The Billionaire Problem Isn’t Just Economic— It’s Existential For Dems Once The Working Class Party

We’re Either Going To Tax The Rich For Real Or Burn With Them

Paul Krugman wrote that Tuesday’s “CPI report looked fairly tame on the surface, but if you look at the details it showed clear signs that Trump’s tariffs are starting to drive up prices. And private surveys suggest that there’s a lot more inflation in the pipeline… I think Trump really is a Tariff Man who will keep us at Smoot-Hawley-level tariffs indefinitely, and businesses will eventually realize that and raise prices accordingly… Clearly, we shouldn’t expect Trump to admit that his tariffs are raising prices, or even to admit that prices are rising. What we can expect is that he will keep putting pressure on the Fed to cut interest rates. I don’t think he’ll manage to push Jerome Powell out before next May, but whoever he picks after that will do his bidding.”

Whoever he picks for any job, every job— especially every judge— will be selected to do his bidding. But when his decisions start impacting peoples’ wallets, that’s when easily manipulated low-info voters— a huge part of his base— start to pay attention and start to feel uncomfortable. The Republicans were wily to schedule the Medicaid cuts for after the midterms. Most voters probably won’t vote on that issue, even if the Journal of the American Medical Association predicts that Trump’s Big Ugly Bill will mean thousands will die who wouldn’t have.

Nonetheless, CNN reported that Democrats are far more motived to vote than Republicans. They may not like their own party, but they really hate the GOP. “Overall, 72% of Democrats and Democratic-aligned registered voters say they are extremely motivated to vote in next year’s congressional election… 22 points above the share of Republican and Republican-leaning voters who feel the same way now… Among voters younger than 45 who align with the Democrats, just 52% say most Democratic members of Congress deserve reelection, and 48% say they do not. Older Democratic voters, by contrast, say these elected officials deserve another term by a wide margin, 76% to 24%.”

The problem is the corporate-aligned Democratic establishment. They suck. Maybe not as bad as the GOP— but still terrible. Yesterday, Tessa Stuart wrote that polling conducted by Celinda Lake indicates that, “contrary to Beltway groupthink,” voters the Party lost last year would have preferred someone more progressive than Kamala. “According to Lake, the Americans who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and sat out the 2024 election generally hold a favorable view of Democrats, they believe inequality is at the heart of the country’s problems and health care should be available to everyone who needs it, and they want candidates committed to fighting for that vision. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the politicians most popular among the voters polled were the ones who have long campaigned on making health care accessible to all, and making billionaires pay their fair share: Senator Bernie Sanders  (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) were far and away the favorite candidates of voters polled. 78% of those polled held favorable views of Sanders, and 64% had favorable views of AOC. Governors Gavin Newsom (CA) and Gretchen Whitmer (MI) also polled reasonably well among these voters, earning favorability ratings 60 and 50 percent, respectively.”

Voters don’t know how terrible Newsom and Whitmer are yet.

Lake wrote that these voters “want leaders who will fight for everyone… They’re very health care-oriented…They want to crack down on Big Pharma… They’re very populist. They have a clear economic agenda around affordability and making the wealthy pay what they owe in taxes. You can’t get these voters by just being against things. You have to be for something… You have to be offering solutions… And you have to be standing up and fighting.”

Unlike the establishment shits who run the party, these voters want Medicare For All and they want the super rich to pay their fair share of taxes, although defining “fair share” is subject to immense disagreement with the Democratic party. I liked what one of the candidates for the AZ-07 congressional seats looked at it when he explained his “greed tax.” No-one should have over a billion dollars. Beyond that— taxes. Personally, I’d lower that to $100 million or maybe $50 million. I saw a comment on social media yesterday— I wish I could find it again— where the poster noted that the U.S. is the only country the world worried about taking money from billionaires who might leave more than worrying about taking money from poor people who might die.

And there’s more to this that Patriotic Millionaires shared with their supporters this week:

It's really easy to blame the rich for today’s problems, because frankly, they deserve it. The rich bear most of the blame for what’s wrong with our economy. They bear most of the blame for what’s wrong with our democracy. And, they bear most of the blame for what’s wrong with our planet too.

If this summer has made one thing clear, it’s that the impacts of climate change are here and time is running out to reverse the damage. June 2025 was the third-hottest June the world has experienced, and many states and cities in the Midwest and Northeast hit record high temperatures during the heat wave at the end of the month. In addition to the heat, we’re also experiencing more frequent and violent storms, as evidenced by the recent flash floods that have tragically claimed the lives of roughly 140 people in places like New Mexico, North Carolina, Texas and the New York City metro area. 

... The The world’s rich are driving the climate crisis, leaving the rest of humankind and the planet in a perilous position:

• The world’s wealthiest 10% contributed 6.5 times more than the average person to the global warming the planet experienced between 1990 and 2019. Meanwhile, the top 1% contributed 20 times more and the top 0.1% contributed 76 times more.

• In 2018, the average American had a carbon footprint of about 15 tons. Meanwhile, based on a sample of twenty billionaires, the carbon footprint of the average billionaire is 8,190 tons.

• Fifty of the world’s richest billionaires produce more carbon emissions in 90 minutes than the average person does in their life.

• Experts agree that we can’t let Earth’s temperature rise by more than 1.5 degrees centigrade if we want our entire planet to remain habitable. If the world continues on its current emission path, our carbon budget, i.e. the amount of carbon dioxide we can add to the atmosphere to stay under that 1.5°C mark, will be depleted in four years. However, if everyone emitted as much as the average billionaire, it would be depleted in two days.

• Billionaires emit so much pollution that they essentially cancel out the benefits of renewable energy sources like wind, solar, and hydropower. For example, every year, billionaires’ carbon emissions alone overpower the benefits of 1 million wind turbines.

... You may think the wealthy’s private jets, mega mansions, superyachts, and (for some) spaceships are just symbols for extreme inequality. But the truth is, their many luxury items and possessions are actually doing real and serious physical harm to the planet.

... The rich harm the environment not only through their own personal consumption habits but through their investments in fossil fuel companies as well. In 2023, Oxfam found that the investments of 125 of the world’s richest billionaires are responsible for an average of 3 million tons of carbon emissions each year. The typical investments we see wealthy people making are far, far more harmful than their personal indulgences. The average investment emissions of 50 of the world’s richest billionaires are roughly 340 times higher than their emissions from their private jets and superyachts.

Wealthy fossil fuel investors are committed to maintaining our planet’s destructive status quo, and they aren’t shy about making other investments— namely, political investments— to protect profit margins at their coal, gas, and oil companies. We also cannot ignore the fact that there are many other industries dependent on fossil fuels, which are also backed by wealthy people who have little financial incentive to pursue greener alternatives when the status quo is working for their bank accounts just fine. Americans for Prosperity, the conservative political advocacy group linked to oil and gas magnate Charles Koch, spent $20 million on an ad campaign this year promoting the extension of the 2017 GOP tax cuts. They certainly got their wish (and then some), as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act created a new, special carve-out to the Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax for large oil and gas companies.

... We'd be on a better path forward toward saving our planet if more millionaires and billionaires… had the courage to change their excessive consumption habits and divest from large fossil fuel companies on their own accord. Right now, we need the wealthy and corporations to prioritize creating sustainable and ethical changes to save our planet. These kinds of actions would help set the standard of how we can live within our means and still save our planet. We all have a role to play in protecting our planet, whether it’s something as small as using paper straws at your local coffee shop or something as big as giving up your private plane or superyacht. 

We know, it’s wishful thinking, because unfortunately having an excess of money and resources has created a sense of entitlement among wealthy people who are not going to give up their special gas-guzzling privileges and luxuries without a fight. But that doesn’t mean we can’t do anything to stop them from setting the planet on fire or drowning it.

The solution? In the famous words of Dutch historian and author Rutger Bregman, “Taxes, taxes, taxes.” If we’re not able to make millionaires and billionaires give up their polluting ways, we can use the tax code to encourage better behavior. Massachusetts Senator Edward Markey and Representative Nydia Velázquez (NY-07) proposed one such tax through the Fueling Alternative Transportation with a Carbon Aviation Tax (FATCAT) act, which we proudly endorsed. The legislation would increase fuel taxes for private jet travel from 22 cents to $2 per gallon and eliminate fuel tax exemptions for logging and oil and gas exploration. Not only would this dissuade the use of private jet travel, but it would also correct a big injustice in the tax code, where private jet fliers contribute just 2% of the taxes that go to the trust fund that predominantly finances the Federal Aviation Administration.

One of the best Democratic candidates anywhere is Saikat Chakrabarti, who is challenging Pelosi this cycle. Almost none of the groups that should be backing him are— Blue America is though— because everyone is afraid of Pelosi and her allies. In a recent interview with Jacobin he said that “Democrats need a new economic vision, and they need new leadership… For most people, the American Dream is dead. Their kids are not going to do better than them. People are having to work longer hours to be able to afford less and less. This trend has been getting worse for about fifty years now. This is, ultimately, why people keep voting for anyone campaigning on bold, sweeping economic and political change. In 2008, Barack Obama campaigned as a populist who would fight for Main Street, not Wall Street. In 2016, Trump campaigned against both parties to drain the swamp. In 2020, Joe Biden even pitched an ambitious economic vision with Build Back Better. People are open to radically different versions of what the vision of change looks like, but most agree that the status quo is simply not cutting it… Democrats don’t know who they stand for. People like AOC and Bernie are tapping into real energy by speaking out against oligarchy and presenting a vision of a party that fights tooth and nail for the working class. But much of the rest of the party is ignoring that, and the party leadership is busy wasting their time trying to woo the billionaire class. Democrats have neither an explanation for why working- and middle-class Americans are sinking nor a vision for how to reverse that… Democrats are seen as weak, incompetent, and sluggish. I experienced this firsthand when I worked in DC during Trump’s first term. The party felt like a slow, bloated corporation, completely blind to the rapidly changing world around it. While Trump flooded the news cycle with outrageous statements on a daily basis, Democrats would respond a week later with a ‘strongly worded statement’ at a press conference no one watched. By then, the conversation had already moved on.”

We should look at how the Democratic Party became the party that most workers aligned with in the first place. Before Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democratic Party was not the home of the working class. Reconstruction, the labor movement, and the radical working-class and multiracial Populist movement all took place outside of the Democratic Party.

No one would have said that the Democrats were a working-class party when Roosevelt took power. And no one would have said that Roosevelt was a working-class leader or a leader of the working class. But then he did something surprising: he did amazing politics.

He did that by bailing out every American’s life savings right after taking office and averting a total banking system collapse— and explaining exactly what he was doing directly to Americans on the radio with the same kind of thrilling suspense and drama that Trump uses (though Roosevelt’s version was strategic and caring as opposed to chaotic and cruel). He delivered life-saving assistance to most of the United States through Social Security, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the Works Progress Administration, the Civil Works Administration, the Surplus Commodities Program, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, and other social programs— all of which were completely new.

He built hundreds of thousands of miles of roads, tens of thousands of bridges, hundreds of airports, and extended electric power to almost all of America through the Tennessee Valley Authority and Rural Electrification Act. He put all of America to work defeating fascism by building the most powerful industrial economy in the world, creating a vast amount of new wealth as a byproduct. He unequivocally stood by unions so that the wealth from this new economy would be shared, creating the middle class. He trash-talked oligarchs and Wall Street, supported women’s rights, and even cautiously began hinting toward racial equality toward the end of his presidency. 

Roosevelt built a new economy and society that improved workers’ (and really everyone’s) living standards and conditions so dramatically that he made the Democratic Party the obvious home for the working class. And he relentlessly made it clear through his speeches and fireside chats that he was on the side of workers. This meant that even when the New Deal didn’t end the Great Depression after his first term, workers kept giving him a chance because they trusted that he was fighting for them.

For the Democratic Party, the crime his successors committed was to think their job was to shut down Roosevelt’s project. There’s a whole story, with many twists, of why that happened. One was that Southern white Democratic congressional leaders believed it was their duty to dismantle planning institutions that had been interfering with the supply of practically indentured black workers in the South. That’s not an exaggeration: US representatives were explaining on the House floor on the record that economic planning had to stop in order to “preserve white supremacy”— their words.

Another twist was that Northern tycoons and the free-market ideologues they funded were running think tanks and employer associations devoted to brainwashing Americans against any kind of economic planning or coordination. They were literally slipping comic-strip versions of Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom into millions of workers’ pay envelopes.

So we lost our capacity to keep deliberately upgrading our economy. We stopped making sure investment in industry and upkeep of infrastructure kept happening. And when you stop upgrading your economy, the existing economy slowly falls into disrepair just like an old house that no one looks after. So as companies started shipping factories overseas, and as good-paying jobs were replaced with minimum-wage jobs at Walmart, our politicians did not believe it was their duty to figure out what to do about it.

Since Democrats were no longer demonstrably delivering real gains to workers, they no longer had an edge over the Republicans. That didn’t mean workers left the party immediately. But when neither party is clearly improving workers’ lives, other issues start determining elections and which party workers will vote for— just as they did before Roosevelt.

Through the 1950s and ’60s, Democrats continued to win workers and dominate elections by maintaining and expanding social programs (which didn’t upgrade the economy to make workers a lot wealthier but at least gave workers a safety net), coasting on strong brand identity with Roosevelt’s achievements, and benefiting from race-affiliated voting by whites in the South. After civil rights, Democrats became the home of black voters, while Southern whites flipped to the Republican Party, which started an era of split control between Democrats and Republicans.

Then starting with Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, both parties started cutting the social safety net as well, so it was really no longer clear why workers should vote for Democrats. Of course, Republicans often went after the social safety net more aggressively. But Republicans were clear that their offer to the American people was tax cuts that would put more money in their pockets, which often gave them an edge in elections.