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economic growth
Since 1975, $79 Trillion Has Flowed From Bottom 90% to Top 1% in US: Analysis
Sanders used the findings of a recent working paper to denounce Republicans' determination to pass tax cuts that will benefit wealthy Americans the most.
Mar 04, 2025
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday used a new working paper about income distribution over the past several decades to push back against congressional Republicans and President Donald Trump's effort to pass more tax giveaways for the rich.
The recent working paper from the nonpartisan research organization RAND, which was authored by Carter Price, aimed to quantify how much money the majority of workers—the bottom 90% by income—would have made if earnings growth had not begun to disproportionately flow to those with the highest incomes starting in the 1970s.
According to Price, assuming the same distribution of income among workers as in 1975—and taking into account continued economic growth, continued growth in inequality, and inflation—the majority of workers would have made an additional $3.9 trillion dollars in 2023. Cumulatively, "the gap between what workers from 1975 to 2023 earned and what they would have earned with the counterfactual income distribution" tallies at $79 trillion in 2023 dollars, per Price.
"The massive income and wealth inequality in America today is not only morally unjust, it is profoundly damaging to our democracy," wrote Sanders (I-Vt.) on Tuesday in response to the study.
The analysis updates earlier numbers on the same topic. A previous analysis from Price and a co-author found the gap between what the majority of workers earn and what they could have earned if the more "uniform growth rates from the 50s and '60s" had continued totaled $47 trillion in 2018 dollars.
Sanders used the update from RAND to discuss the current aims of Trump and Republicans in Congress.
"Over and over again, my Republican colleagues have expressed their deep concern about the redistribution of wealth in America, and they are right," Sanders continued. "The problem is that it has gone in precisely the wrong direction."
Sanders opposes Republicans' intent to provide tax cuts primarily for the wealthy, which will almost certainly be paid for by cuts to Medicaid, nutrition assistance, and more. "We must do the exact opposite," he wrote.
Last week, House Republicans were able to pass a budget resolution that tees up those tax cuts after Trump intervened to pressure wavering members to vote for it.
The resolution instructs the House Energy and Commerce Committee to "submit changes in laws within its jurisdiction to reduce the deficit by not less than" $880 billion over the next decade. That panel has jurisdiction over Medicaid, which the GOP has repeatedly targeted in public and private discussions, with one leaked document floating over $2 trillion in cuts to the program.
Republicans also rejected numerous Democratic amendments that would have prevented Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program cuts in the upcoming budget reconciliation process as their resolution moved through committees.
Sanders has been a consistent voice speaking out against the cuts. "Trump and his Republican friends want to enact massive cuts to the [Medicaid] program. We won't let them," wrote Sanders last week.
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Economic Growth Is the World’s Most Dangerous Game
The game of growth has convinced us that the only way we can win is to continue to play.
Dec 14, 2024
In Richard Connell’s popular short story “The Most Dangerous Game,” hunter Sanger Rainsford goes overboard while sailing to the Amazon, washing up on an island owned by deceivingly charismatic General Zaroff. Rainsford expects Zaroff to help him off the island, but instead, Zaroff invites him to participate in a hunt.
A hunt, to Rainsford’s utter disbelief, in which he is the prey.
Our reckless pursuit of economic growth has become society’s “most dangerous game.” It keeps us trapped on an island of inequality, environmental degradation, and corporate power, all while convincing us there’s still a chance we can win if we continue to play.
To win this game, we can’t keep playing by the rules, but rewrite them entirely. We can start by challenging one of the most dominant rules of the growth model: Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
But there is no “winning” in a game dependent on the exploitation of people and nature. As long as “growth” is defined by profits and production, people and the planet will always lose.
That is, unless you are one of the few Zaroffs of the world: According to an Oxfam report, the world’s top 1% own more wealth than 95% of humanity, and over the past 30 years, income inequality has steadily risen to the point where many economists believe wealth is more stratified today than any time since the Gilded Age.
If economic growth doesn’t deliver its promised benefits, then why do we continue to play? Because those who preach economic growth as a path to prosperity—usually the same people who bag the most benefit—have engineered a game of forced “choice:” Hunt, or be hunted. As Zaroff explains to Rainsford, “I give him his option, of course.” But if they decline, he hands them over to his servant for torture. “Invariably,” Zaroff muses, “they choose the hunt.”
The same logic is used to silo economic and environmental objectives, perpetuating the false premise that reducing poverty and raising living standards must come at the cost of climate action. Such “choice” is equally manufactured—if economic growth is truly a means of improving societal well-being, shouldn’t actions that secure and sustain access to basic necessities be a vital part of our economy?
Even Americans seem to agree that economic growth is an incomplete measure of prosperity. In a nationally-representative survey of 3,000 participants, conducted by survey organization Verasight between October 21 and November 5, only 12.8% (with a 2.3% margin of error) responded that economic growth is a “mostly accurate” way of assessing societal well-being. The rest were skeptical, with 50.8% calling it “somewhat accurate” and 36.5% deeming it inaccurate altogether.
And yet, despite the dissatisfaction, dissonance, and destruction that our economic model begets, pundits and policymakers “invariably” brandish growth as the hallmark of prosperity. Meanwhile, the Zaroffs of the world continue to indulge their unchecked appetite for profit, capitalizing off the preservation of the status quo.
To win this game, we can’t keep playing by the rules, but rewrite them entirely. We can start by challenging one of the most dominant rules of the growth model: Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
GDP is a measure of aggregate production, not a reflection of progress and well-being. It excludes the costs of pollution and exploitation and ignores 16.4 billion hours of unpaid labor, much of which is performed by women. It also omits many non-materialistic goods (health, family, and equality) that define happiness and quality of life. In fact, economists have always warned against conflating GDP with societal well-being—even one of its founders, Simon Kuznets, told Congress that GDP was a poor tool for policymaking.
As Robert Kennedy put it in his 1968 election speech, GDP “measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.” By adopting more inclusive measures of progress that consider health, equality, and environmental well-being, we can move beyond the flawed metric of GDP as a measure of prosperity. In doing so, we build economies that prioritize people and the planet instead of outrageous profits.
Such measures are already gaining traction in the U.S. and across the globe. For example, India’s Ease of Living Index assesses the well-being of 114 Indian cities, using a total of 50 indicators that fall under three pillars: Quality of Life, economic ability, and sustainability. At the international scale, the United Nations is working to advance a “Human Rights Economy” that anchors all economic decisions in human rights. In the U.S., Vermont became the first state to adopt an alternative to GDP called the “Genuine Progress Indicator” in 2012, shortly followed by Maryland and 19 other states.
These measures aren’t perfect, nor should they be the only way we address a system that continues to inflict irreparable damage on global ecosystems and communities. However, they play a crucial role in disrupting our current growth paradigm, establishing an economic model where well-being isn’t exclusive to the wealthy, and where societal and environmental objectives are aligned.
It’s time we expose the injustices of our economic system, rewrite the rules, and beat the Zaroffs of the world at their own game.
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Beware the Fasci-Clown: Working Class Anxiety in an Age of Climate Catastrophe
Much of the working class, feeling neglected and sidelined by the Democratic Party for decades, are increasingly prepared to allow Trump to twist and turn their grievances into shapes that fit a fascist agenda.
Nov 13, 2024
We now live during the time of the fasci-clown. In post-election analyses, all the discussions of the appeal of his racism and patriarchy capture important things. But they may not speak starkly enough to why these sentiments run so deep and cut so broad a swath, though for different reasons, through both the white donor class and so much of the working class. Neither do they explain how and why growing segments of the populace laugh so much at Trump's fascist humor. Dressing up and clowning as a "garbage man" illustrates only one recent instance of that conjunction.
The donor class knows, and much of the working class senses, that neoliberal capitalism cannot survive in its old form for much longer. Knowing that, the donor class intends to capture as much wealth and power as it can in the time left to it, prepared to support a transition from neoliberalism to fascism if that is what it takes. Elon Musk is a perfect exemplar here, turning Twitter into a propaganda machine, becoming the fasci-clown’s Goebbels, and informally assuming the role of his economic lieutenant, preparing to impose punishing austerity in the name of a restoration of a pre-New Deal government. So much of the working class, feeling neglected and sidelined by the Democratic Party for decades, are increasingly prepared to allow Trump to twist and turn their grievances into shapes that fit a fascist agenda.
Why? Filtering into the sense of extreme entitlement of the superrich and desperation of growing segments of the working class-- sliding into those intensities in ways electoral polls do not directly capture--is a sense that the old alternatives are not working and cannot be sustained into the indefinite future. Workers, for instance, probably do not truly believe that climate wreckage is a liberal farce. Many sense that it is real, but that attempts to really reckon with it would leave them in the lurch. So they laugh at the clown's outrageous jokes, hateful comments about women, race, transgender people and immigration, and allow the fasci-clown to twist their grievances into support for his themes.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler, the fascist, malignant narcissist, and vicious humorist, summarized in two sentences the essence of his campaign to become Fuhrer:
"It belongs to the genius of a great leader to make even adversaries far removed from one another to belong to a single category, because in weak and uncertain characters the knowledge of having different enemies can only too readily lead to the beginning of doubt in their own right." And: "If he suspects they do not seem convinced by the soundness of his argument, repeat it over and over with constantly new examples."
The irony, just lurking below the rhetorical surface, is that neoliberal capitalism, in both the past and today, fosters the climate wreckage that helps to drive refugees north; and it will increasingly do so in the future.
For Hitler, writing after the massive German defeat in WWI, high inflation, and the return of hardened soldiers from battle with no jobs, Jews became the "red thread" to which he tied, through constant repetition, military defeat, social democracy, and communism. He thus condensed multiple adversaries into one enemy. For Trump, living during a time when imperial instabilities and climate wreckage create more and more refugees heading from southern to northern states, immigrants of color become the new red thread. The stagnation of the working class, the problems facing large cities, the "uppity-ness" of women of color, the snarky-ness of the liberal snowflake, and the loss of "black jobs," are all tied to the red thread of immigration. As you intensify opposition to immigration by, first, treating immigration as something insidious as such, and, second, linking it to everything else you oppose, you thereby loosen the rhetorical reins previously restraining public attacks on women, Blacks, Democrats, cities, and secularists. They are all now placed on the same line of associations, with resentments to any one magnified by those felt against others. A brilliant, cruel campaign.
The irony, just lurking below the rhetorical surface, is that neoliberal capitalism, in both the past and today, fosters the climate wreckage that helps to drive refugees north; and it will increasingly do so in the future. That is the truth that Trump and his followers must resist and shout down whenever it rears its ugly head. That is one reason racism must be intensified by the fasci-clown. This core truth must never be acknowledged: America works to produce the immigration it increasingly abhors.
But what about us? That is, what of those of us on the democratic left who have resisted Trump, supported Harris, and oppose the regime the fasci-comic seeks to impose? We participate, in at least one way, in the very condition we resist. As neoliberal capitalism morphs toward fascist capitalism during the second Trump term, we too have failed to come up with an alternative that could both work and attract droves from the working and middle classes to it.
This core truth must never be acknowledged: America works to produce the immigration it increasingly abhors.
As productive capitalism forges a future it cannot sustain in the face of growing climate wreckage, as many flirt with fascist capitalism to avoid facing this truth, nobody really believes in the alternative models of rapid growth and mastery over nature supported by classical social democracy and communism either. The danger of fascist capitalism, indeed, is tied to the failure of other familiar critical traditions to respond in a credible and sufficient way to the time of climate wreckage. This failure insinuates itself inside climate denialism and casualism today.
Such a failure encourages many to deny climate wreckage, that is, to embrace fascist tendencies. It may also encourage others to pretend that it can be resolved within either old forms of productive capitalism or one of the twentieth century alternatives to it. So, we critics, too are caught in a bind. We insist that immigration is good economically, by which we mean that it will lead to greater economic growth, when the truth is that the pursuit of that growth is at the heart of our current crisis. Is our failure connected in some subliminal sense to the growing attractions of many others to Big Lies today, to lies that growing numbers embrace without necessarily believing?
Our sense—though we cannot prove it—is that growing attractions to, and tolerances for, fascist capitalism within the working classes is tied to a larger intellectual failure to show how to evolve a political economy that curtails the future scope of climate wreckage while speaking to real grievances and anxieties of the working class writ large. Unless and until that happens it will not be that hard for fasci-clown leaders to attract the billionaire class and capture large segments of the working class. Fascist humor flourishes when no other responses to deep grievances appear credible.
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