I joined Michael Medved’s show recently to talk about the worsening wealth gap. Bullet points below. Here’s the clip. (Sorry for the jiggly video, I’ve since fixed it!)
Inequality has been worsening for at least 30 years, as more of the nation’s wealth goes to people who own financial assets and less goes to workers earning most of their income through labor.
These trends are accelerating under Trump.
It starts with tax cuts for the wealthy, who don’t need them. Wealthy Americans have earned extraordinary amounts of money during the last 30 years from a booming stock market and the rise in real-estate values. There’s nothing wrong with that, but they didn’t need the 2025 tax cuts Trump signed into law.
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Trump, meanwhile, has cut food-aid benefits for lower-income Americans. And last year Congress let health care subsidies expire for at least 3 million people who buy insurance through the ACA marketplace. Those moves have made several million lower-income people worse off.
Trump’s Iran war is another burden for working Americans. The higher cost of gas and many other necessities hurts lower-income Americans more than higher-income people.
Tariffs raise costs even more. The average tax on imports has gone from 2.6% to about 12% under Trump, so far. Importers pay the tariffs up front, but pass on as much of the added tax as they can to their own customers, with no apparent benefit to anybody.
The housing bill Congress recently passed may help make homes more affordable at some point, but Trump distanced himself from that and called it a “big yawn.” He seems to have no regard at all for the cost struggles of ordinary Americans.
Wealth inequality is complicated and not readily understood by everybody, but many people know something’s wrong, even if they can’t define it precisely. This is probably one of the reasons consumer confidence levels are dismal, even in an economy that looks pretty good on paper.
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As a (mostly) retired person whose spouse is also nearly there, I thought I'd check where we sit based on the net worth spectrum (rather than on the income spectrum, as that's far less relevant to us now). https://dqydj.com/net-worth-percentile-calculator/ showed me that a household with $1M in assets (excldg house - assume paid off) is in the top 18.5% and one with $2M is in the top 7.5% of all households. This was eye-opening for me, showing me how your comments perfectly hit the mark.
It's "nice" for people in my situation to enjoy the OBBBA tax cuts but we didn't really need them, especially as they're coming at the expense of people who're really struggling, whether with general cost of living levels and inflation (vs annual wages & their growth) and/or with decent healthcare access and/or with the ability to afford a home purchase (young households) and at the expense of our kids and future generations as we saddle them with an enormous and ever-growing debt load.
All this makes me feel dirty. Significantly increasing charitable contributions can act as a bit of a salve on this "moral injury" felt by folks in my position, but there's no guarantee doing that will help with the general population's actual problems, which have worsened under OBBBA and other Trump policies.
No wonder there's a radical reaction to this situation seen in the consumer sentiment surveys, which is being exploited by the DSA and others.
Doesn't make for a cheerful day, that's for sure. How "wealthy" people don't have qualms about the situation we're in is beyond me. The only way to not let it bother you is to take a view along the lines of "I totally deserve all I have; those who don't have much are responsible for their own situations and are simply 'takers' in our society", i.e. a jaundiced, cynical view of your fellow citizen. As I heard someone say, this is the kind of thing taken to an extreme that leads to revolutions and guillotines.
Well your argument is summed up i the "Ordinary American's.These are the largest population in America. The ordinary who make this a great country to live end.Trump if you want to be honest about it "is the swamp". He is not the only one. There are a lot of politicians from both sides who have no interest in the "Ordinary American's.You no which way the wind blow's.It blow's in their direction.