Economic Justice

Tax Reform & Closing Loopholes

The current federal tax system is a monument to the political power of wealth. While working Americans pay income tax on every dollar they earn, the ultra-wealthy pay preferential rates on investment income, exploit carried interest loopholes, defer taxes indefinitely on unrealized capital gains, and pass vast fortunes to their heirs with minimal taxation.

The Historical Case: Prosperity Requires Investment

The debate over progressive taxation is often framed as a modern ideological controversy. It is not. It is a settled historical question with a clear empirical answer. From the New Deal era through the early 1960s, the United States maintained a top marginal income tax rate of 91 percent on the highest incomes. This was not a fringe policy position. It was the law of the land under Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy — spanning both parties, two world wars, and the longest sustained period of economic growth and middle class expansion in American history.

During those same decades, the United States built the Interstate Highway System, funded the GI Bill that sent a generation of veterans to college and into homeownership, created Social Security and Medicare, invested in basic scientific research that produced the technologies of the modern world, and sent human beings to the moon. The national debt as a percentage of GDP fell dramatically. Union membership was at its peak. A high school graduate could support a family on a single income. The gap between the highest and lowest earners was the narrowest it has ever been in American history.

It is important to be precise about what the 91 percent rate actually meant in practice. The rate applied only to income above the threshold — not to all income earned by high earners. There were significant deductions available, and effective rates were lower than the marginal rate. But the structural effect was real and documented: extreme accumulation of personal wealth was economically irrational under this system, which created powerful incentives for corporations and wealthy individuals to reinvest profits into their businesses, pay higher wages, and expand employment rather than extract and hoard. The result was an economy that grew broadly and rapidly, producing prosperity that reached deeply into working and middle class communities that had never before had access to it.

The top marginal rate was cut to 70 percent under Nixon, then to 50 percent under Reagan’s first term, and finally to 28 percent by 1988. In the decades since, wealth concentration has returned to Gilded Age levels, wage growth for working Americans has stagnated, union membership has collapsed, the cost of housing, healthcare, and education has skyrocketed relative to median incomes, and the national debt has exploded. These are not unrelated trends. They are the predictable consequences of a deliberate policy choice to shift the tax burden away from concentrated wealth and onto working Americans and the public investments that sustain them.

This document does not propose a return to 91 percent marginal rates. It proposes a tax system that is genuinely progressive, closes the loopholes that allow the ultra-wealthy to pay lower effective rates than their employees, and generates the revenue necessary to fund the investments that have historically produced the broadest and most sustained prosperity. The historical record is not ambiguous. The America of broadly shared opportunity that conservatives and progressives alike claim to want was built under a tax structure that demanded proportional contribution from those who benefited most from American infrastructure, American workers, and American markets. That is not a radical proposition. It is a proven one.

Retirement Income Security & Tax Relief

Millions of Americans who spent their working lives contributing to Social Security, pension funds, and retirement accounts now find that a portion of that income is subject to federal taxation in retirement. The taxation of Social Security benefits was introduced in 1983 as a budget measure during a period of fiscal crisis, not as a principled policy position. Franklin Roosevelt’s original vision for Social Security was that it would be a guaranteed floor of retirement security, free from the anxiety of taxation.

Labor Rights & Worker Protections

The strength of America's economy has always been its workers. Yet decades of anti-union legislation, stagnant minimum wages, and the rise of the gig economy have eroded worker power and left millions of Americans without adequate wages, benefits, or protections. The systematic dismantling of worker bargaining power is not an accident; it is a policy choice, and it can be reversed.

Corporate Accountability

American corporations benefit enormously from American infrastructure, education systems, and consumer markets. In return, they have an obligation to invest in the country and the people that make their success possible. Corporations that exploit tax loopholes, offshore jobs, and undermine American workers while reaping record profits represent a betrayal of that social contract.

Bankruptcy Reform & Financial Fresh Start

The 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act made it dramatically harder for ordinary Americans to discharge debt through bankruptcy while leaving most corporate bankruptcy protections intact. The result is a system in which corporations can use Chapter 11 to shed obligations, while individuals facing medical catastrophe or student loan debt have no comparable relief available.

Private Equity, Asset Stripping & Essential Services

Private equity firms have in recent decades acquired ownership of hospitals, nursing homes, emergency medical services, newspapers, veterinary practices, child care centers, and other services that communities depend on and that cannot simply be replaced when they fail. The private equity business model, which involves acquiring businesses using borrowed money, loading the acquired company with debt to repay that borrowing, extracting fees and dividends, and selling or closing the business within a defined investment horizon, is fundamentally incompatible with the long-term stewardship of essential services. When a private equity firm acquires a hospital, the hospital's patients become the collateral for a financial transaction they never consented to and cannot exit. [115]

Gig Economy Reform & Worker Classification

The deliberate misclassification of workers as independent contractors rather than employees is one of the most widespread forms of wage theft in the American economy. When a company controls when, where, and how a worker performs their work, that worker is functionally an employee regardless of what the contract says. By misclassifying these workers, companies avoid paying payroll taxes, providing workers compensation insurance, offering benefits, and complying with minimum wage and overtime laws, shifting billions of dollars in costs onto workers, taxpayers, and public safety net programs. The gig economy has not created a new category of free and flexible entrepreneurship for most workers; it has created a new mechanism for denying employment protections to people who have no meaningful ability to negotiate the terms of their engagement. [118]

Consumer Financial Protections

The financial system exists to serve the American people, not to exploit them. Yet predatory lending, discriminatory financial practices, and the systematic targeting of vulnerable communities by financial institutions have caused immeasurable harm to millions of American families.

Cryptocurrency & Digital Asset Regulation

The rapid growth of cryptocurrency and digital asset markets has created enormous opportunities for innovation alongside equally enormous opportunities for fraud, money laundering, tax evasion, and consumer harm. Comprehensive, thoughtful regulation is essential both to protect consumers and to ensure that America remains a leader in financial innovation.

Universal Basic Income

The concept of a Universal Basic Income, a regular, unconditional cash payment to all American citizens, has gained significant attention as automation, artificial intelligence, and structural economic changes threaten to displace workers faster than new employment opportunities can absorb them. It deserves honest, evidence-based consideration as part of a comprehensive approach to economic security.

Equal Pay & Compensation Equity

Equal pay for equal work is a fundamental principle of economic justice. Yet pay disparities based on race, gender, disability, and other protected characteristics persist across virtually every sector of the American economy, representing both a moral failure and an enormous waste of human potential.

Immigration & Labor Market Integrity

Worker Ownership, Cooperatives & Community Wealth Building

The dominant corporate model is not the only viable model for organizing productive enterprise. Worker-owned cooperatives, employee stock ownership plans, and community development financial institutions have demonstrated that businesses can be productive, competitive, and sustainable while distributing ownership and decision-making authority more broadly.

Buy American & Domestic Manufacturing

The deindustrialization of the American heartland, driven by trade policies that prioritized the interests of multinational corporations over American workers, has devastated manufacturing communities across the country and created dangerous dependencies on foreign supply chains.