offshore, and modernizing the IRS to better catch evasion and track complex asset valuations of the ultra-rich. The proposal also includes a 40 percent “exit tax” on multi-millionaires and billionaires that renounce their U.S. citizenship.

While the revenue is not earmarked, the cosponsors of the legislation envision massive investments in affordable housing, universal childcare, expanded Medicare eligibility, and tuition-free community college.

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT)Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)NameMake Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share TaxUltra-Millionaire TaxWho they tax5% annual wealth tax on assets over $1 billion2% tax on every dollar over $50m and additional 1% tax (total 3%) on every dollar over a net worth over $1 billionWhat is being taxedEntire stock of wealth over the $1 billion“All household assets held anywhere in the world will be included in the net worth measurement, including residences, closely held business, assets held in trust, retirement assets, assets held by minor children, and personal property with a value of $50,000 or more.

Both these wealth tax proposals expand the national conversation and vision about what is possible if we tax oligarchic concentrations of wealth and power. They don’t seek to break up big fortunes as an end in and of itself — they directly outline the abundant opportunities and benefits Americans could reap from more revenue.

It’s almost certain that taxing wealth will be at the heart of 2028 presidential election discourse. The policy is incredibly popular across political parties and feels like common sense to hundreds of millions of people across the nation. Those who oppose new taxes should consider why they’re so out of step — and get on board fast.

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Oligarchs have hidden levers to impose private taxes on the rest of us. They use their wealth and clout to snuff out competition and protect their subsidized monopoly to charge you fees and increase their wealth. In this case, the private tax lever is your tax preparation, the imposition of an “Intuit Tax.”

Meet Sasan Goodarzi, the oligarch who in 2025 blocked your ability to access free and simple tax preparation and filing services. Goodarzi, the CEO of Intuit (including TurboTax, Credit Karma, and MailChimp) has just effectively raised your costs.

According to the National Taxpayers Union Foundation, US taxpayers will spend roughly $148 billion preparing their taxes—not counting the average 13 hours of prep time amounting to $316 billion in lost productivity in 2024. Hiring a professional CPA to prepare a modest return can cost between $220 and $800.

Imagine a system that is free, with a simple user-friendly online interface where you can enter data, save, and file your return. Or like the systems in most other industrialized countries, where you receive a draft tax return pre-populated with your reported data that you can amend, reject, or file. (However, a simplified tax code is required for these kinds of systems.)

We were almost there, until recently a few “tax prep” oligarchs like Sasan Goodarzi intervened to kill it. Noa Rosinplotz from the Roosevelt Institute observed, “The Trump administration has gutted the IRS and handed the tax filing system back to the companies that profit from making you waste time and money filing your taxes.”

At the dawn of the new century, President George W. Bush moved to upgrade government technologies. He pressed the Office of the Management and Budget and the Department of Treasury to agree to provide “easier, secure, and free opportunities for Americans to file their taxes via the Internet.”

Brad Smith, then CEO of Intuit, understood the existential threat to TurboTax if the US government made tax preparation simple and free for most citizens. In 2019 ProPublica exposed Intuit’s 20-year lobbying effort to eliminate the “public option” for tax preparation. “This was seen as a low-cost, high-payoff initiative,” said Mark Forman, the Bush era official in charge of “e-government” initiatives in 2002. Blocking the way, he told ProPublica two decades later, was an industry “that lives off the complexity of the tax code.”

Intuit successfully fended off the creation of a public free option by agreeing to offer a free-edition option at TurboTax. But as ProPublica later exposed, the free option offered by Intuit was hard to access by design and misled consumers into sometimes paying for TurboTax, even when the service was supposed to be free.

In a 2019 video intended for Intuit employees, new CEO Goodarzi confirmed the accuracy of ProPublica’s reporting that Intuit deliberately hid the TurboTax Free Edition option from its search engine. “To avoid confusion between the IRS Free File program and our own free product,” Goodarzi told colleagues, “we also decided to have the landing page for the IRS product we offer not rank in search results.”

In 2022, TurboTax agreed to pay a $141 million settlement for “unfairly” charging low-income TurboTax customers who should have received the free service. An estimated 4.4 million taxpayers who paid for TurboTax between 2016 and 2018, when the filing software should have been free, were eligible for a settlement payment.

Progress toward a free tax system lurched forward. Lawmakers included funding for a pilot for e-filing in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. In 2024, the free federal Direct File Program was piloted in 12 states, assisting more than 140,000 tax filers and saving consumers $5.6 million in tax preparation fees. Program users reported that it took them less than 30 minutes to file their taxes and 90 percent of users ranked the experience as “Excellent” or “Above Average.” In 2025, the program was expanded to 25 states.

Anticipating a second Trump term in 2024, Goodarzi mobilized Intuit’s considerable lobbying clout and campaign donations to kill the Direct File Program. Intuit has secured its dominance over the tax preparation service, as TurboTax has 60 percent of the online filing business.

Throughout 2024, Intuit spread $1.8 million around to Republican members of Congress to fortify the resistance to free filing. Representative Adrian Smith (R-NE) took in $98,000 in contributions from 26 different Direct File opposition lobbyists over his career. Efforts paid off in December 2024, when 29 Republicans sent newly elected Donald Trump a letter calling for the elimination of Direct File. In 2025, Intuit spent $3.8 million in lobbying fees to push abolition of Direct File over the finish line.

Among Intuit’s talking points was that the Direct File is expensive. But as researchers at the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy point out, Intuit “receives tax breaks that are roughly the same amount as the cost of the IRS’s popular but now shuttered free filing program.” Since 2021, the federal government funneled $492 million to Intuit for “research and development credits.” In contrast, the estimated costs to the IRS of operating direct file in its pilot year was $32 million, with estimated costs to rise to between $64 million and $249 million as it expanded to more taxpayer filers.

In early 2025 Intuit contributed $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund which sealed the deal. Within a month, the IRS shut down Direct File.

Goodarzi is well-compensated for his efforts. According to WealthX, Goodarzi is worth over $100 million and, as CEO, received compensation of $36.6 in 2024, 182 times the median employee at Intuit. In 2025, his pay slightly increased to $36.9 million.

Intuit’s success has made all the men who run the company wealthy, and Goodarzi is on his way to joining their ranks. According to Forbes, former CEO Brad Smith, who stepped down in 2018, is now worth $900 million and cofounder Scott Cook is now among the country’s wealthiest people, his fortune soaring to $5.6 billion.

This year, as you spend hours and dollars to prepare your taxes, remember Sasan Goodarzi and the extra “Intuit tax” you are paying toward his growing fortune.

Originally published by Progressive Perspectives.

Americans of all political stripes are concerned about affordability. Some politicians would like to change the subject.

Billionaires and their allies in politics have tried everything, from falsely blaming the rising costs of food and housing on immigrants, to dismissing the entire concept of affordability as a “hoax,” as President Donald Trump called it.

The truth is, billionaires themselves are driving up costs and inflaming the crisis. In my new book, “Burned by Billionaires,” I chronicle the many ways that billionaires and their investments are squeezing the rest of us.

Besides lobbying against raising the federal minimum wage (now unchanged for sixteen years) and opting out of their tax responsibilities, shifting the bill to everyone else, here are four ways that billionaires are directly driving the crisis the president claims does not exist.

Monopolizing food: The food sector has become increasingly dominated by a small number of producers who exercise monopoly power over our dinner plates. Four giant conglomerates control more than 80 percent of the market for beef, including JBS, owned by the billionaire Batista family and the Cargill-MacMillan clan, a dynastic family with twenty-one billionaires. These companies deploy their monopoly power to dictate pricing and fend off oversight and regulation.

Squeezing health care: The rising cost of health care has many drivers. But one cause is that billionaire-backed private equity funds treat the health care system—a sixth of the U.S. economy—as ripe for plundering. Investors are buying up emergency rooms, hospitals, and medical practices, all with the goal of extracting more profits from health workers and consumers. In New England, a private equity fund called Cerberus Capital bought ten hospitals and squeezed several into bankruptcy after extracting massive fees and profits

Hoarding housing: In cities throughout the nation, the ultra-wealthy are fueling a luxury construction boom, absorbing huge amounts of land, resources, energy, and construction trade skills. Billionaire-backed private equity funds are also buying up single family homes, mobile home parks, and rental housing to convert to short-term vacation rentals. Blackstone, owned by billionaire Stephen Schwartzman, is the biggest landlord in the country, eagerly exploiting tenants with few other options.

Taxing animal lovers: It’s not your imagination: The cost of veterinary care, pet food, and even dog-walking apps has risen as billionaire investors endeavor to squeeze more dollars out of our love for animals. As billionaire-backed private equity firms buy up animal care resources, the share of household income spent on pets has been steadily increasing. In some cases, people have been forced to relinquish their animals when they can no longer afford the cost of care.

Going forward, we don’t need more empty rhetoric about affordability. We need campaigns that directly address affordability while reducing these democracy-distorting levels of extreme wealth and power. In Burned by Billionaires, I chronicle examples of these game-changing campaigns—such as efforts to tax luxury housing transactions to fund affordable housing, or taxing private jet fuel to fund green transit and infrastructure.

These ideas are gaining steam across the country.

In 2022, Massachusetts voters approved a 4 percent tax on incomes over a million dollars to fund education and infrastructure. New York City’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, ran on a platform of free buses, expanded child care, and affordable housing paid for by a 2 percent income tax on millionaires in the city. And in 2026, California voters will consider a one-time, 5 percent emergency wealth tax on the state’s billionaires to fund health care for millions of Californians.

Taxing the billionaire class to address the affordability problem is wildly popular. Polls show that more than three-quarters of Americans support taxing billionaires to solve major economic problems.

While it’s hard to imagine such proposals passing in today’s hijacked democracy, a new generation of leaders is stepping forward to work for an economy that lifts everyone, not just the billionaires.

This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.

There are about 75 million pigs being raised on farms in the United States, with about a third of that total in Iowa, the nation’s top hog state. Jeff and Deb Hansen founded Iowa Select Farms, now the largest pork producer in the state, in 1992. The Hansens offer a case study in how regional oligarchs can deploy their wealth, political influence, and charitable giving to defend their enterprises from local, state, and federal regulation. Through their capture of Iowa’s political apparatus, the Hansens drive national pork policy.

The pork industry has been consolidating since the 1990s, with a 70 percent decline in the number of farms with hogs, according to the US Department of Agriculture. Large conglomerates have steadily replaced the smaller integrated farms that once used modest amounts of waste from their hogs and other animals as fertilizer.

Watching the consolidation of the poultry industry, the Hansens first became successful manufacturing concentrated animal-feeding operations (CAFOs). Large production sheds, known as “confinements,” hold up to 2,500 sows, which are pumped full of antibiotics to help them survive their cramped, windowless existence. CAFOs generate colossal amounts of manure waste, forming gargantuan anaerobic lagoons that foul the air and pollute local water supplies around the farm.

By the early 1990s, the Hansens’ CAFO business was bringing in $90 million a year. “After steadily expanding their confinement-building business,” writes Iowa native Austin Frerick, the author of Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry, “the Hansens decided they could also make money by raising their own hogs.” Starting with a herd of 10,000 sows, Iowa Select Farms grew into the country’s fourth-largest hog producer, with roughly 260,000 sows.

You can smell these hog-raising operations from miles away, much to the detriment of their neighbors. In 2003, the company settled a lawsuit filed by residents of Sac County, who complained that a farm with 30,000 hogs produced foul odors, noxious gases, and swarms of flies. An expert witness for the plaintiffs testified that the farm produced as much waste as a city of 90,000 to 150,000 people.

The Hansens’ wealth has since increased, from $272 million in 2024 to an estimated $1 billion in 2026, according to Wealth-X. But from their 7,000-square-foot mansion in a leafy, gated neighborhood in Des Moines, the Hansens don’t notice the excrement. Nor do they smell the manure lagoons from their private jet (rumored to be emblazoned with the name When Pigs Fly).

In 2020, pork prices plummeted as the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted the market. Iowa Select Farms responded by exterminating thousands of hogs. According to The Intercept, the company shut off the CAFOs’ ventilation systems, suffocating and overheating the pigs as ammonia gas from the manure lagoons lingered in the air. Video cameras recorded the death throes of these terrified, sentient animals, and a whistleblower reported being ordered to “euthanize” the surviving pigs with captive bolt guns.

In the 1990s, as the political pressure to regulate CAFOs increased, the Hansens fought to shape legislation in the Iowa Legislature aimed at establishing guardrails for the industry. Passed in 1995, the resulting bill stripped away the power of county boards of supervisors to deny construction permits for CAFOs, a blow to the local control of land use. The law permits CAFOs to be constructed as close as a quarter-mile from residences, a distance that does little to diminish the odor and flies or the environmental harms such as groundwater contamination.

In subsequent years, the Hansens have discouraged the further regulation of CAFOs by donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to politicians. They’ve contributed over $300,000, for example, to Iowa’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, making Deb Hansen her top individual donor. They’ve also worked to keep the state’s entire congressional delegation subservient to the pork industry.

As with many other oligarchs, the Hansens’ charitable giving serves as a taxpayer-subsidized extension of their private power. In 2019, Governor Reynolds attended a gala for the Deb and Jeff Hansen Foundation, where she auctioned off a private lunch and tour of the Iowa Capitol with her. The winning bid of $4,250 came from Gary Lynch, another Iowa hog baron and GOP donor. (The largest charitable donation listed by the Hansens’ foundation in its most recent filing is $317,760 to the Iowa Pork Producers Association. The same year, it gave $25,000 to Children’s Cancer Connection.)

Fortunately, some are challenging the Hansens’ exploitative brand of agriculture. In 2018, California voters passed Proposition 12, which establishes baseline animal-welfare standards for farms and for products sold in the state. For example, Prop. 12 mandates cage-free systems for hens and a minimum square footage for breeding sows.

The pork industry has sued multiple times to stop Prop. 12, but in its 5–4 ruling in National Pork Producers Council v. Ross, the Supreme Court upheld the law. The Iowa Pork Producers Association is now attempting to overturn what US Representative Ashley Hinson (R-IA) has called “blue-state bacon bans.” In July 2025, she introduced the Save Our Bacon Act, which would prohibit states from passing laws like Prop. 12. All four members of Iowa’s congressional delegation are sponsors.

In a 2025 op-ed in The Washington Times, Hinson extolled states’ rights. “One of the most effective ways to tackle bureaucratic bloat is to decentralize power from Washington and bring agencies closer to the communities they serve,” she wrote. But the Save Our Bacon Act enshrines the Hansens’ evident lack of concern for public health and animal welfare as the de facto federal standard. Oligarchs and their enablers like to sing the praises of local control—except when it interferes with their power and profits. States’ rights for me, but not for thee.

Kristi Noem will no longer be the face of the Department Homeland Security, labeling peaceful citizens defending liberty as “domestic terrorists.” Trump is now appointing her to a new position of “special envoy in the Western Hemisphere.”

Wherever she goes next, we should remember her DHS debacle wasn’t her first deception rodeo. It turns out that Noem has a long history of twisting the truth to serve the powerful.

In 2017, nearly a decade ago, we caught then-Rep. Kristi Noem telling a whopper fib about her family’s experience with the estate tax — or what Noem called the “death tax.”

The estate tax, our nation’s only levy on the inherited wealth of multi-millionaires and billionaires, has been in place since 1916. In its first half century, it helped put a brake on the build-up of concentrated wealth and power, discouraging dynastic fortunes that threatened democracy.

But for the last 30 years, the estate tax has been under right-wing assault, including a steady drumbeat for its repeal. And one tactic they’ve used is to claim the tax applies to small farmers and other working Americans, rather than the tiny percentage of extremely wealthy estates it actually targets — exclusively multi-millionaires and billionaires, the top 0.01 percent.

Noem’s personal political narrative, repeated at town hall meetings during her 2010 campaign for Congress, is a yarn about a rapacious and greedy federal government imposing an estate tax on her struggling family.

In a 2015 speech on the House Floor and in a 2016 op-ed for Fox News, Noem repeated the estate tax story. After her father died, Noem claimed, “we got a bill in the mail from the IRS that said we owed them money because we had a tragedy that happened to our family.”

“We could either sell land that had been in our family for generations or we could take out a loan,” Noem said, adding that “it took us 10 years to pay off that loan to pay the federal government those death taxes.” Noem says the episode was “one of the main reasons I got involved in government and politics.”

In December 2017, Noem was appointed by then House Majority Leader Paul Ryan to the joint committee working to reconcile the 2017 Trump tax bill — which at the time included a proposal to eliminate the federal estate tax altogether.

That month, I published a widely circulated op-ed about Noem in USA Today arguing that “her sad family saga doesn’t add up.”

My commentary surfaced several simple facts: The federal estate tax has a 100 percent exemption for spouses. In other words, if a spouse dies, the estate’s assets go to the surviving spouse without any estate tax. Corinne Arnold, Kristi Noem’s mother, was alive during these years. (In fact, she is still alive now at 78 years and was active in Kristi’s second campaign for South Dakota governor in 2022.)

Estate tax attorney Bob Lord noted at the time, “It’s hard to believe the estate of a farmer who died in 1994 and was survived by his spouse was subject to the tax. It easily could have been deferred. That would have been a no-brainer.”

Moreover, the process of filing a return can be extended for years, especially for operating farms.

The combination of family tragedy and populist outrage makes for a potent partisan story, but veers from the truth. In the years she campaigned as a victim of the estate tax, Noem’s family actually cashed millions in government farm subsidies. Between 1995 and 2024, her family’s Racota Valley Ranch in Hazel, South Dakota deposited $4.9 million in government subsidy checks.

A few days after my USA Today article, the Argus Leader, South Dakota’s biggest statewide newspaper, wrote an editorial: “Time for Kristi Noem to get her tax story straight.” In her now well-known deflective fashion, Noem fired back that it was “fake news.”

If Noem’s estate tax story is true, she could easily put our doubts to rest. She could explain why her family didn’t use a spousal exemption, share a redacted “bill” from the IRS, or disclose who provided the loan she allegedly received. But she hasn’t.

In the meantime, Noem has helped gut the estate tax, contributing to the growing concentration of wealth that threatens our economy and democracy.

Under the Trump tax bill Noem worked on, the federal estate tax now exempts the first $15 million of wealth for an individual and $30 million for a couple. And as governor of South Dakota, Noem fortified the state’s role as a trust haven, attracting billionaires interested in forming dynasty trusts to hide wealth and use loopholes to avoid federal taxes.

The Trump administration and its allies have blamed immigrants for all manner of social ills — including struggling schools, expensive housing and health care, and more. In reality, the blame more often lies with extremely wealthy people who won’t pay their fair share of taxes to support public programs.

So it’s strangely fitting that Noem, who now slanders law-abiding immigrants and the citizens defending them as “domestic terrorists,” played a big role in gutting those taxes on the rich.

These lies — about the estate tax, about immigrants, about protestors — have something in common: they protect the powerful. As lawmakers attempt to hold Noem accountable for the reckless activities of ICE –and consider her for future jobs – they should keep this early story in mind.

The billionaires know you love your furry family members, and they’d like profit from your affection.

Have you had to seek veterinary attention for a beloved pet in recent years? Have you noticed higher costs for vaccines and routine exams? Do you occasionally need a pet-sitter and wish to purchase services from an on-line service? I’ve got bad news for you: the billionaires have fixed their sights on you and on every corner of the pet care economy, with the goal of squeezing more money out of you.

Pet ownership was on the rise even before the Covid-19 pandemic; today roughly 70 percent of U.S. households have at least one pet. The share of household income spent on pets has risen significantly, with an estimated $123 billion in 2021. While pet insurance is available, few pet owners have it. Yet many are willing to take on enormous debt for high-priced medical services. In a recent article in The New York Times about the rising cost of pet care, Katie Thomas writes,

A generation ago, pet owners with a seriously ill animal may have had little choice but to opt for euthanasia if they wanted to relieve their pet’s suffering. Now, they must choose between extending the animal’s life and going into what can be debilitating debt or letting an animal die.

Thomas spoke to pet owners who were still paying off credit card debt years after their animals had died. She reports animal welfare groups are finding pet owners relinquishing their animals to shelters when they can’t afford veterinary bills.

For many people, their relationships with animals are more steadfast than their connections with humans. With a growing percentage of people saying they have only one or two people they can depend on, if any, the unconditional love of a pet plays an important role in our lives.[i] “Pets are filling a gap,” observed Greg Hartmann, CEO of Veterinary Centers of America (VCA), one of the largest for-profit veterinary medical enterprises. He noted that young adults are waiting until later in life to get married and have children, if they have children at all. “We’re seeing now the younger generation, millennial and Gen Z, own nearly half of the pets in the U.S., and their spending behaviors seem to be outpacing the preceding generations.”[ii]

These trends have not been lost on billionaire wealth extractors, who are looking for the opportunities to siphon income off every corner of the pet-provisioning sector. As a result, there has been an unprecedented concentration of ownership over the last decade in pet food, pet stores, and veterinary care, and pet services, like Rover.com. The biggest players in the pet economy include dynastic billionaire families like the Mars candy clan and the German-Reimann family (JAB industries), along with billionaire-backed private equity firms that are snatching up companies in the pet sector.

Veterinary Care. One of the most startling areas of consolidation is in veterinary care. An estimated 25 percent of all general veterinary services are now owned by billionaires and private equity firms, up from 5 percent a decade ago. And the wealth aggregators own an estimated 75 percent of specialty veterinary clinics and hospitals, the most profitable segment of the sector.[iii] It is no coincidence that over the last decade, the cost of veterinary care has risen by more than 60 percent, dramatically outpacing inflation.[iv] I suspect this is largely due to the impact of private investor consolidation in the sector.

The single biggest owner of pet-care products is the Mars family, the third-generation candy making dynasty worth an estimated $117 billion, making them the second wealthiest family in the U.S. after the Waltons of Walmart. The Mars family and their notoriously secretive, privately held company own 2,500 pet-care facilities including BluePearl and Veterinary Centers of America (VCA). They also own several pet-food companies, an online pet pharmacy, and a kitty-litter company.

The second largest consolidator of pet health care is National Veterinary Associations or NVA, with 1,100 clinics and hospitals. They are known for buying up local mom and pop practices, keeping the same name, signage, and veterinarians –such that you may not know that your pet care is coming from a global conglomerate. NVA is owned by the Reimann family, the second richest family in Germany, with a dark Nazi past, and owners of JAB Holding Company.

As with human health care, billionaire consolidators aim to extract big coin on veterinary services, pushing expensive tests and pricey interventions, instituting aggressive billing and collection, and focusing on cost-cutting on the service side, including squeezing wages from employees.

Four major private equity buy-outs of veterinary care operations occurred in the first half of 2024. Billionaires and their private equity firms are interested in these businesses because they are high consumer demand, largely cash pay, and buffered from the business cycle –along with historically being a less regulated corner of health care.[v] These vulture investors typically collect management fees on all transactions, strip out profitable assets (including real estate), call the shots in terms of major decision-making in the practice, and charge fees for monitoring them, even as some of the companies they acquire spiral into bankruptcy. “It’s like setting the fire, being paid to put out the fire, and collecting the insurance on the fire all at the same time,” quipped Stephen Dubner, host of Freakonomics Radio.

Consolidation and the monopoly power it produces allows a smaller number of pet-care providers to raise prices and suppress wages for veterinary workers, especially in localities without a lot of choices of provider.

Pet Services like Dog Walking and Sitters. My friend Katherine earns a little extra income walking dogs. Recently she started finding clients through an on-line platform called Rover.com. “Rover takes 20 percent for making the match,” Katherine told me. “They’re just an app, taking a fifth of my earnings. And they charge the pet owner an 11 percent booking fee, capped at $50.” Rover charges a pet care provider $49 to put a profile up on their account. In addition to matchmaking, Rover offers a guarantee to both parties and back-up insurance, claiming in their motto, “We’re here for you.” But when Katherine encountered a dangerous dog situation—and reached out with some urgency—the company failed to respond to requests for help. “Meanwhile, the person providing services is on the hook for any liabilities,” Katherine said, sharing the fine print of the service agreement. “Rover absolves itself of responsibility for just about everything. Pet owner and service provider beware.”

In November 2023, the billionaire-backed private equity firm Blackstone, with over $1 trillion in assets, acquired Rover for $2.3 billion in cash. They see nothing but growth in the pet care space.

Katherine went on to describe the cost of veterinary care for her late dog, Princess Lucy. “You walk into that clinic, and they swipe your credit card, and you know you won’t be walking out of there for less than $1,000 and probably much more.” And let’s not even talk about pet stores and pet food. The 1,500-store Petco company is owned by the Luxembourg-based private equity firm CVC Capital Partners. And an estimated 95 percent of the common pet food brands are owned by six global conglomerates, with number one being the Mars family, followed by Nestlè Purina, Smucker’s, Colgate-Palmolive, Diamond, and General Mills.

Be careful what you love, because the billionaires are paying attention; they will figure out how to siphon as much of what you’re willing to spend on your passion as they can.

Animal Politics with Ed Boks

Navigating the Rising Costs of Veterinary Care: A Call to Action for Animal Welfare Organizations

In recent years, the landscape of veterinary care has undergone a remarkable transformation, mirroring the advancements seen in human healthcare. A recent New York Times article by Katie Thomas, The Costs of Caring for Pets, provides a thorough examination of these changes, highlighting both the benefits and the challenges that come with them…

Read more

2 years ago · 25 likes · 22 comments · Ed Boks

My response to Greg: “An economy rigged to funnel so much wealth and power to the billionaire class is bad for you and everyone else. It undermines your life in some major ways.”

I wrote my new book, Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power are Ruining Our Lives and Planet, for folks like Greg to talk about how extreme wealth inequality disrupts our daily lives. Here are ten ways you are being burned by billionaires, pulled from my book.

My analysis doesn’t focus on the behavior of individual billionaires — though some are gnarly ones (while a handful show signs of decency). The problem is the system of laws, rules and regulations tipped in favor of big asset owners at the expense of wage earners and working folks.

When I’m talking about billionaires, I’m thinking of more people than the 905 U.S. billionaires that together control about $7.8 trillion in wealth. I include the top one-tenth of 1 percent, the 0.1 percent of households that have over $40 million on up to the billionaire class. People with wealth north of $40 or $50 million have every need and desire met and easily accumulate power. They’re not just buying mansions and private jets but also lawmakers and media outlets. That’s when we need to sound the alarm about “the billionaires.”

Here are ten of the ways you are personally getting burned by billionaires:

1. The billionaires stick you with their tax bill. By opting out of their tax obligations, the billionaire class is shifting responsibility on to you to pay for everything from infrastructure to national defense to veterans services.

2. They rob you of your voice and vote. With the billionaire capture of the government, what you think barely matters. Your vote might still make a difference, but only in marginal situations where the billionaires haven’t dominated candidate selection, campaign finance, and policy priorities. The billionaires love gridlock and government shutdowns because they can block popular legislation from happening.

3. The billionaires supercharge the housing crisis — and profit from it. Billionaire demand for luxury housing is driving up the cost of land and housing construction, supercharging the already existing housing crisis. Billionaire speculators are buying up rental housing, single family homes, and mobile home parks to squeeze more money out of the housing shortage. Global billionaires are coming to “tax haven USA” to park their money in U.S. farmland, timber and housing.

4. They inflame existing divisions in society. The billionaires don’t want you to understand how they are picking your pocket. So, they invest heavily — pouring millions into partisan media organizations and divisive politicians — to deflect our attention away from their harmful behavior. Their divisive policy and social agenda drives down wages, worsens the historic racial wealth divide, and scapegoats immigrants.

5. They are trashing your environment. The billionaires are the super polluters and carbon emitters, burning up the earth with their excessive consumption through yachts, private jets, and multiple mansions. While you’re recycling and walking, they are zooming around in private jets and yachts with the carbon emissions and pollution of small nation states. While we all need to do our part, the billionaires make us feel like chumps for making ecological choices and sacrifices.

6. They are making you sick. Billionaire backed private-equity funds are buying up hospitals and health specialties — along with big pharma drug companies — with the aim of squeezing more out of health care consumers. Health outcomes in societies with extreme disparities in wealth are worse for everyone, even the rich, than societies with less inequality.

7. They are blocking timely action on climate change. Fossil fuel billionaires spend millions to block the transition to a healthy future. They fund politicians to declare a bogus energy emergency to keep their coal plants open and shut down competing wind projects. They are literally running out the clock for our governments to take action to avert the worst impacts of climate disruption.

8. They are coming for your pets. Billionaire private equity funds know we love our pets like family members and are sometimes willing to go into debt for their health care. To squeeze more money out of us, the billionaires are buying up veterinary care, medical specialties, pet food and supply – and even pet care services like Rover.com.

9. They are dictating what’s on your dinner plate. The food barons — the billionaires that monopolize almost every sector of the food economy — are dictating the price, ingredients, and supply of most food stuffs.

10. They are corrupting charity and philanthropy. Billionaire philanthropy has become a taxpayer subsidized form of private power and influence. As philanthropy gets more top-heavy — with most charity dollars flowing from the ultra-wealthy — it distorts and warps the independence of the nonprofit sector.

11. Bonus: They are buying up and hijacking the media. The billionaires are buying up the media: broadcast, social media, news outlets. We need more news and social media outlets that are independent of billionaires, like this one!

Burned by Billionaires isn’t another gloom and doom book. I talk a lot about what we can do together to fight the billionaire hijacking of our society and democracy. And you can read about our faces on the frontlines in our Inequality.org newsletter every week to see how people are taking action. A few action steps you can undertake today:

1. Talk to your neighbors about these ten ways they are feeling the billionaire burn. Organize a discussion group of Burned by Billionaires. Don’t act alone. Join with others.

2. Advocate for taxing the rich and ensuring that billionaires pay their fair share. When your neighbor understandably complains about local and state taxes, explain how the billionaire class has lobbied for tax law changes — to shift taxes off the wealthy and onto everyone else; off federal tax systems onto local; off taxes on income from wealth and into taxes on wages.

3. Game-changing campaigns. Advocate for policies that tax billionaire wealth and invest in housing, educational opportunity, and the energy transition away from earth-cooking fossil fuels. If federal changes are blocked by the billionaires, work at the state and local level. Tax luxury real estate transfers to fund affordable housing. Tax private jet fuel and fund green transit. Tax billionaire inheritances and fund debt-free higher education and job training.

4. Join the satirical resistance: Trillionaires For Trump! We see the power of comedians and late-night talk show hosts. You can join a new comic resistance effort, see www.trillionairesfortrump.org. Have fun while imitating and parodying the powerful billionaires and join their new health campaign, “Go Fund Yourself!”

5. If you haven’t already checked out Inequality.org, the web site I co-edit. Please sign up for our weekly newsletter HERE. Every week we lift up action campaigns and heroic “faces on the frontline” of people working to reverse extreme wealth inequality.

If this intrigues you, I hope you’ll buy Burned by Billionaires from your local independent bookstores or online. Learn more at www.burnedbybillionaires.com.

**

Chuck Collins is a researcher, campaigner and storyteller based at the Institute for Policy Studies, where he directs the Program on Inequality and the Common Good and co-edits, Inequality.org. He is the author of ten books about the impact of inequality on our lives, including The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions, Born on Third Base, and (with Bill Gates Sr.) Wealth and Our Commonwealth.

In this book of fiction, author Chuck Collins (who came of age in the late 1970s) challenges the reader to contemplate the rights and wrongs of different acts or methods of civil disobedience, and to ask the difficult questions of how much one is willing to risk in order to stop the terrifying destabilization of Earth’s fragile community of life. The reader follows the emerging radicalization of the main character, Rae Kelliher, from her 20s through to her death.

The book opens at the end of Rae’s long life with her decision to commit a drastic and violent act in a desperate attempt to stop what she considers to be a greater evil. This was prompted by her fury after learning that the Big Oil companies had long known about the catastrophic effects of climate change and the role of their products in creating it but had done nothing to prevent it. After much discernment, Rae decides to kill an oil company executive by detonating an explosive device concealed in her clothing. Although the path to her principled action is clear to her, it baffles and bewilders her friends and many in the peace community. As the effect of this shocking murder–suicide ripples throughout the peace and activist community, readers are given the opportunity to explore their own reactions and feelings about whether Rae’s decision could be justified or how it might ultimately set back the environmental movement.

The book then goes back some decades to share her story, beginning with the many influences along her path to radical action. This includes living in communities in western Massachusetts and southern Vermont, where she learns about simple living and caring for the land. Rae travels to Central America with Witness for Peace, risks arrest at the School of the Americas, and engages in many more public demonstrations over the decades. She is also influenced by the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian and pacifist who had joined one of several plots to assassinate Adolf Hitler and was eventually arrested and executed by the Nazis. This raised many questions for Rae since she considered herself a pacifist.

The book is divided into the stages of Rae’s political and social awakening, starting with formation and including but not limited to resistance, discipleship, and reckoning. She is greatly influenced by Quakers, and throughout the book, Quaker values are lifted up, along with the exemplary lives of many Quaker elders. Wally and Juanita Nelson, real people who lived and farmed at the Woolman Hill Quaker Retreat Center in western Massachusetts, provide support and guidance to the fictional Rae. Collins also puts Rae into a relationship with another real person, Brian Willson, who lost his legs at a peace demonstration when an oncoming train carrying weapons bound for Central America didn’t stop.

Collins brilliantly and seamlessly intersperses real and fictional people throughout the book, lending a feeling that what the reader is experiencing is all real history. Having lived in New England for about 50 years, I have attended a number of the demonstrations and protests mentioned in this book, or ones very similar, so it all felt very real and personal to me.

The author has had his own journey of radical witness. As the great-grandson and heir of Oscar Mayer of hot dog fame, Collins gave away his inheritance to deserving organizations, understanding how damaging income and wealth inequality is in a society. Over several decades, he has been an inspiration to many for his work to bring about a sane and healthy planet. I am personally grateful for the light that his book sheds on the challenges and dilemmas that he faced as he charted his own course as an environmental activist.

Ruah Swennerfelt is author of Rising to the Challenge: The Transition Movement and People of Faith. She is also a homesteader and board member of Vermont Interfaith Power and Light and Transition Town Charlotte, Vermont. Ruah is active with New England Quakers, Transition US and New England Resiliance and Transition Network. She blogs at transitonvision.org and tweets at @ruahswennerfelt.

These trends are flickers of possibilities, cracks in what sometimes appears to be an impermeable system of concentrated wealth and power.  These dissenters of the power elite, who by no means constitute a majority of the ultra-wealthy, are working together with promising movements to address the harms of extreme inequality, racial capitalism, and the need for reparations and healing.

Here are a few of these signs of the time:

• A veteran wealth advisor starts a new firm to help wealthy clients entirely rethink their relationship to wealth. She sparks a “progressive advisor’s movement,” including the tax attorneys, accountants, wealth managers, and family office staffers, to join to a higher purpose: aiding their clients to deploy wealth to heal the harms caused by wealth extraction.

• A segment of these wealth managers, members of the trusted couture of enablers that serve the ultra-wealthy, are defecting, blowing the whistle on systemic abuses and helping craft laws to close the tax loopholes that they helped to create.

• Wealth holders are pledging to radically redistribute their wealth, seeking ways to share decision-making and power to “decolonize wealth.”

• Former philanthropists are calling for “taxing the rich” through the endowments of foundations.

• Wealthy individuals and families are forgoing their privacy – sometimes facing belittlement and attack – to publicly speak out in favor of higher taxes on the wealthy, higher wages for workers, and reforms in the laws governing philanthropy.

While there are historical examples of random '‘class traitors,” rejecting wealth and its trappings, what’s new about this new movement is the scale and institutional formation, what organizer Michael Gast has described as an unprecedented ecosystem of “organizing the rich” activity.

Driven by Extreme Inequality and Climate Disruption

We are living through a period of extraordinary wealth inequality, with the lion’s share of income and wealth gains of the last two decades flowing not just to the richest 1 percent, but to the richest 0.1 percent, those with assets north of $30 million. On March 18th, 2020, at the beginning of COVID-19 pandemic, there were 615 hundred billionaires in the U.S. with a total combined wealth of $2.9 trillion. Four years later, on March 18, 2024, there were 737 billionaires with total combined wealth of $5.5 trillion, a four-year gain of 88 percent.

These trends have given rise to a wide variety of social disruptions, both radical and reactionary. On the positive side, there is a generation of wealth holders that are rejecting the historical socialization of the ultra-wealthy to hold onto wealth and create multi-generational dynastic institutions to protect, manage, and hoard assets. Propelled by the harms of extreme inequality, racial injustice, and climate disruption, these wealth holders are also rejecting traditional philanthropy, with its focus on creating perpetual legacy foundations and institutions. Instead, they are aggressively moving money, often through intermediaries that share decision-making, and to grassroots social change movements.

Members of wealth networks like Resource Generation, Solidaire, Threshold, are engaged in peer-to-peer support to boldly redistribute. Resource Generation (RG) encourages members to reject “making wealth off of wealth” and take a redistribution pledge to give away “all or almost all inherited wealth and/or excess income to social justice movements.” 

RG also encourages members to move capital out of traditional Wall Street investments in corporations and “practice regenerative, values-aligned strategies for investing our resources to build a world where land, wealth, and power are shared equitably.”  They point to opportunities for direct loans and investments in high-impact funds and projects.

Resource Generation is rethinking how it relates to financial advisers, helping their members navigate a field that is biased against redistribution. To be included on their referral list, the organization is now inviting financial advisers to fill out a survey that includes how they would respond to various scenarios, including a client that wants to give away 10 percent of their wealth every year for 10 years to racial justice groups. “Believe it or not, there is a growing market for anti-capitalist wealth advisers,” says Nora Leccese of Resource Generation.

A number of these networks have joined together to change the laws governing philanthropic giving. They are rejecting the ways that philanthropy has been captured by billionaire donors, some of whom are deploying philanthropy as a taxpayer-subsidized form of private power and influence.  An emerging “donor revolt for charity reform” is pressing for law changes to accelerate payouts, increase transparency, and shut down the tax avoidance and self-dealing aspects of philanthropy.

Cracks in the Wealth Defense Industry

The wealth defense industry are the professional enablers that serve the families of the ultra-wealthy. They are trained tax attorneys, accountants, members of the Society for Trust and Estate Planners, staffers at family offices. Their north star is to aid families in maximizing wealth accumulation, minimizing taxation, and fostering dynastic succession, ensuring that as much wealth as possible flows down a narrow blood line to future generations. 

But there are defectors from the industry’s norms. Stephanie Brobbey, a veteran wealth manager based in London, formed her own advisory firm, Good Ancestor Movement. In an interview for YES Magazine, Brobbey told me, “We are pioneering a radically different path for wealth stewardship – to move from a system of wealth extraction to a regenerative economy where wealth is more fairly distributed.”

“We ask our clients,” Brobbey said, “What harm may have been caused in the process of the extraction or ongoing accumulation of this wealth? Were there groups of people [who] were harmed? Was there ecological harm? And what, based on this, is imperative for you to do?

The answer is not always philanthropy. Redistribution outside philanthropy can take the form of paying taxes – at the local, state and federal level. It can mean transferring assets into community-controlled ventures, forming partnerships with social movements and communities that have been excluded from wealth for generations.

“What really inspires me is the potential of the great wealth transfer,” says Brobbey, referring to the trillions passing from the Baby Boomer generation to their children and grandchildren, mostly in the upper canopy of the wealth forest. “We want to be ready and optimistic that there will be people who want to radically redistribute this wealth for repair and regeneration. Our clients will be partners in pursuing a radically different vision of the world,” she adds. “This is a lifelong journey of healing for all of us as we try to recover a lost story – or write a new economic story of justice and collective liberation.”

Organizing the Wealthy to Change the Rules

A segment of wealth holders are using their wealth, status and influence to change the laws that are tipped in favor of asset owners at the expense of wage earners. The Patriotic Millionaires includes several hundred high net worth individuals that speak out for policies to increase taxes on themselves. They actively lobby for taxes on higher incomes and wealth, as part of a comprehensive plan to revamp the tax code

The Patriotic Millionaires have spawned sister efforts in the UK, Europe and other parts of the world. At the 2024 meeting of the World Economic Forum at Davos, more than 250 billionaires and millionaires, in an open letter, urged lawmakers in their nation states to “tax our extreme wealth.”

These networks are activated at the local level as well, with wealthy individuals pressing for state level wealth taxes. In Vermont, over 35 millionaires signed an open letter to state legislators in support of a 3 percent higher income tax rate on incomes over $500,000 to fund affordable housing programs. The letter states: “Here in Vermont, we take care of our neighbors and form close relationships that transcend economic circumstances. Public investment, funded through tax revenue, is necessary to amplify these community efforts and fund programs that strengthen our communities….[It is] important for Vermonters – especially our state legislators – to know that many of the people who will pay these taxes support them…We love living in Vermont and appreciate the public goods that taxes provide.”

The signers include Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream, Renee Reiner, co-owner of Phoenix Books, green energy entrepreneurs Duane Peterson, David Blittersdorf, and Alan Newman, of Gardener’s Supply Company, and Magic Hat Brewing Company. 

Four decades of growing inequality has led to interesting shifts in public opinion, including the attitudes of the wealthy. A majority of households in G-20 countries with more than $1 million in wealth support higher taxes on themselves. January 2024 polling found 74 percent of millionaire households support wealth taxes to address the cost of living crisis and improve public services. 72% think that extreme wealth helps buy political influence, and 54% think that extreme wealth is a threat to democracy itself.

The power of today’s billionaires – and their enablers in the wealth defense industry – are formidable. They command huge pools of resources and have captured the political systems, in oligarchic fashion, all over the world. Yet the cracks in the system are appearing, a harbinger of the new possibilities for decolonizing wealth and building regenerative economies to serve human, and more-than-human, needs and flourishing.

*originally published in “Healing Wealth” Volume 24, Issue 3 of the Kosmos Journal

How about this one: Private developers proposing to double the amount of hangar space for private luxury jets at Hanscom Field claim this will reduce the number of private jet flights and reduce carbon emissions.

Independent research has debunked this. The question remains whether Governor Maura Healey will stop this massive expansion from going forward.

A bit of background: The Massport-owned Hanscom Field outside Boston (not the Air Force Base) is already New England’s second busiest airport after Logan. It’s also the region’s largest private jet airport, with an estimated 38,000 annual jet operations.

A year ago, two private developer firms submitted a joint proposal to dramatically expand Hanscom’s private jet facilities. This March, they submitted a Draft Environmental Impact statement (DEIR) claiming this massive expansion will be “net zero” — and will somehow decrease flights and emissions.

In the face of record temperature rises in 2023, there’s greater scrutiny of luxury private jet travel. Private jet travel is perhaps the most carbon-intensive form of travel on the planet, emitting 10 to 20 times more pollution per passenger than commercial flights.

According to the developers, there’s an acute crisis of unhoused private jets flying about looking for parking. Lack of hangar space, they contend, means that private jets must drop their well-heeled passengers off at Hanscom and then “ferry flight” to another regional airport for parking (but not Boston Logan, which has no housing for private jets, nor space for such housing). More hangars, they claim, could eliminate 3,543 ferry flights a year.

Last fall, I co-authored a report that found that half the flights in and out of Hanscom were to luxury and recreation destinations. Out of 31,599 private jet operations, we identified just one aircraft — making fewer than 20 trips — that fit the definition of a ferry flight. A private jet owned by billionaire Arthur S. Demoulas regularly travels from Hanscom to Nashua.

Now another independent researcher, Industrial Economics, Inc., working with a larger data set, has issued a report disputing the developers’ projection. They identify only 132 ferry flight reductions — which would be offset by adding 6,000 flights a year, contributing an additional 150,000 tons of emissions.

Their conclusion: “Emissions associated with full utilization of planned capacity far outweigh any emissions savings…by a factor of 950 to 3,900.”

Private jet consumption mirrors the growing concentration of wealth in the hands of the richest 0.1%. The median wealth of a private jet owner, according to WealthX, is $190 million. As inequality increases, demand for private jets is surging — just look at the private jet traffic for the Super Bowl, eclipse-watching, and the Masters golf tournament.

The private jet lobby claims that “sustainable aviation fuels” will reduce its carbon footprint, which the developer’s proposal also mentions. But while there is a tiny nugget of possibility for alternative sources of fuel, there is currently no realistic or scalable alternative to kerosene-based fuels that would meet current aviation needs, let alone projections for future growth.

Statewide opposition to the project is growing — and some policy makers are getting the message. “I know the destruction you folks intend to wreak on Massachusetts and I resent it,” said state Senator Mike Barrett, who represents the four towns where Hanscom is located.

“Please don’t erect these bogus environmental rationales for something that has nothing whatsoever to do with relieving the crisis that faces us in terms of climate,” Barrett said at the developers’ public hearing. “Just be honest about it. This is all about becoming a little richer yourselves by helping people even richer than you.”

The private jet lobby represents the most wealthy and powerful people on the planet, so they’re used to getting their way. But don’t let their lawyers and PR firms cloud your common sense.

The hard truth is you can’t eat three banana splits a day, sit on the couch, and lose 50 lbs. And you can’t build a massive private jet facility and save the planet.

*Originally published as an opinion piece in the Boston Herald, May 2024