Hey there - I’m Matt Hughes, managing editor of Roosevelt Forward’s Fireside Stacks and coauthor of a new report out this week from our sister organization, the Roosevelt Institute—The Good Life Agenda: Fuller Lives, a Stronger Economy, and Renewed Trust.

In his foreword, Paul Krugman puts a fine point on one of the report’s core arguments: “Economics is ultimately about people,” he writes, “and the purpose of economic policy should be to help people live good lives.”

Over the last five months, we’ve seen that principle in action in New York City. Zohran Mamdani’s mayoralty is offering a real-time case study in what people-focused economics can look like, and has delivered early progress on some of New Yorkers’ most urgent demands. Perhaps most notably, we’re getting massive investments in pre-K and 3-K and the launch of the city’s 2-K program, which will deliver full-day, full-year childcare for two-year-olds.

Of course, a lot still needs to be fleshed out as the administration moves from bold policy planks to the nuts and bolts of implementation. That’s what makes this such an exciting moment for progressive economists, and what made a recent convening at The New School so special.

On May 2, the People’s Policy Conference brought together economists, public policy experts, and labor organizers to show how people-centered policy can drive inclusive growth and productivity in New York City. Cosponsored by the Roosevelt Institute, the event also featured members of the Mamdani administration, including Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice Julie Su, Commissioner of the NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection Sam Levine, Director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants Cea Weaver, and Deputy Director for Policy Planning and Delivery at the Office of Management and Budget Nathan Gusdorf.

This week, I chatted with one of the event’s organizers, Jessica Forden—a labor economist who specializes in caregiving and inequality, and the author of an excellent Roosevelt Institute brief from earlier this year, “How Long-Term Care Costs Drain the Middle Class and Deepen Intergenerational Wealth Inequality.”

We talked about the role of economists in a people-powered agenda, the “how do you pay for it” question, and what we’re learning in these early days of Mamdani. Check it out below.

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Jessica Forden: Yes, it’s so important to start with the context! This conference was originally conceived out of the incredible enthusiasm and excitement of myself and colleagues for Mayor Mamdani’s agenda. What we saw was a policy platform that reflected not only the values that many of us held, but also the economics that we studied. The New School for Social Research has an economics department that is uniquely pluralistic in its curriculum and research.

And so, for us, when we heard the inevitable retort to Mamdani’s policies—that all these things would be nice to have, but were unrealistic to implement for economic reasons—we just knew that wasn’t true. There was a whole body of economic theories and models that folks out of our tradition and history offer that say otherwise.

So, we organized a daylong convening to bring together these economists, public policy experts, and labor organizers to really connect this city agenda to a tradition of economic study that rigorously and, in my view, convincingly shows that such policies are not pie-in-the-sky ideas. In other words, progressive urban policies that provide for the public, like universal childcare or fast and free buses, are not only morally desirable but also economically sound and capable of driving inclusive growth.

The next step is to then do the real intellectual work in bridging the gap between the promise and the implementation, and that’s exactly what we’re hoping to do next. This conference was just a first step.

We’re already looking to next year and thinking about what conversations we might want to have after a year of policy experimentation and implementation from the administration, and in the meantime, we’re planning to draw from the incredibly rich and informative conversations of the panels to develop policy briefs that further explore these policy areas—housing, transit, childcare, and labor.

Jessica: Great question. I think historically the role of economists in policy has been to play the role of expert, where we take the traditional economic paradigm as a morally neutral framework with which to assess the “right” or “wrong” policy and its impacts. Under this thinking, economics provides rigor because of the tools we employ in the field, and so policy decisions flow from this expertise.

The people-powered approach flips that script by recognizing an obscured, but important, fact, which is that economics, and consequently its policy assessments and recommendations, is not morally neutral by default. We economists make decisions about the assumptions we bake into our models and how we interpret and apply their results.

As Sam Levine pointed out in the labor panel, some economists point to dynamic pricing as being good because of efficiency gains, but we have to ask who benefits from those gains. If economists prioritize economic efficiency in their policy recommendations, they are implicitly putting forth a values-based argument about what we should prioritize in the economy.

A people-powered approach instead allows the broader populace to make those moral and ethical judgments about what we want to prioritize first. The role of economists then becomes one of providing the rigor that undergirds and informs that socially developed, values-based set of decisions. Economics therefore still provides the important analysis of the trade-offs and effects of policy, but the hidden stage of values-setting happens directly via the people instead of implicitly in the economic analysis, which allows for a better-aligned assessment for how we can shape our economy in ways that better reflect our collective desired outcomes.

Jessica: People always love to ask that question, “how are you going to pay for it,” when it comes to big, bold policymaking—the implication being that there’s some fixed pot of resources. What the balanced budget announcement, as well as the conversations throughout the conference, really highlighted are the limits of this kind of thinking, not only because it precludes a chance to vision creatively and optimistically, but also because the “how to pay for it” conversation is actually much more nuanced, especially in two ways.

First, we do actually have a lot of resources, not only in this country, but also specifically in New York City. As Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice Julie Su put it, “we are the richest city in the richest country in the world.” The question then is how are we deploying these resources? And that is a fundamentally political, not purely economic, decision. Nathan Gusdorf from the Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget made this point directly in his opening session when he shared that: “It’s not that the city doesn’t have a tax base that is capable of supporting these programs. It’s just that someone has to make a call—are we going to pay for them?”

The constraint isn’t fiscal capacity, but rather what we collectively decide is important and fundamentally a right for New York City’s working class. This is a question about how we structure taxation, what we exempt, and who we ask to contribute.

Second, there are actually many ways we can be creative about paying for things, because there are things we indirectly pay for or don’t realize we are paying for, and what we do currently pay for is not fixed. We can, through policy, shift things to better reflect what we collectively value in our society and community. Adam Tooze from Columbia University and Nathan Gusdorf did a really good job of highlighting this in their discussion of progressive austerity for the opening session.

Typically, progressives hate the idea of austerity, because it often comes attached with reductions in spending on social welfare programs—especially at the state and local level. The textbook definition of austerity is simply reducing budget deficits, and says nothing about the trade-offs between cutting spending and raising taxes at all. What a progressive austerity approach offers instead is the idea that how we reduce budget deficits does not automatically have to come from cutting spending on social programs. There are actually other levers at our disposal. As Tooze summarized: “A progressive austerity program would consist of a hard look at the distributive consequences of different types of spending through indirect mechanisms.”

In other words, when you have to close budget gaps, it’s crucially important to think about who these policy changes negatively impact the most. Traditional austerity approaches essentially always come at the expense of the working class, framed as, “The people need to take their medicine—it’s unpleasant now, but that’s what will help them be healthy in the long term.”

A progressive austerity approach, as I understand it, would look at the distributional consequences of our spending and budgets first, and instead ask something along the lines of, “Where are we currently spending in ways that don’t match our stated values, especially indirectly through forgone taxes and other revenues?” Those are places where we can plug the leaks to perhaps then afford the policies we do want, and in ways that can balance taxes to better serve the working class. If we had universal childcare where providers got paid enough and parents could afford it, parents wouldn’t have to worry so much, and providers would have enough children in their programs.

Jessica: Yes, it was really clear from the housing, transit, and childcare panels that this transition between ideas and implementation brings up a lot of complexity. There are questions of who bears the distribution of the costs and impact of such policies, and how to navigate current infrastructure and systems without replicating the existing inequalities deeply embedded in them. The administration is only about five months in, and so now is the right time to really dig into these types of questions.

Housing, for instance, is a good example of how the distribution question comes up in implementation. Overall, rental income in New York City is well above operating costs, so there’re real margins to lower rents through rent control or freeze programs. But there’s also the issue of how financially leveraged rental owners are. J. W. Mason of CUNY John Jay told us that private landlords are highly leveraged, with around 80 percent of rent income going to servicing debt. Once you slow rent growth, landlords operating under that kind of leverage face financial issues, but tenants might end up bearing the consequences as landlords defer or avoid building maintenance as a means to lower costs. Owners and builders have the market power to essentially “go on capital strike” and “choose not to make repairs,” for example, as Cea Weaver of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants put it. How to go about implementing affordable housing therefore raises questions of how to manage and navigate the financialized structure underneath the city’s housing market, which have real consequences for how costs are borne and passed on.

This also brings us back to that third question, of how to navigate current infrastructure when trying to advance major changes. On the topic of universal childcare, that third panel really engaged in the idea that sometimes expanding current programs simply means replicating existing inequalities and issues currently embedded in the sector. For example, expanding access to childcare has to take into consideration how other home- and community-based childcare providers not included in the pre-K and 3-K, soon to be expanded 2-K system, are displaced, especially those who are in communities of color.

Another way to think about this is how Lauren Melodia of the Center for New York City Affairs highlighted the idea that childcare providers and parents are often pitted against each other in the current private market. Costs are too high for parents, but wages are too low for providers, who are, again, mostly women and women of color. At the end of the day, there needs to be public intervention and more willingness to experiment with pilots and changes to existing infrastructure, especially with practitioner and parent feedback and involvement, rather than just expanding existing programs.

That tension between families and care workers, mediated by an underfunded and fragmented system, is actually a structural feature of how care is organized in this country more broadly, not just in childcare. I recently explored how the same dynamic plays out in long-term care in a piece for the Roosevelt Institute, where rising costs are increasingly captured by private actors while low- and middle-class families are forced to spend down their assets just to age with dignity.

Jessica: To bring it back to Deputy Mayor Su’s fireside chat, I really think the overarching theme of the day was how interconnected economic justice and economic growth truly are. More and better social provisioning of essential goods and services can be in direct service of both goals. As Deputy Mayor Su put it, we should start by asking, “if you wanted economic justice to be the reality, how would you pursue economic growth?” as opposed to starting from a position of economic justice as a trade-off to growth.

Michelle Holder from John Jay pointed out during the labor panel that raising minimum wages has a well-documented fiscal multiplier effect. If you pay workers more, they spend more, because working families put their income back into the local economy. Workers on the lower end of the income distribution in this city are also women, Black, and Latino, so those multiplier effects also are equity effects.

In general, policies that address inequality get more dollars in the hands of working people, which has positive downstream impacts on economies. The transportation panel made this clear too. By connecting workers to jobs, fast and free public transit reduces commute burdens and increases access to housing and childcare.

Deputy Mayor Su raised the example of childcare, noting that federal level paid leave policies and investments in the care workforce, for example, could also create billions in economic activity. To ignore the multiplicative growth effects of policies that put money in working people’s pockets is to ignore the many economic benefits that actually arise out of an economic justice approach.

But designing those interventions intentionally and holistically is really important. We heard from many panels that while abundance-style approaches that focus on increasing supply are important, supply-side interventions alone are not enough. Rather, they should be paired with other interventions.

The housing panel, for example, was explicit that policies to expand the housing stock had to be paired with policies on affordability, like rent stabilization. In the labor panel, this came up as both increasing wages and resourcing the state to ensure enforcement. For example, wage transparency laws provide the state and public with a lot of data and information on gig worker wages, but it’s incumbent upon the state’s agencies, not workers individually, to ensure that their minimum wage is being enforced.

This is where the labor movement can particularly play an important role. In the labor panel, Sam Levine made a convincing case for more and continued old-school labor interventions—things like strong wage floors, for example—as a way to combat modern technological interventions in labor markets, namely algorithmic wage and schedule setting.

We need a strong labor sector fighting for these kinds of policies, as well as those explored throughout the day, because these aren’t separate fights. Better economic conditions strengthen workers’ bargaining power, and stronger workers strengthen the coalition that makes better economic conditions possible to begin with.

As Deputy Mayor Su emphasized, unions matter not just for what they win at the bargaining table, but because they’re one of the few remaining institutions capable of diffusing economic power more broadly through society.

Fireside Stacks is a weekly newsletter from Roosevelt Forward about bold economic ideas and the people who put them into motion. If you enjoyed this installment, consider sharing it with your friends.

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On May 11, childcare providers across the country closed their doors.

It was the fifth annual “Day Without Childcare,” a day drawing attention to the importance of this struggling workforce. Nearly 4,000 people participated in a work stoppage this year, including both providers who closed up shop and parents who joined in solidarity. An even larger number joined rallies, marches, and events in support. And like many such strikes, the organizers were fighting for more than just workers’ wages; their “demand is decisive, organized, and unapologetic: universal child care for all.”

Despite the foundational role that childcare providers play holding up our economy, despite the high level of skill required to care for young children, childcare workers still make poverty wages. This has resulted in massive workforce shortages and a subsequent lack of supply, with half of US families living in a childcare desert. Historical and persistent sexism and racism also keep wages low for childcare workers, 90 percent of whom are female and more than a third of whom are people of color.

Childcare is high-cost and labor-intensive, and its low profit margins provide little space to raise wages for providers without increasing prices beyond what families can afford. Childcare is untenably unaffordable, even exceeding families’ housing costs in most of the country.

The US is long overdue for a massive systemic overhaul of our early childhood system. We need government investment in public, universal childcare, which necessarily requires investing in the workforce to pay childcare providers a thriving wage.

Traditional organizing has long been challenging for this field, for reasons both structural (fragmented workplaces) and systemic (the exclusion of domestic workers from the National Labor Relations Act, for example). But this is shifting in recent years, as childcare workers increasingly organize not only to improve conditions for themselves as workers, but also to fight for childcare for all.

To learn more, I spoke to Tashieanna Smith, a family childcare provider who operates out of her home in Connecticut.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Tashieanna Smith: It was even more personal this year. In the past, Connecticut has done its own thing—a “morning without childcare”—but this year we decided we were going to be a part of the national Day Without Childcare. Doing it with the whole country really showed me how unified we all are. This year, I hope it’s also showing legislators how unified we are. It’s not just individuals struggling, this is a nationwide thing, with providers unifying as one to take a stand and say: Listen, enough is enough. I think that’s why I felt more passionate and also just SO joyful—I loved it. I would love to transition out of being a childcare provider and be an advocate for all providers, because when I saw the day come to life, I just loved it.

When I heard our usual rally wasn’t going to happen, I said okay, let’s make this happen on the national level. We organized almost 300 providers to come out for the rally after only two weeks of advertising it. Providers groups, every social media site. I sent it to the parents, the parents blasted out texts and emails. When my community needs me, I show up. We only had two weeks to pull it off and we did it, we pulled 300 people out. Can you imagine how many people are going through this, if we could get 300 people in two weeks?

Tashieanna: Here’s the struggle: We’re not making enough money. And that makes it so hard to deal with all of the regulations and rules, with not enough money. It takes away from the reason we do this job: because we love it. Especially for family childcare providers like myself. It takes away the love of what you do. We are forced to close our doors. I love my job, I’ve been doing this for 18 years, but I want to get out sometimes—because it’s just too hard. Any provider would tell you that, but some of them would be too afraid to speak out and complain. But we need to get paid what we deserve.

To meet the staff ratio requirements, for example, I lose money. I serve nine children at one time. That means I need another staff member. So I overwork myself, and I pay someone else, and I lose money. Right now, we get a range per child—one for $1000 a month (because she is with me 10 am–10 pm), others are $500, or $200, it depends. But in order to make a decent living, you’re working 10 times harder just to make $16 an hour when all is said and done. So those numbers, with working 10 am–10 pm . . . If I worked a minimum-wage job, one job, with less hours, say, at McDonald’s—well, you do the math. I’d be making more. Instead I work 50, sometimes 60 or 65 hours a week, and I make so little.

Tashieanna: I would love to see universal. I have to charge less than the cost to provide care so my parents can make ends meet. But at the end of the day, I have a mortgage, my own children, bills, overhead costs. If we had universal childcare where providers got paid enough and parents could afford it, parents wouldn’t have to worry so much, and providers would have enough children in their programs. And with universal, parents wouldn’t have to deal with [the situation] where if they work a LITTLE bit more, take on a few more hours at work, they can lose their childcare subsidy—even if they need those extra hours at work to pay the water bill, and the car payment, and all of that. Parents often have to think: I need the income from that extra 10 hours of work, but if I do it I’ll lose my childcare and I won’t be able to work at all. Universal childcare would help families AND providers.

Tashieanna: We are so important. And for family childcare providers, you have to understand—I provide care 24 hours, 6 days a week. I do a first, second, and third shift. I do weekends when needed. We are these families’ therapists, best friends, teachers of their children. We’re the moms of these communities. We provide safe haven for the children, a home away from home while mom or dad has to work. That’s important. We’re the foundation, the backbone. Think about it—when we had a health crisis and everything closed, we said: Listen, if you still have to go to work, we are open. They are our babies. I call them my children.

Tashieanna: The families came out and supported us because they know the sacrifices we make. The families we serve really appreciate it. They actually helped me organize—they told their friends and family about the rally, they helped spread the word. They realize the mental stress providers are under. They want us to get paid. And they know we still smile and do a good job even with this stress. They realize we don’t have sick days. They support us when we call for it.

And we need that support. I knew a family childcare provider who was struggling with so many medical conditions, but she had no papers and no health insurance. She passed away. And through her struggle, she was still showing up for families. They didn’t even know she was sick until she passed. I show up too. I am dealing with my own struggles, and my daughter’s health struggles, and still I show up through all of this. I still show up for my children and families. We still show up. We could easily say, this is too much, let me focus on me and myself. But I know our parents and my children also need me. I’m still here. That’s what family childcare providers do. Parents know that and know how much we show up.

Tashieanna: Parents can’t pay, and we need more pay. That’s where the Day Without Childcare comes in—it’s just not adding up. The math does not math. That’s why we did this rally, and that’s why we advocate. Some of these 300 providers we organized were new to this kind of thing. They kept just saying, “thank you, thank you for doing this!” And I made sure they got to speak, I highlighted them. I wanted them to see the unity between us all, and that we all want to hear their voices. I might have been the organizer this time, but it wasn’t about me—it was about us.

Fireside Stacks is a weekly newsletter from Roosevelt Forward about bold economic ideas and the people who put them into motion. If you enjoyed this installment, consider sharing it with your friends.

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In part two of our conversation below, we discuss potential reforms and policy solutions and how to achieve them.

Miranda is a health policy professor at the University of Pittsburgh and was the Roosevelt Institute’s 2025 author-in-residence.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Miranda Yaver: In addition to the broad coverage losses and increases in administrative burdens associated with enrolling and staying enrolled in health insurance, a couple of things happened. First, with the expiration of the enhanced premium tax credits, those with Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace insurance saw their premiums jump up dramatically. That means denials of coverage that do arise may be more harmful because people have less financial wiggle room with which to get creative with stopgap measures.

With both premium increases and new administrative complexity around eligibility verification, there’s also greater potential for patient churn among health insurers, which creates a setting that can lead to myopic coverage decisions from insurers who feel they can pass the buck rather than make up-front investments in patient health. For example, an insurer might deny coverage for a diabetic’s continuous glucose monitor with the expectation that by the time the patient faces costly complications from poorly managed glucose, they’ll be with another insurer.

I think whenever we’re introducing new fiscal pressures in the insurance market, we need to worry about private insurers turning to prior authorization as one way to make up some of that financial deficit.

Miranda: I think that’s absolutely right, and in Coverage Denied, I certainly highlight both perspectives: In chapter one, I walk through the political origins of prior authorization and its entrenchment. It’s hard to talk about the origins of this managed-care tool without reflecting on the yearslong outcry over socialized medicine, but I also highlight the AMA’s more contemporary work around prior authorization and physician burden reduction, as well as broader issues of professional autonomy. The AMA’s physician surveys call attention to the sweeping impact (or at least, perceived impact) of prior authorization—from time and staffing demands to adverse effects on patients. The organization has also led the charge in advocacy and model legislation to do things like regulate the qualifications of reviewing physicians, promote transparency concerning prior authorization requirements, require more timely processing, and reduce the volume of prior authorizations. None of those issues address the broader philosophical objections to prior authorization—that is, that health coverage decisions are being made by companies with fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders rather than by treating physicians—but they do reduce the extent to which patients and their physicians are dealing with the constant headaches of these processes.

The AMA rightly frames these prior authorization headaches as sources of physician burden and burnout. Even if physicians might prefer to do away with prior authorization, and even though promoting transparency and timeliness won’t necessarily result in fewer denials, these reforms could take the guesswork, “black-box” feeling out of prescribing. In turn, physicians could more easily assess whether and when to move on to a plan B rather than endure the protracted delays common under the current system. Regulation of the qualifications of reviewing physicians could (at least on the margins) reduce the odds of erroneous denials that reflect lack of familiarity with more recent treatment protocols outside a doctor’s field of specialty, and which necessitate burdensome appeals to rectify. And even in this highly polarized and gridlocked political climate, some of these measures are passing at the state level with unanimous or near-unanimous support.

But this does not disrupt the reliance on prior authorization or confront the philosophical objections. A larger-scale intervention into this facet of the US health-care system would require more sweeping health reform from Congress than is feasible in the foreseeable future given *gesticulates wildly at the world.* Although the AMA continues to oppose single-payer, over the decades they have become more conciliatory toward issues of health coverage expansion and now support a public option. A public option would certainly move our health insurance system forward because private health insurers (which have been heavily reliant on prior authorization, delays, and denials) would have to compete with a government plan. Still, my money is very much on single-payer—which would extract the profit focus—for delivering the most relief for those in need of health care. But politics is complex and often much more a dynamic of incrementalism than waving a magic wand, and I’m a big believer in moving the needle where we can and when we can, even if the bigger philosophical issues of health insurance delivery will have to wait a few years.

Miranda: One area where states have begun to take action is the role of AI, which health insurers are increasingly using to bulk-process claims and prior authorizations. California’s SB 1120, which went into effect this year, stipulates that when insurers’ AI programs recommend denials, they must be reviewed by physicians in the appropriate specialty. These technologies are advancing faster than regulatory oversight tools can keep up with, and unlike the relatively low-stakes penalty assessed when, say, a student uses AI for a paper and hallucinates a citation, when AI programs get health coverage decisions wrong, the consequences can be dire. And especially amid the ongoing litigation against Medicare Advantage plans’ use of AI to deny (with reversal rates of 80–90 percent), this could be a valuable shift.

Some states are doing things that I’m not as fond of: Gold card laws, under which physicians who secure around 92 percent or more approval for their prior authorizations become exempt from these processes. It sounds good at face value, but it’s really replacing one form of physician burden with another because it’s assessed at the plan-service level, such that one might have a wallet full of gold cards to keep track of—a gold card for head CT scans with Aetna and abdominal CTs with Cigna, and so on. Texas’s law was so restrictive that just 3 percent of physicians qualified as “high performing” under its terms, so its impact has proven quite limited.

There are other options worth thinking about that are highly feasible and don’t require revisiting big philosophical questions about the US health care system. For example, plain-language rules in health insurance communication could help prevent patients from falling through the cracks due to complex and technical explanations of denials and appeal processes. The average American adult reads at around the 8th grade level, but most health insurance materials are written in at least the 10th grade level. Lower-income and lower-educational attainment patients and non-native English speakers are especially vulnerable in this system. This would also be relatively simple to administer and enforce. The Washington State Office of the Insurance Commissioner is a great model of guiding patients through appeal processes—from an accessible YouTube video to template appeal letters for different types of denials. Of course, this doesn’t address the propensity to deny in the first place, but it can mitigate the ensuing patient burden.

It would also be relatively feasible for states to limit prior authorization’s application to only domains of health care where there are at least relatively recent evidence bases of abuse or overprescribing. All too often, prior authorization is applied to areas of medicine where this overuse is not a documented concern. Lower lumbar spine MRIs are a commonly cited example of overprescribing, such that health insurers will often require a few weeks of physical therapy before being able to proceed with the scheduling of the MRI. That might not necessarily be an inappropriate use of prior authorization, whereas applying this process to a drug like PReP is far less logical, since it is life-saving and there is no evidence of abuse. States could, at the least, require insurers to justify the use of prior authorization for these types of procedures with data and evidence.

At the federal level, the House of Representatives approved by a voice vote the Improving Seniors’ Timely Access to Care Act in 2022, but despite bipartisan support, the legislation died in the Senate. This bill was centrally aimed at streamlining existing prior authorization requirements. It would require Medicare Advantage plans to deliver timelier decisions through electronic processes. This wouldn’t increase the odds of approval, but it would mitigate delays before either initiating appeal or moving on to a plan B.

In the background of all of these state efforts is the reality that state reforms cannot touch the majority of employer-sponsored health insurance plans. This quirk, which deviates from the federalism embedded into so many other areas of health policymaking and beyond, is due to the constraints of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA). ERISA preempts state laws that “relate to” self-insured health plans, which cover most workers in employer-sponsored insurance. Because of the limits of what states can do to move the needle on equitable coverage, comprehensive health insurance reform really needs to happen at the federal level, which presents obvious challenges in the current political environment.

Miranda: My work is very US-centric, but I’ve grown increasingly interested in Switzerland. Even though traditional Medicare is immensely efficient, spending vastly less on overhead than do private insurers, Americans largely maintain the perception that the private sector is comparatively more efficient in policy delivery. That constrains our political choices (though this preference is becoming weaker over time, as more Americans are open to a government-run system). Given this underlying preference, are there ways that we can make private health insurance work? I think Switzerland shows that the answer is “yes, but.”

The Swiss health insurance system is actually more privatized than ours, and like our system, there’s a great deal of decentralization across localities. Where it diverges is its coupling of privatization with significant regulation as opposed to a broader embrace of free-market principles. The Swiss are legally required to be insured (though they have many options from which to choose), and on top of the standard but comprehensive insurance package, people can purchase supplemental private insurance to fill in any gaps or gain access to better hospital accommodations (e.g., a private room) or to see additional health-care providers. Consequently, nearly everyone in Switzerland is insured. In contrast with the relatively consolidated insurance market we have—with UnitedHealthcare, Cigna, CVS Health/Aetna, Elevance, Centene, Humana, and Kaiser Permanente dominating the markets, especially in certain regions—the Swiss have 56 insurers from which to choose. But the Swiss government exerts considerable regulatory oversight over both quality and prices.

So, you’ve got nearly universal coverage, market competition, regulation of pricing so as to mitigate exploitative charges to patients and the system writ large, and privatization. But all of these elements are in combination with enough regulation that you’d be unlikely to run into the insurance barriers that are such a dominant American experience and that make up the focus of my book.

The challenge, of course, is that to get this better coverage (which unsurprisingly produces better health outcomes), the Swiss both accept a higher tax rate than US politics tends to find palatable, and they accept the insurance mandate (whereas there was public consternation, driven by conservative political leaders, over the ACA’s individual mandate). To be sure, Americans’ attitudes could shift: We’ve certainly seen significant growth in support for the ACA, and the share of Americans who see it as the federal government’s responsibility to ensure health-care access has increased significantly over recent years. To the extent that these trends continue, that could facilitate a broader menu of health reform options.

But there are also some questions about scalability given that Switzerland has roughly the same population as New Jersey, is quite homogeneous, and invests more broadly into addressing social determinants of health. All too often in the US, we ignore those social determinants, which are truly in the driver’s seat of our health, while pouring money at health-care delivery. This leaves us with high health spending but a suboptimal return on investment. Switzerland can serve as some inspiration to right-size US reliance on private industry, though the extension may be difficult amid political preference for lower tax rates and deregulation.

Miranda: One elephant in the room amid discussions of health insurance barriers—their proliferation and their persistence—is why health insurers have been able to remain so largely unaccountable. At least part of this answer comes back to ERISA. To begin with, it preempts states’ efforts at comprehensive coverage reforms. This means that when political conditions aren’t well-suited to federal reforms, while we can often turn to the states to advance progress where they can, ERISA prevents comprehensive prior authorization reforms or the broader reduction of administrative burden in insurance. Further, it denies meaningful legal recourse to patients enrolled in self-insured health plans, which is about two-thirds of covered workers. Under ERISA, denied patients cannot obtain monetary damages (e.g., punitive damages, or damages for pain and suffering) and attorney’s fee recovery is left to the discretion of the judge. All that patients are entitled to receive is the benefit owed, which may be cold comfort to someone whose condition has worsened. And needless to say, less affluent patients will be risk-averse in taking legal action with this vulnerability to being left to cover their own legal costs.

The lack of meaningful remedies is where it becomes really clear that health care was an afterthought in ERISA, which was motivated by pension concerns. If your employer tries to screw you out of your pension, you can sue and get your pension back, but health conditions can change and make this enforcement apparatus ill-suited. Further, lawyers will likely be reluctant to take on cases that lack a monetary value. And if insurers know that patients are especially unlikely to sue insurers under these conditions, effective control over these entities can be harder to come by because wrongful denials are virtually costless. So, ERISA’s denial of meaningful remedies for wrongful coverage denials can not only be harmful to the patients when such denials arise, but insurers may have less incentive to exercise caution when deciding whether to cover costly care because they won’t face a meaningful penalty. In the worst case scenario for them, they eventually cover the treatment if the patient challenges the denial, which they rarely do. This design can thus increase the probability that insurance barriers arise in the first place. Congress tried to fix this problem in the late 1990s with the Patients’ Bill of Rights, but it didn’t come close to enactment. That bill is a critical issue for legislators to revisit. I’m currently writing another book that looks squarely at what accounts for the entrenchment of this feature of our health insurance system and the ways it disrupts equitable access to health care.

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Miranda is a health policy professor at the University of Pittsburgh and was the Roosevelt Institute’s 2025 author-in-residence. Her book Coverage Denied is out today, April 23, from Cambridge University Press.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Stay tuned for part two of this conversation in the next edition of Fireside Stacks.

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Health insurance coverage denials and how they affect patients

Miranda Yaver: When we talk about problems like underinsurance in America, we’re typically referring to high out-of-pocket medical costs within the plan terms (such as high deductibles or high cost sharing). What I work to do in Coverage Denied is show that there’s this additional, less-discussed dimension of underinsurance: inadequate protection by health benefits in which one is enrolled, not due to plan terms, but rather due to insurer decision-making about what is actually medically necessary. Strikingly, there are more ways people can be denied by their health insurer than they realize.

Prior authorization, or required health insurer preapproval for prescribed care (typically costlier care, though it has certainly extended to lower and even low-cost care in recent years), is the realm of denials with which Americans are likely the most familiar. This is when your health-care provider wants you to get a CT scan, but you can’t proceed with scheduling until it gets cleared by your health insurer—and it might get denied. When people are denied prior authorization for health-care services, they face delays or denials of medical tests or treatments, potentially risking worsening health, unless they can afford to pay out of pocket (but health care in the United States is notably expensive, so that is rarely an option).

There are appeal processes in place that a patient denied prior authorization and their physician can pursue, though it can take time to submit additional information and receive a redetermination, and physicians might only be given hours to respond to a request to avoid a patient being denied again. This might mean that the patient cannot proceed with scheduling a diagnostic test. In the case of, say, a prescription medication, the patient may go unmedicated—potentially leading to worsening of symptoms —or be on a second-choice regimen to avoid an entire gap in care, pending the insurer processes that will take an unknown period of time to resolve. And if the patient’s conditions worsen, they may eventually require higher-level (and consequently, more expensive) medical care.

The irony here is that prior authorization is partly a measure aimed at cost containment, but if denials are ultimately delays that necessitate more pronounced medical intervention (whether receipt of medication in the emergency department, or even getting admitted), then this practice can undercut insurers’ underlying profit objectives.

People can also receive concurrent denials, which occur when the insurer decides during the course of a medical treatment that it will decline coverage for further care. The result of this mid-treatment decision can be treatment disruption, if not altogether discontinuation, that can undercut optimal health outcomes for the patient.

Retrospective denials occur when the insurer denies payment for health care that was already provided to the patient. While this does not leave the patient vulnerable to declining health with respect to that condition, it does raise the prospect that they will have to take on medical debt and potentially forgo other care so as to avoid risking accruing additional medical expenses. Additionally, though infrequently, one may be vulnerable to a retroactive denial, which occurs when an insurer retracts payment for a service that they already approved, leaving the patient themselves responsible for the payment (e.g., because the insurer determined that they should not have approved it previously). This can also render the patient vulnerable to assuming new medical debt that can be financially destabilizing and foregoing further health-care expenses. While this may be an appropriate error correction on the part of the health insurer, it can drive significant uncertainty and destabilization for the patient, who might not have continued to pursue the care if they had better information at the outset.

These types of claim denials (i.e., denials post-treatment) operate quite differently from prior authorization denials. The good news is that they shouldn’t result in a patient’s worsening condition per se (though anxiety about a denial of coverage for test A may lead to reluctance to pursue test B). The bad news is that this can contribute to the patient’s financial destabilization, potentially leading to medical debt that hurts their credit and thus broader economic opportunity. And of course, we know that medical debt is unevenly distributed across racial and socioeconomic groups, and health insurance barriers constitute another driver of those inequities.

Given that patients are often making these decisions with informational disadvantages—we don’t have a good sense of what care is in fact medically necessary, let alone the criteria with which our insurers are evaluating this—this multitude of ways that patients can be left both medically and financially vulnerable lays bare just why accessing health care in the US can be so anxiety-provoking (not to mention inequitable). And while analyses have shown that some providers do prescribe medical care that is of low or questionable value (in turn, running up quite a tab), all too often, the burden falls on patients, who get caught in between their prescribers and their insurers.

Miranda: As I mentioned, there are appeal processes in place, which insurers are legally required to provide patients with information about when they are issuing a notice of a denial. Some insurers are especially transparent about their process—UnitedHealthcare, for example, publishes online its detailed description of the three-layered standard appeal process and three-layered expedited appeal process. But there are a few things that can and often do get in the way of patients understanding and acting on this right, so that fewer than 1 percent of denied marketplace claims and less than 12 percent of Medicare Advantage (the privatized version of Medicare) prior authorization denials are appealed.

For starters, appeal explanations are already complicated processes that are often written in a way that is difficult for the average reader to understand. That means many people don’t even know what their rights even are. Additionally, people may underestimate the value of appealing. “I’m just one person going about their day. How could I possibly stand a chance going up against a health insurance giant?” And in fact, when I asked 1,340 people to guess how often health insurance appeals are won, most survey respondents thought patients win less than 20 percent of the time. In truth, it’s closer to a coin flip, with various estimates lying in the 40–60 percent range, and 52 percent of my survey respondents winning their appeals if they appealed. But if you think that this endeavor of appealing is likely to be fruitless, it makes sense that one wouldn’t exert the time and energy—the burden—of appealing.

I asked all of my survey respondents who were denied by their insurer but did not appeal why they chose not to do so. The two most common reasons were that (a) they didn’t realize they could appeal (often because the information was in fine print or not conveyed in plain language, or they saw the denial and got so discouraged that they didn’t read further) and (b) they didn’t think they stood a chance at winning (though many said that if they had known it was a coin flip, they’d have been more likely to appeal their own denial). Respondents also cited confusion about how to navigate the red tape of this insurance process. So, on the one hand, there’s a lot of evidence that coverage denials are not only destabilizing to health and finances, but that administrative burden gets in the way of patients pursuing appeals to reverse these adverse decisions. On the other hand, my findings point to the possibility of some simple information interventions to improve patient knowledge and, in turn, improve access to health benefits, even if we can’t tackle (yet) the complexity of the appeal processes themselves.

But the underlying reality is that insurers expect that patients are unlikely to go through the appeal process, which is difficult enough on a good day (and we’re rarely having our best day when we need to appeal to insurers). In fact, one person I interviewed, who reviews claims for a major health insurer, said they were told that denying is perfectly fine because there is an appeal process—even though they have the data to confirm that most patients don’t go through with them. This is why I characterize these processes not as rationing care through denial, but rather rationing by inconvenience, or accumulations of inconveniences.

Miranda: It is absolutely the case that this uncertainty and apparent arbitrariness—the “song and dance”—is overwhelming and heart-wrenching for patients (as well as for their providers) in a way that goes beyond the broader but more predictable frustrations about care being unattainable due to, for example, a high-deductible health plan. One physician interviewee told me about his experience with prior authorization burdens:

“It feels like there are people sitting around a room conspiring to figure out how to delay care further. And every day that they can delay your care is money kept in their pocket longer.”

One patient story that stuck out was surely an administrative error, but nevertheless burdensome for both patient and physician to correct. This patient was getting a wrist MRI with contrast: First, the patient had radioactive dye injected, and then the scan was to be performed. Her insurer approved the radioactive injection but not the scan that made that exposure necessary. Now, at face value, that sounds silly—and it is. But what it took to correct it was a recognition that this was absurd (when a lot of patients don’t read itemized medical bills, let alone understand them), and a degree of health insurance literacy and administrative capital that enabled her to successfully navigate the complexity of the health insurance appeal process.

But there were some really heart-wrenching stories. One was from a low-income woman in the South who had taken time away from a years-long nursing career due to medical complications following the birth of her daughter. Amid prolonged severe lower abdominal pain and vaginal bleeding, she was ordered a CT scan and spent months navigating insurance complexity to get prior authorization, to no avail. When the insurer asked for additional documentation of medical necessity, she brought to bear all of her skills as a nurse, using not only technical medical terminology to document her symptoms but indicating numeric pain ratings based on exacerbating factors, ameliorating factors, and the like—things that the average individual can’t do, because most people have limited medical knowledge. “I’m a nurse. I know how to document stuff. I’ve been doing it for 15 years,” she recounted. But it was to no avail that she described her condition as clinically and as elaborately as possible when seeking insurer approval. “I got specific, they denied it, and they picked a different reason.”

Then, the hospital erroneously said that the prior authorization was approved, but this patient ended up stuck with such a big bill that not only did she have to put off necessary home repairs amid a failing roof, but she even contemplated divorcing her husband and the father of her daughter in order to have an income that would qualify for Medicaid. This level of financial and family devastation wasn’t anomalous. The average American can’t accommodate an emergency $1,000 expense without going into debt, and as most people can attest to, it’s not hard to accrue a $1,000 medical expense.

And alongside all of this was a real loss of trust in the system and feeling of inadequacy amid the navigation of red tape. One diabetic lawyer said of his battle to get a continuous glucose monitor,

“Is there something wrong with me? Do I not deserve this? Do I think my need is more important than it really is? The process makes you feel so small.”

Diabetes treatment was an area in which coverage barriers were very common. After one interviewee battled her insurer to get on a more sustainable insulin regimen, she said,

“It colored the way I interacted with insurance for the rest of my life.”

Relatedly, it was striking to see the prevalence of prior authorization requirements in corners of health-care delivery where there is not evidence of overutilization and abuse, the mitigation of which is ostensibly a central goal underlying the administration of prior authorization. PrEP is one such medication, which is critical in preventing HIV transmission and thus an important aspect of LGBTQ health. This isn’t a medication that people just take “for fun,” nor is it a medication that is abused or overprescribed—but there can be prior authorization attached to it nevertheless. Another example is insulin, which is literally lifesaving for millions of Americans, but can still have onerous prior authorization and formulary restrictions attached to it. As I spoke with these patients who felt like they were constantly playing the role of Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill, it is little wonder why they lost trust in, and felt betrayed by, the insurers to whom they had been paying monthly premiums for years.

How we got here: Why US health insurance is the way it is

Miranda: During the New Deal, there was some hope that amid this expansion of national power to lift the US out of the Great Depression, there might be sufficient support to carry national health insurance across the finish line. But even Franklin D. Roosevelt’s immense popularity wasn’t enough to get this done, and it became clear pretty quickly that trying to tie health insurance to Social Security was going to compromise both, and Social Security was an absolute must-have. Harry Truman then spent his presidency fighting tirelessly, albeit unsuccessfully, for national health insurance, but faced immense opposition campaigns from organizations like the American Medical Association (AMA), which used the slogan “The Voluntary Way is the American Way” in an effort to curb movement toward a compulsory insurance program that they likened to “socialized medicine.” In the background of all of this, employer-sponsored insurance had just gained prominence during World War II and further advanced through the labor movement: The Stabilization Act of 1942 precluded raising wages to attract much-needed workers, so health insurance became the perk of choice.

Eisenhower didn’t unravel the New Deal, but he did favor privatization over national insurance. When the 1960s rolled around, the previous ambitions of national health insurance were scaled down to prioritize targeting two vulnerable populations, the indigent (who would get Medicaid) and the elderly (who would get Medicare). Amendments to the Social Security Act in 1965 ultimately secured this new coverage. And in fact, LBJ signed these into law at the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Missouri, as a nod to his long-fought efforts toward this expansion.

But of course, these programs cost money, in part thanks to the fee-for-service arrangements according to which they were designed, such that there was little oversight over billing and the physicians could earn more by ordering more tests and treatments. So, it’s around this time that we see the introduction of some very narrowly circumscribed utilization management, such as certifying hospital lengths of stay. Of course, having a physician tell an insurer, “Yes, this patient does still need to be in the hospital to treat X” is a far cry from its current sweep. But the rising health-care costs also fueled the enactment of the Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) Act of 1973, which encouraged the development of HMOs, which are private insurance plans. What would later follow was the more flexible preferred provider organizations (PPOs). Ironically, with this latter, more flexible mechanism of health insurance delivery came the loss of a key cost-control mechanism, giving rise to the set of concerns that led to the proliferation of prior authorization.

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The Balanced Budget Act of 1997 further cemented the United States’ reliance on privatization, bringing Medicare Advantage onto the scene and escalating the privatization of Medicaid. It’s in this moment that we see at a large scale the privatization of traditionally public health insurance programs whose enrollees would now come to experience managed care plans’ cost-containment tools like prior authorization. And as health-care innovation—from new drugs to new technologies—flourished in the US, both quality and cost increased, spreading prior authorization into new corners of health-care delivery. Today, if you’re being prescribed a higher-cost drug, high-tech imaging, a surgery, a major procedure, and even some less costly drugs, you can bet on prior authorization or some form of step therapy (in which a patient must try lower-cost drugs before “stepping up” to what was initially prescribed).

At the end of the day, it’s a tough issue of politics, economics, medicine, and law all wrapped up in one. We don’t have unlimited amounts of money to spend on health care without making very hard (and likely politically unpalatable) choices in other areas of policy delivery, so we need to find ways to contain costs, hopefully without compromising quality of care. We often misperceive more care as equating to better care (sometimes it is, but it certainly isn’t a guarantee), which then places demands on physicians who need to be mindful of patient satisfaction ratings as well as malpractice liability. That can in turn drive some degree of defensive medicine (or ordering unnecessary tests and procedures) that comes with a price tag.

And in the background of all of this is the reality that health insurers don’t have a ton of incentive to make up-front investments in our health—even those that have a good return on investment—because people change health insurers so frequently. This means that while it may seem like poor financial planning for Cigna to deny a patient Drug A, by the time a costly complication manifests for the patient, they may no longer be on Cigna, but rather UnitedHealthcare, or they may have aged onto Medicare. So, in addition to concerns about privatization, cost containment (as well as profit maximization given the need to report quarterly growth), and overutilization (which can undercut those cost-containment objectives), there’s also some passing of the buck that may not yield great patient outcomes and may even drive up costs in the system writ large, but not for the insurer that issued the initial denial.

So, then we get to the question of whether there are better alternatives to contain costs. One way to make up the deficit is that insurers could raise premiums, but we know that’s untenable for most people and would drive problems of adverse selection. Negotiating down the cost of health-care delivery by providers would certainly be a nonstarter with the AMA as well as with the broader physician community, especially given the high cost of medical training and recent politics around loan forgiveness. Improving drug price negotiation with the pharmaceutical industry is important, and we’ve moved in that direction narrowly, but that still won’t touch a lot of the problems here.

Another very underdiscussed aspect of this problem is the reality that while overutilization is a commonly cited concern driving the implementation of prior authorization, physician burdens associated with prior authorization and the appeals it can necessitate can actually drive issues of underprescribing to avoid these challenges.

Miranda: I’ll preface this by saying that I’m a huge fan of the ACA, but a few aspects of it are relevant to the story I’m telling here. First, it directly built on the private health insurance framework (the setting in which delays and denials of coverage are the most common) and left prior authorization largely undisturbed, with the exemption of emergency department care and in-network OB-GYN care. So, overall, there’s increased patient participation in private health insurance plans, which come with more prior authorization except in some narrowly circumscribed areas. But there’s also the possibility that when Congress told these private health insurers to cover all these people they’d done a very good job of finding ways to avoid covering—those with what had been declinable preexisting medical conditions (around 27 percent of non-elderly US adults, according to a 2019 KFF estimate)—the insurers look for other ways to curb costs. They can’t deny patients anymore, so it’s possible that denial of payment for prescribed care became the attractive alternative.

Miranda: The US health insurance system is definitely made far more complex through its fragmentation, as well as its entwining of public and private programs, which can culminate in contradictory popular sentiment like “keep your government hands off my Medicare” and what Suzanne Mettler has characterized as the “submerged state.” And of course, Medicare is not the only government insurance program that has become heavily privatized. Not only are about 54 percent of seniors in Medicare Advantage, but about three-quarters of Medicaid is privatized.

Privatization of these two critical health insurance programs, which combine to cover roughly 4 in 10 Americans, is problematic for many reasons, but in the context of this book, it means adding a lot of prior authorization—and the delays and denials that come with it—for a population that has generally lower health-insurance literacy and is consequently less well-equipped to navigate the burdensome repercussions of these processes. Unlike Medicare Advantage, where 99 percent of enrollees have prior authorization, traditional Medicare has historically used prior authorization sparingly and denies care infrequently, though Centers for Medicare and Medicaid administrator Mehmet Oz’s introduction of the WISeR model that experts agree may lead to more denials. Medicare has been a game changer in enabling seniors to have quality coverage at a time in their lives when they generally have greater health needs but limited disposable income—and it provides this coverage with low administrative spending relative to private insurance and outside the confines of means-testing that can be stigmatizing and thus dampen policy take-up. But its privatization over the last three decades has produced outcomes that look a lot more like the broader private health insurance landscape (whether employer-sponsored insurance or the ACA marketplace) in terms of prior authorization, delays and denials of coverage, and burdensome and inequitable processes to appeal those adverse decisions.

On the managed Medicaid side, we also see frequent reliance on prior authorization and high incidence of delays and denials. Not only is this a population that has generally low health insurance literacy (raising the burdens of appealing barriers to coverage), but it is also generally less healthy (raising the stakes of these barriers to coverage). Moreover, due to their low income, they’re especially unlikely to be able to front the cost of medical treatment in order to avoid a gap in care pending an insurance appeal.

Part two of this conversation will arrive in your inbox in two weeks.

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Her words are timeless, but coming across this sentence in a moment of creeping fascism and disconcertingly thin institutional opposition to it, they struck me with particular force. As deputy director of democratic institutions at Roosevelt Forward, I’ve spent the past few years steeped in the daily news cycle covering the manifold attacks on our democracy. And like millions of other young Americans, I have often felt deeply anxious, unsure of what to do as we descend deeper and deeper into authoritarianism, overwhelmed by all I should be doing, and at times convinced that nothing I do could ever be enough. And most dangerous of all, I—and I’m sure many readers can relate—have felt disillusioned, all too often tempted to throw my hands up and give up hope altogether.

In these moments of despair, Morrison’s words remind me of the power and potential of sensemaking. With so much brutality and destruction unfolding before our eyes, it is vital to have a clear sense of what is happening, who is responsible for it, who can propel us toward a bright and just future, and where we fit into that picture.

To understand all of this better, I spoke with narrative strategist Patrick Reinsborough. In 2002, Patrick cofounded the Center for Story-based Strategy, a national strategy center dedicated to harnessing the power of narrative to accelerate transformative movement building. More recently, he served as the US Organizing Director for 350.org. Throughout his career, he’s helped organize and support numerous campaigns, including the youth-led global climate strikes in 2019, demonstrations against the US war on Iraq, and the historic shutdown of the Seattle World Trade Organization meeting in 1999. He is also the coauthor of the strategy manual Re:Imagining Change: How to Use Story-based Strategy to Win Campaigns, Build Movements & Change the World. You can follow Patrick on BlueSky @GiantWhispers.

In our conversation, Patrick defines narrative power and unpacks the strategic importance of telling a compelling Left story at scale.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Shahrzad Shams: A lot of your work is concerned with understanding narrative power and how we can build it on the Left. Can you start by explaining what you mean by that term and its significance to social movements?

Patrick Reinsborough: Philosopher Bertrand Russell described power as “the ability to produce intended effects.” From there, we can understand narrative power as the way that effects are produced through storytelling, which is one of the primary processes for collective meaning-making. Because for almost anything to happen—whether it’s harvesting crops or declaring war—some sort of story has to be told that helps harness the collective will and resources to make it happen. More specifically, we can call narrative power the narrative component of existing relationships of power.

Humans are narrative animals. We constantly create social constructions that structure every aspect of our societies, interactions, and identities. Over time, as these narratives are repeated and spread, they solidify into their own form of power. I’m talking about the types of narrative that legitimize the status quo, making it seem as if it were the only way things could be. Narrative power expresses itself as conventional wisdom and defines the boundaries of what is politically acceptable. The human capacity for narrative appears to be fundamental to our evolution, from coordinating hunts to cave paintings to the emergence of hierarchy and religion. But I think the rise of mass communications technologies has made narrative power even more central to both exercising control and making change.

Narrative is always central to the work of organizing and building power, both in the fight for the world we wish to create and in the fight against the world authoritarians are seeking to materialize. Organizers help people come together to share their stories and find commonality in their experience. People then create a shared story about the problems they are facing and, more importantly, about what it will take to solve them. A shared narrative that connects lots of people across space and time is one of the defining components of any social movement.

Shahrzad: How does narrative power differ from traditional messaging efforts?

Patrick: If narrative power is the whole multifaceted, fluid realm of how humans create and contest meaning, then messaging is a specific tactic of how to build narrative power by using language effectively. Many readers will no doubt be familiar with the concept of “framing” and how we structure our messages to be more persuasive and activate the existing perspectives of our audiences. That’s a good example of exercising narrative power.

But messaging on its own, without a deeper analysis of the underlying narratives shaping the discourse, often doesn’t produce the results we want. Too often, strategists think that the way to persuade people is to just come up with the right message, which usually means trying to fill people’s brains with facts. Now of course facts are important, but if having the facts on our side was enough to win, we’d have won a more equitable and democratic economy a long time ago. What a narrative power analysis helps us understand is that although what people don’t know is an obstacle, the bigger problem is what they do know; everyone already has existing narratives about the world (aka “worldviews”) that filter out incompatible messages, regardless of whether those messages are factually true. Understanding narrative power helps us go deeper by challenging us to grapple with why our audience holds certain beliefs. Once we do that, we can go beyond just telling better stories to actually changing the stories that shape people’s lives.

Shahrzad: The Right has been extraordinarily effective at making its base feel like active participants in a larger story, positioning them as patriots, truth-tellers, defenders of a civilization under siege by “illegal aliens” and the “woke-mind virus.” Some parts of the Left, by contrast, seem to believe people will be persuaded by appeals to pocketbook issues alone—an approach that lacks narrative scaffolding and treats people as passive beneficiaries of good policy. To the extent the Left does offer a broader narrative, it tends to portray people as victims of a rigged system—which, however accurate, is ultimately disempowering because it offers no active role for the hero.

What do you think a better, more compelling progressive story might look like?

Patrick: I get asked this question a lot, and my response is rarely the answer people want to hear from me, but I think it’s the answer we all need to grapple with. The issue is less the content of the narrative itself—there are tons of smart progressive communicators who can and do produce effective storytelling on their issues—and more the underlying political process of building an aligned political vision across different issues and constituencies so that we can tell larger shared stories.

Effective narrative is important, but there isn’t some magic story that will blast open the minds of the unconvinced. That’s not how meaning-making operates. Over the past few decades of working on narrative and movement-building, I’ve seen people take exactly the wrong lesson from observing the Right’s narrative power. We all experience the Right’s deployment of highly distilled frames as magic words. Take “big government” as a perennial example: Through decades-long narrative power-building efforts, “big government” has become a quick shorthand that invokes the inherent wastefulness of government and bolstered arguments for tax cuts or privatization, or most recently, thanks to DOGE, the wholesale dismantling of government agencies.

So, naturally, institutions opposed to these efforts want their own magic words and hire consultants and pollsters to try and create them. But this misses the whole point of where the magic in the Right’s framing language actually came from. There isn’t some inherent quality or secret force that is unleashed when the two words “big” and “government” are put together. Instead, the magic comes from the preceding decades of right-wing organizing that created a shared meaning around those words—a meaning that influences political discourse enough that sadly even some center-left politicians have reinforced it over the years. Powerful frames—at least the ones that survive in our fast-paced, novelty-oriented media ecosystem and have an ongoing impact on political discourse—are usually the end result of an organizing process. We take shortcuts and jump to the conclusion without doing the hard work of organizing and sensemaking at our own risk.

So the bigger issue is less content and more strategy, specifically shared strategy. Whereas the Right has an entire media distribution system, our movements do not. We have to transform the media ecosystem. Obviously democratizing private media is a big priority, but we also need to build scalable progressive media infrastructure. That doesn’t mean we need to replicate the Right’s centralized, top-down approach, but we do need to create more of an echo effect, meaning that progressive institutions are aligned and coordinating enough to amplify each other’s narrative. I often think of this as a shared melody with different harmonies for specific issues or audiences—a unity that doesn’t compromise our diversity. But that requires mass alliance building and political alignment, which is why, if we are serious about building narrative power, we need to invest in the processes to build it.

So the question evolves from “What is the winning progressive story?” to “How do we get all of our diverse and fractious stakeholders and constituencies to cocreate that story?”

That said, I can’t resist sharing three general aspects of a more effective narrative strategy. One obvious thing is to stop operating from within our opponents’ narrative. This is the fallacy of moderation, where certain political actors will try to carve out a position that is not as extreme as the regime’s, but still acknowledges some of their argument. Regardless of whether this is good for people’s careers, it’s a terrible narrative strategy because it actually reinforces the original, extreme worldview.

Look at President Trump’s signature issue, immigration. The right-wing narrative dehumanizes immigrants and frames immigration as an existential crisis that has more in common with a zombie invasion narrative than with the historic realities of human migration. Yet far too many critics of the administration’s tactics start by agreeing with the premise that immigration is a big problem. Advocating for a less unconstitutional version of the same crackdown ends up reinforcing the core assumptions of Trump’s policies.

Instead, we have to polarize by offering a different story with equal explanatory power. Polarization often gets a bad rap. But social movement researchers like Frances Fox Piven and Gene Sharp have shown that polarization is a critical mechanism for forcing the broader public to pick a side on an issue. So I would argue our problem is we are not polarized enough. The Right currently controls the debate and drags our entire window of discourse along with it. We need to offer our audience sharp moral choices about the issues of our times by polarizing against unjust policies.

To come back to immigration, this type of polarization is exactly the narrative that many immigrant rights groups have long-promoted: In a nation of immigrants, our diversity makes us strong. Immigration isn’t a problem, but a solution. By completely rejecting Trump’s narrative premise, it opens space for a counternarrative—one that shows that he is scapegoating immigrants to create an artificial crisis that provides an excuse for him to terrorize people into accepting his authoritarian takeover.

Second, we need to do better at “narrating change,” especially given the realities of our fast-moving information landscape. This means explaining why things are happening, naming villains (banish the passive voice!), exposing the deeper agenda, and showing people that we have the agency to make different choices.

Finally, we need bigger narratives that build bridges between the limited political space we have now and actual progressive system change. In recent years, the Green New Deal played this role for many progressives. But the power of the narrative is tied to audiences beyond our base accepting the vision as plausible. This is the “believability horizon” that any big social change narrative must successfully navigate. If our narrative stays on the credible side of that horizon, regardless of how far away it may seem, our vision will inspire the audience to follow us in taking the first steps toward that distant shared goal. But if our vision falls on the wrong side on the believability horizon, then it seems impossible or crazy. More effective progressive storytelling has to expand the “believability horizon” by helping more people see pathways toward meaningful system change.

Shahrzad: You’ve argued that narrative power matters more than policy in shaping political reality—a lesson that the Right has certainly embraced while centrist and Left establishments continue focusing the bulk of their attention on governing and policy. A lot of policy shops are built around research, legislative strategy, and traditional communications, and aren’t structured to do the kind of narrative work you talk about.

How can progressives go about challenging this internal culture, which over-indexes on technical expertise and good policy design? And how might our approach to policy look different if narrative power were taken more seriously?

Patrick: I don’t run a policy institution, so I don’t want to pretend I have more insight than I do. But I suspect the first step is simply getting people to recognize narrative as a key arena of struggle and calling attention to the internal culture that holds technical expertise and policy design out as the most important dimensions of political power. We need to change the incentive structure of the progressive establishment, which is still focused around a flawed model of persuasion centering facts, nuance, and expertise. We still buy into the economist myth that humans are rational actors—a blatantly untrue story that nevertheless continues to be accepted as conventional wisdom. Facts are indispensable to effective analysis. But they are not useful on their own for the kind of persuasion and mobilization that builds political power. Analysis and narrative are different, and our entire movement, not just policymakers, needs to stop conflating them.

Having good ideas is important, but it doesn’t mean much without creating the mandate—the collective power—to implement those ideas. The sharpest policies in the world won’t materialize if people don’t buy into the larger worldview those policies were crafted in service of. It is also worth remembering that our current unjust global system did not come about because it won in some mythical “marketplace of ideas” and outcompeted all the various other lifeways that were present in the world. Rather, it came about through organized violence, through colonialism, mass enslavement, and genocide, and through a bipartisan policy apparatus that legislated in its service. Organized people power may have overcome many of the worst abuses, but we are still largely living within the architecture created through these histories and actions.

If folks in policy start taking narrative power seriously, the walls between issue silos become less important than the ability to articulate the larger connections that bind policies together under an overarching narrative that shapes worldviews. This doesn’t mean leaving issues behind—at least not issues that have actual constituencies fighting for them—as much as developing viable umbrella narratives that incorporate them into larger stories of values and change. Policy proposals are often an effective soapbox for launching new narratives, and if we can shift the narrative landscape, it makes everything more winnable.

The design of the narrative should shape the policy, or at least the way we walk about it. Our framing of our policies should be attention-grabbing, polarizing, and boundary-pushing, and our proposals should expose the interconnected, systemic problems we must confront. For example: At a time when our current economic model is driving us toward fascism and ecological collapse, it is imperative that we establish democratic control over our economy, so that principles beyond short-term profiteering begin to shape decision-making. That means challenging the free market mythology that has provided cover for the consolidation of oligarchic wealth and power.

Which brings me to what I believe should be a through line in all progressive narratives: casting billionaires as villains. By this, I don’t just mean singling out particular morally despicable billionaires, but making the very existence of billionaires a symbol of our failing system. In a system where wealth equates directly to political power, we cannot have billionaire levels of wealth and pretend to have a functioning democracy, particularly when those billionaires are buying off politicians and buying up media platforms to control what the public gets to know.

So what does that mean for the policy? I’ll leave the nuts and bolts to our movement’s actual policy experts (which, yes, we do still need!). But I’ll push for us to frame those efforts under the umbrella of #BanTheBillionaire policy, despite the fact that a literal application would presumably be a nonstarter under our current legal system. But that is the transformative beauty of narrative as a form of power: It’s not bound by material limitations or current political realities. Effective narratives offer us compelling alternative visions and help create the collective belief that can make them real. Narrative power helps the spark of “what if?” grow into the conflagration of “this must be!” And that is what helps us get to the more just, democratic, and ecologically sane future we are all working to create.

April 10, 2026: This piece has been updated to identify that Toni Morrison received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Fireside Stacks is a weekly newsletter from Roosevelt Forward about bold economic ideas and the people who put them into motion. If you enjoyed this installment, consider sharing it with your friends.

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Julie Menter is program director at Transform Finance, where her work focuses on challenging traditional investment practices and mobilizing support for Alternative Ownership Enterprises. Transform Finance is a research, education, and implementation partner that works with stakeholders to challenge legacy investment approaches, seed transformative investment models, and build movement power.

Earlier this month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei refused the Pentagon’s demand for unrestricted military use of the company’s AI models. He drew a line at autonomous weapons and mass surveillance, even as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth threatened to blacklist the company.

While the headlines focused on one CEO’s courage, what’s more interesting is how he was able to make that moral stand.

Anthropic is a Public Benefit Corporation with a Long-Term Benefit Trust (LTBT) designed to safeguard its mission against short-term pressures of shareholder returns. Specifically, the LTBT “can ensure that the organizational leadership is incentivized to carefully evaluate future models for catastrophic risks,” according to Anthropic’s website, “rather than prioritizing being the first to market above all other objectives.” These structural features don’t guarantee the company will always make the most socially beneficial decision, but they do help explain why Anthropic could say no to the Department of Defense when others wouldn’t.

Contrast this with 2020, when America’s largest corporations pledged nearly $50 billion toward racial equity after George Floyd’s murder. Walmart, Amazon, and Meta made sweeping commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion. By 2024, those same companies were rolling them back. Without structural mechanisms to lock in the commitments when they were made, they evaporated when political winds changed.

What makes values-based decisions durable isn’t the whims or courage of select leaders—it’s infrastructure. And the opportunity to build corporate infrastructure that supports public benefit is broader than most people recognize.

More Business Leaders Act on Values Than We Realize

There’s a powerful norm in our economic system: shareholder primacy. That’s the idea that corporate board members and managers are expected, even obligated, to prioritize short-term financial returns for shareholders above everything else. This norm is reinforced by investor expectations, business education, market incentives, policy choices, and anyone who treats profit maximization as inevitable.

But this norm is relatively recent, and more contested than many believe. For much of history, commerce was embedded in community obligations. Medieval European guilds, Islamic waqf endowments, and Indian shreni associations all balanced profit with broader social purposes. The singular focus on short-term shareholder returns intensified only over the past few decades.

Even today, strategic choices guided by values like environmental stewardship, economic inclusion, worker dignity, or community responsibility—even when those choices conflict with short-term returns—happen across industries, ownership structures, and company sizes. In fact, we found and analyzed over 600 such cases.

These decisions are not always motivated by or related to progressive goals—Chick-fil-A, for example, closes on Sundays for religious reasons, forgoing revenue in ways many companies wouldn’t tolerate. But they show that shareholder-first norms can be broken. Dick’s Sporting Goods, a publicly traded company, took a $150 million revenue hit to stop selling assault rifles after the Parkland school shooting. Epic Systems, now valued at over $45 billion, refused outside investment for 45 years to maintain independence and control over its patient-centered mission. Beatrice Dixon left $70 million on the table by agreeing to sell the Honey Pot Company to a buyer committed to preserve its values, for $380 million instead of $450 million.

Business leaders are already making decisions motivated by reasons other than profits, and sometimes to the detriment of profits. And while every business leader who breaks the norm makes it easier for others to follow, individual decisions aren’t enough. Without structural backing, they can be easily reversed.

Structural Mechanisms Can Make Values-Led Decisions Durable

The DEI rollbacks demonstrate the core challenge: When values depend only on ongoing leadership commitment, without structural backing, they can be abandoned when political winds shift, leadership changes, or investor pressure mounts. What makes values stick is whether they’re embedded into mechanisms that can apply them into a company’s day-to-day operations.

Our research identified a range of tools companies use to operationalize values—from mission statements and philanthropic programs that can be easily reversed, to legally binding provisions that are far harder to undo.

Kickstarter, for example, amended its charter in 2015 to become a Public Benefit Corporation, legally obligating directors to consider impact on society, not just shareholders. This requirement has now outlasted leadership changes and market pressures for a decade. When Bob’s Red Mill‘s founder faced succession, he converted the company to employee ownership rather than sell to private equity, ensuring workers would share in long-term success and values would outlast him. CivicaRx, a nonprofit pharmaceutical manufacturer, can offer insulin at a fraction of typical market prices specifically because its nonprofit ownership structure prioritizes access over profits.

These mechanisms—ownership structures, governance provisions, agreements that protect values during acquisitions—are where progress gets locked in. The challenge is making them much more widespread.

How Nonmanagement Stakeholders Can Push for Change

Nonmanagement stakeholders—workers, consumers, investors, and civil society groups—have long pushed companies to act on values. But the outcomes of that pressure vary widely.

Sometimes pressure leads to commitments that quickly evaporate, but other times, it leads to lasting structural change: After the rise of the #MeToo movement, shareholder advocacy groups convinced Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Wells Fargo to drop forced arbitration clauses. Health-care unions pushed for California’s mandated nurse-to-patient ratios, which became policy that bound the entire industry.

Some business leaders want to prioritize values but lack the models or resources to make those commitments last. We see three promising pathways to address this gap:

1. Build awareness of alternative models. Most business leaders don’t know that options like employee ownership, golden shares, or perpetual purpose trusts exist—or how to implement them. Organizations like the Purpose Foundation, the Employee Ownership Expansion Network, and Doughnut Economics Action Lab are documenting these models and expanding what business leaders see as possible.
   

2. Direct capital toward values-aligned structures. Business leaders interested in values-led structures often struggle to find investors who won’t demand financial returns above all else. These leaders can turn to impact-investing initiatives like the Catalytic Capital Consortium, which supports investors who prioritize values over financial returns. When stakeholders organize to direct this capital, they can create the financial infrastructure that makes alternative models viable.
   

3. Advocate for enabling policy. Policy can make values-based corporate governance mechanisms easier to adopt. The proposed American Ownership and Resilience Act would make employee ownership transitions more financially viable by allowing selling owners to defer capital gains taxes. As an example from abroad, Germany is working to establish a distinct legal form for steward-owned companies—businesses where control stays with active stewards rather than external investors, and profits are supporting the company’s purpose rather than enriching shareholders. Workers, consumers, investors, and civil society groups can advocate for policies that make durable mechanisms for values-based corporate structure the easier path, not the harder one.

None of this replaces the critical need for government action to raise the social and environmental standards for all companies or the need to hold corporations accountable for their actions. But stakeholders can shape the broader ecosystem by influencing norms, building awareness of alternatives, organizing capital, and advocating for enabling policy. Together, they shape the structural conditions that make values-led decisions more possible, more likely, and more durable.

Thanks to Curt Lyon and Andrea Armeni for their guidance and feedback in drafting this article.

Fireside Stacks is a weekly newsletter from Roosevelt Forward about progressive politics, policy, and economics. If you enjoyed this installment, consider sharing it with your friends.

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Andrea Prat is the Richard Paul Richman Professor of Business at Columbia Business School and a professor of economics at Columbia University. Fiona Scott Morton is the Theodore Nierenberg Professor of Economics at the Yale University School of Management and an adjunct professor at Yale Law School. Jacob Spitz is a PhD candidate in the Columbia University economics department and Columbia Business School.

Income inequality in the US has risen over the past several decades. This trend has sparked work trying to pin down the causes, including technology that favors high-skilled workers, globalization and trade that reduce demand for low-wage labor, changes in taxes and benefits, and shifts in education. Importantly, many of these forces are shaped by policy choices, such as tax rules, labor regulations, and opportunities for rent-seeking that tend to benefit those at the top.

While Congress is formally in charge of making federal policy, many scholars point out that the Supreme Court has become a key player as well, using its rulings to interpret or strike down laws and influence public opinion. As Congress has become more gridlocked, the Court’s role has arguably grown.

So, a natural question to ask is: What role does the Supreme Court play in redistributing wealth in the United States, and has that role changed over time?

Narrative accounts claim that the Court’s modern trajectory tends to favor economic elites. Adam Cohen’s book Supreme Inequality argues that, starting in the 1970s, the Court has, with striking regularity, sided with the rich and powerful against the poor and weak. Investigative journalism by ProPublica has tracked the size and frequency of undisclosed gifts given to justices by the rich. Recent empirical work by Epstein and Gulati has documented the increasing “pro-business” tendencies of modern courts, most pronounced in the Roberts Court.

A central challenge for this work is over what exactly to measure. This is an area where the tools of political economy can help.

In our new working paper, published by NBER, we offer a novel approach to build a standard against which to hold the Court’s decisions over time. We build a dataset that codes Supreme Court votes by whether the outcome directly shifts resources toward parties more likely to be wealthy (“pro-rich”) or toward parties less likely to be wealthy (“pro-poor”). We then use the same family of statistical tools that underpin widely used measures of judicial ideology—specifically the Bayesian approach pioneered by Martin and Quinn—but with an explicitly economic interpretation.

The basic descriptive pattern is stark. At the start of our sample, in 1953, Democrat- and Republican-appointed justices voted “pro-rich” in a similar share (40–45 percent) of economically coded, nonunanimous cases. By 2022, the average Republican-appointed justice votes pro-rich about 70 percent of the time, while the average Democratic-appointed justice votes pro-rich about 35 percent of the time.

A New Way to Classify Decisions: Pro-Poor, or Pro-Rich?

Our goal is to avoid labels such as “liberal” or “conservative,” which can be self-fulfilling and time-variable. Instead, we focus on outcomes: who gains resources as a result of a ruling.

Specifically, we restrict attention to direct economic incidence. For example, the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans own roughly 90 percent of publicly traded stock—so if a court ruling allocates resources to shareholders, then it is more than likely to be benefiting the rich.

Conversely, cases that grow the social safety net help the poor: The bottom income quintile receives 28 percent of federal government transfers, compared with 7 percent for the top quintile.

Many cases could also have indirect economic consequences (for example, cutting business regulations may lead to long-run innovation). But those indirect channels can be hard to predict, have varying levels of empirical support, and are subjective, which could distract from what can be concretely understood from case opinions.

Here’s a concrete example to illustrate our classification system In Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency (2007), the Court allowed the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. The cost of complying with the Act falls largely on firms (and, through ownership, on shareholders), while benefits accrue broadly to citizens via improved environmental quality. Under our protocol, this is coded as pro-poor, because it shifts surplus away from the (on average) wealthier shareholders and toward the broader public. The aim of our methodology is to extract this information from each case so we can use it to compare justices’ voting patterns over time.

We begin with the universe of 9,341 Supreme Court cases in the Modern Supreme Court Database (1946–2022). Within this, we focus on the post-1953 period during which there are justices from both parties appointed to the Court. We also consider only nonunanimous cases, since it is from the disagreements that we are able to infer justices’ relative positions. This leaves 5,012 cases across 69 years.

We then hired and trained undergraduate and graduate research assistants to read opinions and determine (1) whether a case has direct economic content and, if so, (2) whether the decision directly moves resources from rich to poor or poor to rich. They also had to assign these cases to a “channel” that describes the type of dispute (these include employees vs. firms, customers vs. firms, competition policy, and the social safety net). The resulting dataset contains 1,782 cases classified as having a direct economic impact that is either “pro-rich” or “pro-poor.”

The raw data tells a clear story: Over time, the share of votes justices cast in favor of the wealthy bifurcates along party lines. Importantly, these trends cut across many different types of cases. When we split the raw data using the Supreme Court’s way of categorizing cases by issue area (which include groupings like unions, economic activity, taxation, civil rights, and federalism), as well as by the channels defined by our own categorization, the same polarization pattern shows up in almost all subcategories.

Standardizing and Applying the New Framework

Descriptive statistics, however, have their limits. Justices’ decisions may appear more polarized than they actually are as a result of the changing types of cases that make it to the Supreme Court. To make meaningful comparisons between decades, we need to separate changes in justices’ underlying voting tendencies from changes in the cases they face over time.

To do this, we impose a common scale on the data using a statistical model. In the spirit of Martin and Quinn, we treat votes as revealing latent preferences. In economics, this modeling approach does not require any information about the intent of the justice, or need to know what they consciously or unconsciously considered. The Martin-Quinn method eliminates the need to guess intention and focuses on action.

The advantage of our classification approach is to give that latent dimension a concrete economic interpretation: a justice’s propensity to vote for outcomes that shift resources toward the wealthier parties. The model interprets the information on each justice, case, party, and appointment date holistically, allowing us to recover a consistent measure of how the Court’s center of gravity has moved.

Our model estimates imply that a “typical” justice appointed by the Republican party in 2022 would be expected to vote pro-rich on a neutral case 74 percent of the time, while a “typical” Democratic appointee in the same year would have a 27 percent likelihood of doing so—an implied 47 percentage-point gap. In the 1950s, statistical tests reject the claim that the typical appointees by the two parties were credibly different when it came to the wealth impact of their decisions. By the end of the period, that difference is a near statistical certainty.

The choices of any given justice only tell half the story. The other half concerns the balance of power on the court, determined by the composition of nine justices. In assessing this, we find helpful the concept of the “median justice.” Decisions depend on majorities, and the median justice on a nine-justice Court will find themselves in the majority. Using our estimates, we highlight the median justice during each SCOTUS term.

Since the 1969 appointment of Warren Burger, the Republican party has made 15 of the 19 appointments to the Court. Combined with the party trends discussed above, the result has been a shift of the median justice—and thus, the overall makeup of the Court—in a distinctly more pro-rich direction. These shifts are particularly associated with three specific presidents’ decisions: by Richard Nixon in 1969–70, by George H.W. Bush in 1990–91, and by Donald Trump in 2018. Because many economically consequential cases are decided by narrow margins, these shifts in the median justice have meaningful implications for regulation, enforcement, and redistribution.

One reason we think this economic metric is useful to policy audiences is that it may be more predictive for many bread-and-butter cases than labels like “textualism” or “originalism,” which—even in legal scholarship—are often not applied consistently. If the wealthy who have provided gifts to members of the Court also benefit from rulings in their favor, the varieties of legal reasoning that justices use to explain their decisions are not as informative as the material result of their decisions.

Supreme Court Reform—an Economic Policy Issue?

Calls to significantly reform the judicial system are growing. Justices have lapsed in their ethical judgments and accepted hugely valuable gifts; it took an award-winning investigation to finally force the adoption of an ethics code on a court that was previously unique in not having one.

Recent decisions reveal a judiciary unafraid to wrest power away from government administration and toward the courts, as shown in overturning the Chevron doctrine, and with an expansive view of presidential power and immunity that many liken to that of a monarch. In this climate, it is more important than ever to be measuring and monitoring the court.

Our work in this area is explicitly descriptive. We provide a benchmark to understand how the institution has changed over time. What we see today is a Supreme Court that is favoring the interests of the ultra-rich more so than at any point in the past, and a judicial appointment process that has been politically captured. This can help policymakers understand the reality of the Court’s current composition, which is significant when thinking about judicial reform. We contribute to a growing body of evidence justifying a total overhaul.

Fireside Stacks is a weekly newsletter from Roosevelt Forward about progressive politics, policy, and economics. If you enjoyed this installment, consider sharing it with your friends.

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When the Washington Post announced at the beginning of the month that it was laying off at least a third of its staff, many people saw this as yet another chapter in the decline of print media and an increasingly unstable media landscape. But the shake-up reveals much more: Concentrations of extreme wealth are corroding the free press, even its legacy institutions, and threatening our democracy. Whatever Amazon founder Jeff Bezos wanted when he first bought the Post in 2013, he appears to be increasingly using it as a tool to further his own agenda and grow his power at the expense of the rest of us.

After the layoffs were announced, Tax the Greedy Billionaires—a campaign I run focused on educating the public about the consequences of extreme wealth and building support for taxing it—spoke to staffers rallying outside of the Post building in Washington, DC, about the consequences of a billionaire taking over their newsroom.

Rushard Anderson, who was laid off from his role as social media editor, told us: “These piss-poor decisions made by Jeff Bezos are now not only causing strain on the company, but strain on my former colleagues and my friends.” The day’s layoffs cut the newspaper’s sports and books sections, debilitated both its international and local coverage teams, and left more than 300 union workers jobless.

Patrick Nielsen, a software engineer and co-chair of the Washington Post Tech Guild, highlighted a pattern that’s all too common in the world of billionaires: Buy something, break it, and then throw it out because it’s broken.

“So much of media depends on reader trust,” Nielsen told us, “and I think the more people see and feel that a billionaire with his own interests is dictating what the paper writes about, [that] destroys our credibility and it destroys our trust.”

Indeed, since taking over, Bezos has reshaped how the paper operates. Under his leadership, changes have included explicitly focusing opinion coverage on “personal liberties and free markets” (Bezos said he believed those “viewpoints are underserved in the current market” and “right for America”) and ending the long-standing tradition of presidential endorsements within weeks of the 2024 election (he wanted to avoid the “perception of bias” that endorsements bring). As a result, the Post hemorrhaged approximately a quarter million readers.

The Bezos-Post story is a perfect illustration of what extreme wealth actually does in the wild. It doesn’t just sit in a vault somewhere. It doesn’t ask or negotiate. It just reshapes the world around it to suit the person holding it, and leaves behind a newspaper with half as many journalists. A hospital that no longer has enough nurses. A neighborhood that no longer has affordable apartments or housing options. Same story, different industries.

We need to say the quiet part out loud: Taxing the ultra-wealthy isn’t just about funding new programs or making them pay their fair share. It’s about chipping away at their wealth, which is warping our economy and democracy alike.

Private Equity Shows Us How This Plays Out in Practice

Over the past decade, private equity—firms that buy companies with the intent to grow their value, sell them, and provide a return to shareholders—has moved aggressively into hospitals, physician practices, nursing homes, and emergency care. The playbook is consistent: acquire, cut costs, raise prices, extract. Their goal isn’t to provide better care to patients; it’s to use the hospital, nursing home, or other institution as a vehicle to accumulate wealth.

Private equity firm Apollo Global Management now owns two of the largest hospital systems in the United States and controls 235 hospitals across 37 states. Under Apollo’s ownership, hospitals have been burdened with sky-high debt, reduced staff, and degraded essential services, including OB-GYN and pediatric care. It’s a story repeated across the country: Billionaire-run private equity loads hospitals with debt, cuts operating costs, and shuts down “unprofitable” services so investors can extract more cash while patients in entire regions lose access to basic care or pay more for what’s left.

And it’s not just hospitals. Major health insurers are in on it too, funneling skyrocketing premiums into shareholder payouts rather than controlling costs. The largest health-care companies increased shareholder dividends and stock buybacks by 315 percent between 2001 and 2022, allocating 95 percent of their profits to Wall Street investors. The result? Premiums for employer-sponsored family coverage climbed to over $25,000 annually.

It’s a similar story in housing. Billionaire-run investment firms currently own at least 1.6 million housing units in the United States. They’ve systematically purchased hundreds of thousands of single-family homes across America, pulling them from the market for would-be buyers and converting them into rental income streams. (As just one dystopian example—in Detroit, the firm RealToken bought up homes and sold them as cryptocurrency tokens to overseas investors, leaving the houses in their care in dire, unsafe conditions.) Private equity firms then deploy aggressive revenue-maximizing tactics to generate returns for their investors while increasing costs for families.

It’s no coincidence that many of the metropolitan areas where private equity landlords own a large share of apartments—Tampa, Phoenix, Dallas, Atlanta, and Charlotte—have experienced some of the sharpest rent increases in the country. Invitation Homes, backed by Blackstone, the world’s largest alternative asset manager, alone owns more than 80,000 single-family homes. When a single entity controls that much of the housing supply in a given market, rents don’t go up by accident.

This is wealth working as intended. It’s what happens when you have enough capital to reshape entire markets in your favor and then use the political influence that same capital buys to make sure no one passes a law to stop you.

This is what gets missed in the “pay your fair share” framing. We’re not just talking about wealthy people holding onto money that should be taxed. We’re talking about the ultra-wealthy actively using that wealth to increase your rent, raise your hospital bill, lower your wages, and reduce the quality of the care and services you receive. The money isn’t sitting still; it’s working against you.

Massive Wealth Is Bad for the Economy

The consequences of extreme wealth also reach into your ability to start a business, compete in a market, and build wealth of your own.

When wealth pools at the top and gets parked in financial assets rather than spent in the real economy, it slows growth, reducing aggregate demand by an estimated 1.5 percent of GDP. Five million people with $100 to spend can buy more goods and services across a broader swath of the economy than one person with $500 million. After all, one person can only eat so many dinners or take so many trips.

That slowdown hits aspiring entrepreneurs especially hard. Billionaire-backed corporations use their concentrated capital to dominate markets, undercut prices on competitors, and sustain losses indefinitely until they’ve captured the market. Would-be competitors, those without access to that kind of capital, simply can’t survive the war of attrition.

The promise of the American economy has always been, at least in theory, that if you have a good idea and you work hard, you can build something. Extreme wealth concentration is quietly dismantling that promise, not through any single dramatic act, but through the steady, grinding pressure of markets that are rigged before you even show up.

Make Greed a Sin Again

In short: Extreme wealth concentration is itself the crisis. It’s not just that billionaires aren’t paying enough taxes to fund public services. It’s that the existence of billionaires, with their capacity to buy newspapers, hospitals, housing stock, and governing institutions (billionaires spent $2.6 billion attempting to influence the 2024 election alone), is actively making the rest of our lives harder.

The fact that 300,000 households sit on more wealth than the entire US national debt isn’t just an inequality statistic. It’s a power structure. And that power structure is being used, every single day, to extract value from the rest of us. Higher rents. Higher medical bills. Lower wages. Less media accountability. More influence with elected officials.

“[Bezos is] one of the richest men in the whole world,” Nielsen, the Post Tech Guild co-chair, said. “He could blink and have the amazing work our journalists do funded in perpetuity. But he chooses not to.” And that’s because Bezos’s ultimate goal isn’t to sustain a media institution that can hold power to account and provide a valuable service to the public; it’s to make more money and amass the power that comes with it.

Taxing extreme wealth is about dismantling these coercive concentrations of power.

They shouldn’t just pay more. They should have less.

Fireside Stacks is a weekly newsletter from Roosevelt Forward about progressive politics, policy, and economics. If you enjoyed this installment, consider sharing it with your friends.

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Former FTC commissioner Alvaro Bedoya and former OIRA head K. Sabeel Rahman1 join Roosevelt President and CEO Elizabeth Wilkins to break it down: what it means that ICE has $85 billion of public money at its disposal, and how the country’s biggest corporations benefit from this massive deportation and detention bureaucracy.

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Elizabeth Wilkins: Hey everybody. I’m Elizabeth Wilkins, president and CEO of Roosevelt Forward, and we’re here today to talk about ICE—Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The country has watched over the past month as a surge of enforcement in Minnesota has resulted in forcing families apart, in community terror, and in death. And while that has captivated public attention, the truth is Minnesota is only the latest and most poignant of a nationwide surge. I myself live here in DC, and in my own community we had families line the streets to ensure that children would feel safe getting to school despite ICE presence. This is what many communities in our country are facing.

Today is the deadline for Congress to strike a deal on funding the Department of Homeland Security. And as we tape, we don’t yet see a deal in sight. This wrangling overfunding for the agency is about using that leverage to ensure some measure of accountability for what has become a national police force run amok. We wanted to take this moment to step back a little from this particular inflection point and to reflect a little bit about how ICE became what it is. We’re going to explore the role that concentrated corporate power has in immigration enforcement and how we should be thinking about government capacity when it comes to functions like police.

To have that conversation, it is my delight that I am joined by two of my former colleagues and good friends. Sabeel Rahman is a professor at Cornell Law and a former official at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, OIRA. He’s also a longtime friend of Roosevelt. And Alvaro Bedoya is a digital privacy expert and a former commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission, who you may remember from when the administration tried to fire him. I am personally just thrilled to have both of you.

So let’s get into it. We of course know, in terms of what’s been happening in Minnesota, about the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, the protests and mutual aid that we have seen rising from ICE’s presence there, particularly in the Twin Cities. Alvaro, I just wanted to start with you maybe on a little bit of a hopeful note, but also to help us understand some of the cleavages in the business community. Could you just say a little bit about what we’re seeing, especially in terms of the role of the small businesses in the community, and how we’re seeing them show up and how that might be different with other businesses?

Alvaro Bedoya: Absolutely. Let’s actually start away from the small businesses, with the massive companies. I was Chief Counsel to Senator Al Franken for five years, I worked for the people of Minnesota for five years, and it was a great experience. And honestly, my politics were a little different then, but I had this experience of working with all these executives from Minnesota companies, companies like 3M—which is actually Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing—sometimes corporate executives from Target, Mayo Clinic, General Mills, all these name-brand companies that most Minnesotans are actually pretty proud of having as hometown companies. And this thing happened after the killing of Alex Pretti where people kept on calling on these companies to do something, say something. These are powerful entities in the American economy. And what they did is issue this letter that didn’t even name what had happened, to Mr. Pretti, didn’t name what had happened to Ms. Good, and just called for a de-escalation of tensions. It was so, just, weak and milquetoast that a whole lot of people in Minnesota, not just lefties, but just regular people, said, “what are you doing? Why did you do this?”

And then it started coming out—The American Prospect[‘s] David Dayen [and Whitney] Curry Wimbish wrote an essay pointing out that, hey, 3M actually backed the Big Beautiful Bill, which sent roughly $70 billion into the deportation machine. Companies like Target are affirmatively allowing ICE to use their facilities. You have all these other companies, through their trade associations, industry associations, backing the Big Beautiful Bill. And so what came out was not just a milquetoast statement out of, certainly, the most community-minded executives you could probably find in the country, in Minnesota. (And yes, I am biased, but I don’t think it’s a crazy thing to say.) Not just that, but an actual degree of complicity in what was happening because they wanted their tax breaks. They wanted the economy to keep chugging along so they could stay in the black, and they affirmatively supported (many of them, not all of them—it’s not like the Minnesota Vikings or the Twins were tied up in this). They ended up helping push forward this legislation that made ICE the third-largest—I think someone described them as being funded possibly as the third-largest military, certainly the largest law enforcement associate organization in this country.

Meanwhile—and you said hopeful—so let’s talk about that. You had donut shops, book shops, random diners on the streets of Minnesota who were becoming de facto food distribution centers, aid distribution centers. I have a lot of friends in Minnesota because I worked for the state for five years. And by the way, I have friends on all sides of the aisle in Minnesota. And to a one, they say, “however it looks in the news, it is so much worse. You have no idea.” And number two, all of my friends whose skin doesn’t look Scandinavian are afraid to walk outside. Even they are not going to the grocery store. So all these mutual aid systems are developing and it is these small businesses that are moving forward to support them. This is why people look at small business—it’s like the most respected institution in our country. I think—recently, it surpassed the American military, which has long been the most respected institution in this country. And so it is this gulf between how these billionaire corporations really can’t find it in them to be brave, and how these small businesses—who are scrappy, who rise and fall with their communities—don’t hesitate to stand up for the people they serve. That for me gives me hope, while that letter made me pretty sad, honestly.

Elizabeth: Well, I’m just going to make you feel sadder. The whole topic might. So we talked a little bit about the corporate response of large Minnesota businesses, specifically, and this tie between corporations that want tax breaks and their complicity with the rest of this administration’s policies. Can you talk a little bit, broader than Minnesota businesses, about the relationship between business and ICE enforcement more directly? When we think about that bill and the funding that went to ICE, how does that funding work? What is the relationship between that enforcement and corporate contracts?

Alvaro: I think it is really, really important for people to understand that this is a business. This is not a small business. This is a deca-centibillion–dollar business. And it is not just these companies like Palantir that lean into that bad-boy, “I’m the one who knocks” persona—to quote Walter White out of Breaking Bad. Palantir loves being the bad guy. They lean—they recruit on the basis of it. They say, “oh, all you wilting lilies are afraid of doing the tough stuff.” They lean into almost the Few Good Men persona, of like, “oh, we’ll do it. We’re not afraid of the tough work in that gray margin.” Right?

My friends, yes, Palantir is getting extraordinarily wealthy thanks to this influx of money flowing to its coffers. Palantir is just that last layer on this massive infrastructure. What they do is just connect dots—or they purport to connect dots because I have a lot of friends in the investment community who say this thing is actually not nearly as powerful or profitable as people think it is—all they’re doing is connecting the dots. Underneath, you have this whole ecosystem of really boring companies that are making this possible and are making money hand over fist. There’s Deloitte, who the Financial Times called out for receiving billions of dollars. Financial Times, okay? This is the industry rag for the world financial industry. Deloitte, this consulting company, is making money hand over fist.

Who is providing this data? Your utility company. When I was at Georgetown, the team I built discovered this because it wasn’t out in the open. Your water company, electricity company, shares your address with a data broker named NCTUE. That data broker shares it initially to a company, and—I forget the order—at one point, it was LexisNexis (every single lawyer listening to this will understand fully well what company that is) and to the Minnesota company Thomson Reuters (and every lawyer listening will understand that to be Westlaw). And it was ICE using their Palantir skin that would plug into those systems. So what I want everyone to understand is—there are some folks saying abolish ICE, other folks saying we need to dramatically restructure ICE. Whatever it is you do, in the same way that companies like TurboTax and H&R Block make damn sure that it’s super hard to file your taxes so that you go to their quote-unquote “free services” that you end up paying $100, $200 for—any shift in ICE that will occur will be stymied by these companies. They’re gonna quietly go in and meet with young Hill staffers, like I was, and say, “oh yeah, ICE is bad. ICE is bad. But all we do is provide data. And so, just don’t mess too much with the underlying system.” And so that is what I want to clarify is that this isn’t just Palantir. It is all these companies that are profiting from the system. [1]

And the very last thing I’ll say—sorry for going on for a little bit—is some people might say: Well, Alvaro, I don’t have a problem with, whatever you wanna call it, ICE, someone else, going out and finding violent criminals. You know what? Neither do I. I have no problem—not with ICE. I’ve got a big problem with ICE. I don’t want people who are violent and are illegally present in this country to be in this country. I don’t want that. But my congressman, Jamie Raskin, just went to a facility. Members of Congress have a power to knock on the door of an ICE facility. One time out of two, ICE honors that request and lets them in. He’s finding people packed 60 to a cell with one open toilet, packed like sardines with aluminum foil for blankets around themselves. And he described in a post yesterday, [he] went and visited the cell reserved for violent criminals. Guess how many people were in that cell? Guess.

Elizabeth: Oh, I don’t know. Don’t tell me it was zero.

Alvaro: It was zero. Zero people. This is not an infrastructure that’s being used to find violent people who are hurting your neighbors. This is an infrastructure that’s being used to find your neighbors. And many of whom have been decades in this—many who are lawful, are lawfully present in this country. So that is what people need to understand.

Elizabeth: Sabeel, I would like to bring you in here for a second because what I am hearing is a couple of things. I actually am hearing—particularly with the data infrastructure, but presumably with other parts of ICE’s infrastructure as well, detention centers, all of these things—that there is a set of companies that have vested interest in the growth and continuation of a set of government functions, because of the way that we have contracted out and depended on those corporate functions for its self-perpetuation. Can you give us a quick sense of, how did we get here? Stepping back from ICE a little bit, how did we get here to a place where our government capacity to operate was dependent on these layers of companies and what that means for how we should think about state capacity more broadly?

Sabeel: This is such a rich conversation already. Thanks, Elizabeth and Alvaro. The disentangling, or peeling back, the layers of private power lurking behind this mass deportation coercive regime is hugely important, and there’s a longer story there as well, to your point, Elizabeth. Part of how we got here is, for many decades, two things have been happening to our government. One is it’s been slowly, steadily privatized and emaciated such that, on all kinds of things, even for the delivery of safety net programs, we actually depend on these private intermediaries who then make big money and, by the way, don’t actually serve the people. And so the story Alvaro just described, on the back end of the surveillance infrastructure—you could tell a similar story about other aspects of government that over time has been disinvested in. At the same time, we’ve had—across many multiple administrations, multiple parties—an increasing concentration of unaccountable coercive power.

ICE itself was created after 9/11. It started off as essentially a service delivery organization to process visas, moved over to the newly created Department of Homeland Security, and given this particular mandate around enforcement. And then that also creates a certain culture to the organization. All the surveillance infrastructure that Alvaro described, I would argue a lot of those roots are in that post-9/11 moment of building a mass national security state. And so this combination of thinning out the state so that we’re more dependent on private capacity in the first place—and that creates opportunities for self-dealing and self-interest and exploitation against the public interest—and at the same time, supercharging other aspects of the state to be unaccountably coercive. Part of why ICE is able to go after peoples’ neighbors is that the Supreme Court itself blessed, basically, open racial profiling in a case earlier in the summer in which Brett Kavanaugh authors this opinion saying how, well, racial profiling doesn’t really happen. And Kavanaugh stops are now all over the country and people are being plucked out of their homes.

And so the point I want to make here is that there’s a private infrastructure that Alvaro described, and legally, structurally, our government has both become dependent on that private infrastructure and at the same time has been essentially shielded from all kinds of legal and democratic accountability for this type of coercive power.

Elizabeth: I just want to pull on a thread that you just said because I want to make clear—I think we are busting up a little bit of a very old trope and myth about the fight over the role of the state in public life. There is this notion that you are either big government or small government. You either believe in deregulation and letting the markets govern themselves, and getting out of their way, and getting out of people’s lives. Or you believe in a stronger, more muscular government, which is more interventionist and, depending on your viewpoints, maybe messes with people’s individual liberties too much. And you are telling a very different story, which is: Actually, behind what might seem like it was a small government, was a massive apparatus all the time. That the whole project of a, quote-unquote, “small deregulatory state” actually had this other looming story behind it. And you were telling a story about this ostensibly conservative state actually being much more interventionist in people’s rights, actually, more interventionist in people’s lives. I just want to call in, Sabeel, you have put forward a framework to say this old-school left versus right, small versus big, deregulatory versus interventionist, is the wrong way to think about the role of the state in society. You’ve put forward an anti-domination framework. Can you just spool that out a little bit more for us?

Sabeel: I appreciate that, Elizabeth. I think it’s very much in tune with what you and Alvaro were saying as well. Look, I’m—at the core of it, I’m a believer in small-d democracy. I believe in people. I believe in communities. I believe that we should govern ourselves, and we are safest and most secure when we are actually able to govern ourselves in politics and in economics. And so if the goal ultimately is that—democracy—the things we should be worried about [are] not about big government, small government as you said. The things we should be worried about are when power is concentrated in ways that we can’t control and we are now subject to someone else’s arbitrary will. That could be the arbitrary will of the ICE agent who rolls in and snatches you off the street. It could be the arbitrary will of the boss who [decides] that a worker can’t have a bathroom break on the shop floor. It could be the arbitrary will of the monopolist who keeps goods from going to market. And in this case, the combination of state power and private power creating this extreme fear and extreme violence against our own neighbors, that is—it’s a combination of both of these types of power.

At the end of the day, the thing we should be most worried about is this idea of domination when power is concentrated and unaccountable. Sometimes that takes a private economic form. Sometimes it takes a governmental form. Either way, it’s a problem. That’s why we want to create different kinds of democratic institutions. We want government to protect us against civil rights violations, protect our privacy, to protect economic equality against mistreatment, and we also need that government to be accountable to us, to we the people. So this thing that we’re seeing, what Alvaro described, is living in the netherworld where it’s not—government’s not accountable to us, and government is making common cause with all these private actors who are also not accountable to us. And between the two of them, it’s pretty big business.

Elizabeth: I think the next thing that I wanted to ask about—and, Alvaro, maybe I can bring you back in for this. Okay, so we’ve talked about the relationship between tax policy and corporate willingness to stand up. We’ve talked about the specific interactions between ICE and the corporate infrastructure behind it. I also think, to Sabeel’s point, right now we are in an extreme moment of consolidation of government and corporate power in a way that we have not seen in a very long time. We both have an authoritarian consolidation at the top of our federal government, in the way that power is being wielded, and it’s coming at a time when economic concentration is just extreme. And in particular, and this goes to your understanding and knowledge of the data infrastructure, the enormity of the power concentrated in the tech sector is reminiscent of Gilded Age railroad-baron type stuff. How do we think about, is this just an evolution of what we have seen in the past, in terms of the relationship between this type of state power and this type of corporate power, or are we seeing something else in the relationship between this administration and these tech titans? Whether it has to do with ICE enforcement or the broader relationship between these two types of power, how should we think about that?

Alvaro: I think we need to honestly, and this is not hyperbole, think about it in terms not just of the Gilded Age, but also not even the Roman Empire. One thing that Roman emperors had was a Praetorian guard. And this sounds hyperbolic, it’s not. The Roman emperors had these private guards around them that kept them safe. And I think, for example, of the fires in Los Angeles when all these billionaires have these private firefighters they could just call on, and others are flying to private islands. They literally own islands. In the same way a Roman emperor would have their own little enclave set off to the side. Absolutely, we’re looking at something like the Gilded Age. We are looking at levels of inequality that haven’t been seen since that age.

Let’s talk about Minnesota for a heartbeat. One of the reasons I was so hopeful about the Minnesotan industrial sector was—and it was naive, it was naive—but I remember when I was a staffer for Sen. Franken. You travel all around the state that you work for. I was in Northfield, Minnesota, home to St. Olaf [College], home to Carleton [College]. My colleague pointed to a house and she said, “you know who lives there?” And I was like, well, clearly, no. I have no idea who lives there. And she said, “the CEO of blank.” And it was this massive company, like GM or 3M, one of these companies. And it was like a real normal, kinda nice house, real normal house. And she said, look, in Minnesota, there’s this culture of egalitarianism. There’s this culture that it’s kinda vulgar to throw around your wealth, and all that has been erased. And instead, what you have now is a culture where it is not just accepted, it’s encouraged. It’s celebrated to put on these, just, vulgar displays of wealth. So look, I’ve talked about it ad nauseam elsewhere, so I won’t here. But what I want to point out is, to what you and Sabeel have been talking about, is [regarding] this merger of authoritarianism and oligarchy, is that our government, our laws, are not prepared for that merger.

I’ll give you two examples. You know, the three of us are lawyers. God help us. We come from a very specific professional tradition that has developed a muscle that people should be proud of, which is a public interest legal muscle. And yes, if you go to a fancy law school, you fall asleep, you’re gonna find yourself at a corporate white-shoe law firm defending the Fortune 500. That is true. It happened to me, happens to a lot of people. But if you’re scrappy and you want to work for the good guys, you can find your way, and there’s an infrastructure that gets you in public-interest institutions. If you’re on the left, there are often civil rights institutions, like Lambda Legal, like MALDEF (the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund), like NAACP Legal Defense Fund, like the National Women’s Law Center. If you care more about voting rights, you might end up at Protect Democracy, Democracy Forward, right? There’s this whole infrastructure, public-interest legal infrastructure, designed to keep the government in check.

There is no such public-interest legal infrastructure to check corporate power. There’s a couple of scrappy nonprofits that are out there. But in general, if it’s not ICE or not CBP that’s hurting you, but one of these other companies we’ve been talking about that helps them or works you on their warehouse floors so that your wrists and your back break. Either your case is worth $100 million and a private plaintiffs’ firm will take it up, or the government at the FTC or CFPB will help you—not anymore—or you’re SOL. At the very basic level, the Freedom of Information Act does not apply to Palantir. I can’t just FOIA Palantir to understand what’s going on there. Now there’s some arguments we should be able to, and I think there’s been some progress made on this. But when I FOIAed—when we FOIAed ICE, when we FOIAed police departments, we not only saw them working very closely with these tech vendors, we also saw them forming nonprofits that are even further insulated from public reporting. Because if you’re a publicly traded company on the stock exchange, you actually have to let people know a little insight, as to what’s going on underneath the hood. Nonprofits file a 990, and it is not equivalent to a 10-K. It is even less transparency. And so, this merger of these tech oligarchs and the government—our public interest legal system, our system of government transparency, just was not designed to meet these ends.

Elizabeth: Sabeel, did you want to jump in?

Sabeel: Just quickly, I think that’s so powerful, Alvaro, and I think this is one of the reasons why—there are many reform proposals being talked about right now, and anything that helps people in the country, in Minnesota and elsewhere, is an advance, a progress. But because of what Alvaro just described, this is why structural solutions have to be part of the conversation. It’s not enough to be like, oh, we need the ICE officers to just have better conduct. Don’t wear a mask, have a little badge. Like, no.

Alvaro: Arbitrary and capricious! Except in arbitrary and capricious circumstances, Sabeel.

Sabeel: Totally. Right, exactly. We need structural solutions both for this unaccountable state authoritarianism and for unaccountable private authoritarianism. There’s just too much wealth, too much money, too much resources flowing into all of this, and we are outgunned in all the reasons that—for all the reasons Alvaro just described.

Elizabeth: That was a perfect segue. I was going to try and end us on a hopeful note, and ask us to talk a little bit about what solutions would look like. But I’m first, I’m gonna—professional prerogative—I’m gonna tell us a short story, which is: In thinking about this topic, I was doing a little research and found that under the FDR administration, under Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, one of the first things she did when she entered the Labor Department was she looked at this group called Section 24. And Section 24, at that time in the Labor Department, was an immigration enforcement group. It found and deported people, and it was, at the time, understood to be basically a mob-like terror organization that was going into immigrant communities, terrorizing people, taking people from their homes, and deporting them. And so one of the first things she did was defund it. She took all the money out, disbanded the group, and then, along with someone that she brought in to help her think more holistically about immigration, created a more humane system for understanding who wanted to come into the country and how to process people humanely.

So it turns out that was an incredible story of thinking about what government should be for, how it is supposed to relate to people, citizens and noncitizens alike, and the idea that the New Deal is still thought of as this time of great creativity for creating new government entities. They didn’t just create new government entities. They thought hard about where we should have more state capacity and also where we should have less, and how to reshape it. So in that spirit, this goes to both of you. You started to talk about the path forward, Sabeel. When you talk about structural solutions, for each of you, what are a couple of things that for our future, for our North Star, should we be thinking about? With respect to ICE, but also more broadly as we think about this anti-domination frame that Sabeel has laid out for us?

Sabeel: I’m happy to start, and then give Alvaro the last word here. So I think it’s exactly right. I’ll say a couple things about it. One is just, I love this Frances Perkins story. In a next governing moment, whenever that comes, we have to be thinking very seriously about administrative reorganization. Some—ICE shouldn’t exist, there are other agencies that need to be reduced in capacity, and we’re going to have to build up the power of agencies that protect us against other kinds of private domination. Of course, FTC, CFPB, and others. We have to reallocate resources. You can’t put 70-plus billion dollars into ICE and expect that to be okay. That money has to go away. And I think we’re gonna need a lot of—a very different legal framework on data and data privacy and surveillance. Alvaro is an expert there, so I’ll defer to him on that. And then one last thing I’ll say is not about the state reorganization, but also just about people. I think both, Elizabeth and Alvaro, you talked a lot about the way communities have shown up. And one thing just to note, Minnesota has a very rich civic infrastructure. People have been organizing in Minnesota on the ground for years in faith communities, in multiracial coalitions, in labor, and that infrastructure is a big part of, I think, why you’ve seen the community be able to stand up and defend one another. And so I think as we build our way out of this, we need to reconfigure the state in dramatic ways. The Perkins example is a great one. And I think we need to look for other ways to resource and build up the civic infrastructure, so that—I believe in democracy. It’s the people themselves who are going to actually get us out of this.

Elizabeth: Alvaro?

Alvaro: I want to take a step back and zoom out and talk about the underlying wound that we are trying to staunch and heal. Because I think a mistake we can make is [to] stop what Trump is trying to do, what this administration is trying to do to fix that wound, and not treat the underlying wound. And let me be clear, the wound is not immigrants and immigration. The wound is working people in this country who are here legally or looking at the work options they used to have and [saying], “what the heck happened to that job? That job used to pay well, used to have benefits. Not only now do I not have that job, it is dominated by men from Central and South America.” And what Trump did is look at that. What this president did is look at that and say, “there exactly: That’s the problem. The problem is those immigrants. We’re gonna deport those immigrants. We’re gonna call them criminals. We’re gonna get them out of the country.” And so that was what he said he was going to do. Now the big lie here is that this is not going to bring those jobs back. It’s not going—simultaneously, there was an essay in UnHerd where they are dramatically expanding the number of H-2B manual guest workers, and moving them into this country. They are—and so here’s the thing. You can’t deport your way out of a rigged economy. You deport that rideshare driver, construction worker, off the street brutally. You brutalize their family, you brutalize their neighbors, you brutalize a neighbor standing up to them. Those jobs aren’t going to suddenly start paying benefits and overtime and unemployment insurance. What’s just going to happen is they’re gonna be still terrible jobs that maybe for a little bit pay a little bit more, but still keep people—and again, that is assuming all of these assumptions are true—keep people in a place where they’re constantly struggling to keep their heads above water. What we need to do is look at why that wound is there, and the wound is not there because of undocumented immigration. Although, yes, it doesn’t help. The wound is there because decades ago, American corporate executives decided they could wave a little wand and decide all their employees were actually independent business owners. And I don’t need to pay minimum wage, and I don’t need to pay overtime, and I don’t need to pay unemployment insurance and workers’ compensation to these workers because they’re independent business owners. And guess what also happens when you magically wave that wand and turn all of your workers into independent business owners? You also—the requirements for hiring your tax accountant. Do you check the passport of the tax company that’s doing your taxes? You don’t. You don’t necessarily need to check all the documents for those people who are independent business owners who are working for you. And that is how those companies are getting rich. And that is also facilitating the hiring of this undocumented workforce.

If we want to staunch that bleeding, we need to go at these centimillionaire, billionaire developers and their corporate conglomerate owners that have hollowed out what used to be decent—hard, but decent—manual and blue-collar jobs into a shadow of what they used to be. And I think once we do that, some of these inequalities are going to start fading away. And also, some of the hiring of undocumented labor is necessarily going to go away as well. So that is what I think needs to happen. We need to understand who’s getting rich, talk about that, talk about the structural problems of the American economy, to what you said, Sabeel. Right now, what Trump is doing is saying, “oh, there’s a wound. I got a stapler. This stapler is called ICE. I’m just gonna staple the wound, just like this.” Put the stapler down. Stop making this worse. But you also gotta get at why that wound exists in the first place, I would say.

Sabeel: I think that’s great, Alvaro. And maybe just one thing I would add there. I love this notion of “you can’t deport your way out of a rigged economy.” And to that, I would just also add that, once we’re actually solving the actual source of who is hoarding all the wealth and opportunity, there’s more than enough wealth and opportunity for us to actually have an inclusive society in which people can come, and make lives, and build [and] contribute to communities. That is totally possible. This notion of a zero-sum fight is a construction by people who want to profit by hoarding more and more of that wealth and opportunity. And so it is not about immigration at all, actually. This is a way for that wealth to continue to be hoarded.

Elizabeth: Just to close, I will say, to me what I take away from this is the idea both that there is a problem with the way that state power has been consolidated in an authoritarian moment. There has been, for a long time, an enormous problem with the way in which corporate power has been consolidated at the expense of workers of all backgrounds and consumers and small businesses. We see that at work in a couple of ways. The story about the difference between small and big businesses in this moment, the idea that small businesses are being good community members while big businesses are interested in maintaining their relationship to a coercive state, and that the future lies in figuring out how to deconstruct both some of that state power and that corporate power, and how to, to your point Sabeel, construct more community power at the same time. Some of that is, to me, getting into these questions of what actually are the natures of the powers over us and how do we make sure to have the right countervailing powers to enable the rest of us to live the lives we wanna live, are the real lessons here. And we are seeing the worst version of how that can play out badly, in Minnesota in this moment.

I just have to thank both of you for helping us remember that there’s a best version of this, if we are imaginative enough to seek those structural solutions, think big about them, and really reimagine how we could orchestrate those powers to our benefit rather than [other ends]. So that was a long way of saying thank you for helping us think through the big picture here. And in a real moment of pain and potential despair to remind us, yes, we’ve gotta fight this fight for today about funding an agency, but we also have to keep our eye on the future for a fundamentally different relationship between people and their government. So thank you both.

Sabeel: Thank you so much.

Elizabeth: Thank you, Elizabeth, for having us. Good to see you, Sabeel.

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The Tax Filing System Was Designed to Fail Taxpayers

The tax preparation industry is highly concentrated, with over 90 percent of sales in 2021 belonging to just two companies: Intuit (the parent company of TurboTax) and its closest competitor, H&R Block. As of 2025, Intuit alone holds a 60 percent market share for US consumer tax software.

Despite years of lobbying by the tax filing industry, the IRS piloted a free e-filing service in 2024—and it worked. Direct File allowed nearly 300,000 taxpayers in 25 states to file taxes for free in 2025, with 94 percent reporting a positive experience, and more than two-thirds saying it improved their trust in the IRS.

More than a technical fix, Direct File shifted the cost of tax filing away from individuals and back onto a public system, helping to bring down the unusually high taxpayer burden, in both time and money, Americans face.

But Direct File was swiftly killed by the Trump administration. For Intuit and H&R Block, this was good news. In 2024, the first year of Direct File, Intuit reported losing one million users of its free software, though it didn’t publicly attribute any of the decline to Direct File. Just after the November 2024 election, when the (then) newly envisioned Department of Government Efficiency floated the idea of creating its own free tax-filing app, stock prices for Intuit and H&R Block fell.

Before Donald Trump was even inaugurated, the tax prep industry began its lobbying campaign. In December 2024, 29 Republican representatives—who together had received nearly $2 million in career contributions from Intuit, H&R Block, and associated lobbyists and trade groups—sent a letter asking him to immediately eliminate Direct File. Around the same time, Intuit donated $1 million to the inauguration fund.

By November 2025, the IRS had officially suspended Direct File, and it’s not available to filers for the 2026 tax season.

When Complexity Becomes a Profit Strategy

But the end of Direct File isn’t the only reason the consumer tax preparation industry is set for a windfall in 2026. Trump’s budget bill introduced a number of new, complicated provisions that particularly impact low- and middle-income taxpayers, such as deductions for tips, overtime pay, and car loan interest and a new excise tax on remittances.

Complexity appears to be a feature, not a bug, for the companies that sell tax preparation services. The tips and overtime provision, for instance, is confusing and lacks guidance. Because the bill was passed midyear, in many cases neither taxpayers nor their employers have the documents needed to claim the deduction. When combined with the bill’s other regressive elements, the changes will actually leave most tipped workers worse off.

If the goal is to reduce the tax burden on low- and middle-income taxpayers who are paid in tips, there are better ways to do it.

On the other hand, for Intuit and H&R Block, tax code complexity is a bonus. In fact, the CFO of H&R Block called the new tax provisions a “tailwind” for his company, and both companies are already raking in exceptional earnings this year.

More complicated tax returns mean more clients will be upsold paid services, and, although taxpayers (including those who take the tip or overtime deductions) can sometimes file for free (depending on their income level and tax situation), these companies still use them to make a profit. They aim to convert tax prep clients into year-round financial services clients, and they use the information they glean from tax returns to sell debt products like refund loans and credit cards.

This business model depends on misleading customers, and regulator inquiries appear to confirm it. In 2023, Intuit settled a lawsuit for $141 million after allegedly upselling customers to paid services when they were eligible to file for free. Similarly, in January 2025, the Federal Trade Commission ordered H&R Block to stop making it difficult for customers to downgrade from paid services and to end deceptive advertising practices around which services are “free.”

To cap it all off, their tax-filing software itself is far from reliable. Both TurboTax and H&R Block recently introduced AI chatbots to “help” answer customers’ tax questions, but one reporter found the chatbots gave him the wrong answer more than a quarter of the time. And storefront tax prep businesses like H&R Block appear to target low-income communities with high percentages of nonwhite residents. Studies have found that these businesses employ untrained, unregulated preparers who have high error and fraud rates. This invites the possibility of expensive, stressful audits upon those who can least afford it, on top of the fees these preparers charge that take large chunks out of their refunds.

What Tax Filing Could Look Like Instead

Paying a private company to file your taxes is the norm in the US, but it shouldn’t be.

In other countries, doing taxes is as easy as clicking a button. The IRS could send you a form (or, as they do in Japan, a postcard) saying how much you owe, and you could sign it to file—no intermediary needed.

In fact, a recent study found that 42 to 48 percent of all returns could already be accurately pre-populated by the IRS using just the prior year’s return and the current year’s information return (what your employer, or bank, submits). As anyone who has had a tax return rejected for getting a number wrong knows, it’s frustrating (and bizarre) to learn that the IRS already knew the right answer.

Countries with return-free filing tend to have simpler tax codes than the US, and reforms such as eliminating joint filing and consolidating tax credits would likely be necessary to bring it closer to reality. But as long as return-free filing remains out of reach, there’s another, simpler fix: Direct File. The IRS already succeeded in developing a tool to dramatically reduce the taxpayer burden.

All they need to do is bring it back.

Similarly, the often overlooked Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program provides free tax prep services, usually for low- and moderate-income taxpayers, by preparers who are trained and regulated by the IRS. Increasing funding, visibility, and support for VITA would reduce reliance on private tax prep companies.

Instead, 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.

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As a leader charged with modernizing the legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and as a former federal official who worked to limit corporate overreach, I can see that the new mayoral administration already knows what the 32nd president knew: Affordability crises aren’t solved by rhetoric alone—they abate when leaders use government to benefit people first. Economic well-being is ultimately about power. That’s why the administration’s early moves to protect tenants and investigate landlords, go after junk fees and hidden charges, and empower Commissioner Samuel Levine to lead an aggressive Department of Consumer and Worker Protection matter: They center everyday New Yorkers, shifting power toward them and away from concentrated wealth.

These plans to treat affordability as a question of using the levers of government, not just good intentions, were put into action well before Mamdani took the oath of office. Under Lina Khan’s leadership, the transition team moved quickly to identify tools the city government already has to curb corporate power, rein in exploitative pricing, ease regulatory burdens that fall heaviest on small businesses, and enforce the law in ways that lower prices for consumers. That’s the difference between promising affordability and building the capacity to deliver it.

Equally important was defining the problem correctly and approaching it comprehensively. The mayor has tied proposals like a rent freeze, public grocery stores, and free buses to the real cost pressures facing younger and lower- and middle-income New Yorkers. He also named the side of the affordability crisis that often gets ignored: incomes. That’s why he has proposed a wage floor—raising the city’s minimum wage to $30 by 2030—so that affordability isn’t just about lowering costs, but increasing what people take home for their hard work.

What truly distinguishes this approach is that Mamdani treats people-centered policymaking as a source of governing power, not just popular appeal. He has invested in building a sense of belonging that is now translating into sustained civic engagement. Knocking on doors offered young people not only a political platform, but a way to connect with one another and to the work of governing. For many of the city’s youngest voters, the campaign became an entry point into civic participation. This organizing wasn’t purely transactional. It was relational, bringing people together and building durable community ties. It was the Aunties for Zohran—older immigrant women—who set up tables, talked to neighbors, and tapped in people who might otherwise have remained isolated from the political process. The result is a base of supporters who are connected, organized, and able to maintain momentum through implementation. Just one example is the organization Our Time NYC, which was established to sustain pressure around the campaign’s core demands.

Already, the mayor is empowering this network to support policy implementation by establishing direct lines of communication with the city’s residents through a new Office of Mass Engagement. This matters because it makes clear that the government’s policymaking priorities should align with the problems people actually experience. When people see private equity firms scoop up housing or landlords use algorithmic tracking to jack up rents and threaten eviction, they expect their government to act. That’s the expectation that Rental Ripoff Hearings are meant to fulfill—to give people an opportunity to voice the impact of landlord abuse and shape the policy response to it.

I’ve seen, up close, the difference between a government that confronts powerful interests and one that looks the other way. That choice—whether to act or to defer—shapes how much control people ultimately have over their own lives. The mayor’s success will depend on whether New Yorkers feel more secure in their finances and less at the mercy of companies and employers. It will be seen in how they are able to spend not just their money, but their free time. By not only vowing to take on the affordability crisis but bringing people along for the fight, the Mamdani administration hopes to restore power to New Yorkers in all aspects of their life: in their jobs, on the subway, and at Yankees games.

What happens in America’s biggest city matters because it shows how other leaders can use the authority they already have to listen, act, and change the possibilities for how people can live their lives. From Virginia to Seattle, policymakers are adopting Mamdani’s people-first approach, and as he turns vision into results, he’s paving the way for greater economic freedom nationwide.

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Beginning this month, 19 states raised their minimum wages, with 13 increasing because of annual inflation adjustments. While these are welcome steps forward, it’s hard to miss a glaring gap: Only 5 of those 19 states are also adjusting overtime salary thresholds, which are core protections for middle-class workers.

States have raised the minimum wage because they recognize two simple facts: (1) The federal minimum wage rate is not sufficient in their state, requiring a higher standard to protect workers, and (2) state minimum wage rates need to keep pace with inflation in order for them to remain effective.

Among states that have long had the clarity to recognize these simple truths, it’s particularly puzzling that the majority have failed to apply the same logic to their overtime laws. By failing to revise the salary thresholds under which most employees are entitled to overtime pay, most states let middle-class workers begin 2026 with an exacerbation of the affordability crisis. But it doesn’t need to be this way.

Background on Overtime

The vast majority of employees are covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act and may be entitled to overtime pay (1.5 times their regular rate of pay) when they work over 40 hours in a week. This federal law, however, exempts individuals from overtime if they are in certain occupations, such as doctors and lawyers, as well as individuals who are “employed in a bona fide executive, administrative, or professional capacity.” Under long-standing federal regulations, someone meets this exemption if they (1) are paid on a salaried basis, (2) earn more than a minimum salary level, and (3) meet a set of criteria indicating that they indeed perform specific executive, administrative, or professional activities on the job.

This exemption is premised, in part, on the idea that “exempt workers typically earn salaries well above the minimum wage and are presumed to enjoy other privileges to compensate them for their long hours of work” [emphasis added], such as better fringe benefits and opportunities for advancement, as the Department of Labor has explained.

Like the federal minimum wage, the federal overtime salary threshold hasn’t adequately kept up with rising incomes, despite efforts by the Obama and Biden administrations. The result is that with each passing year, more employees are working long hours without receiving time-and-a-half pay.

When State Minimum Wages Rise but Overtime Doesn’t

Raising minimum wages and ensuring strong overtime protections are a cornerstone of employment protections in the US and help ensure a basic standard of living and fairness for workers. One can intuitively understand why many states have set higher minimum wages to better align with local labor markets and the cost of living in their state. That’s why it’s all the more baffling when states that have consistently set their minimum wage rate well above the federal level (a paltry $7.25/hr) ignore their overtime salary thresholds or peg their standard to the insufficient federal regulations.

Take New Jersey for example. In 2026, the minimum wage in New Jersey automatically increased to $15.92 per hour to keep up with inflation. However, the state’s overtime laws do not function the same way. Instead, New Jersey regulations governing who is eligible for overtime simply adopt the federal regulations. The result is a glaring disconnect between what the state recognizes as an adequate minimum wage and who is eligible for overtime pay. Remember that explanation from the Department of Labor that says “exempt workers typically earn salaries well above the minimum wage”? Not so in New Jersey.

In fact, the difference is less than $50 a week! A minimum-wage worker in New Jersey working 40 hours a week will earn $636.80 per week (or about $33,114 annually) in 2026. Yet, the overtime salary threshold in New Jersey is still stuck at the low federal level of $684 per week (or $35,568 annually). For many workers in New Jersey, where average wages are higher than the national average, the relevance of an overtime salary threshold is all but nonexistent.

Consider the more than 55,000 first-line supervisors of retail sales and food service workers in New Jersey, like those at Walmart or McDonalds. These supervisors, who are often salaried and many work more than 40 hours a week, should be entitled to overtime protections given their relatively low salary. In fact, that’s exactly how it plays out right across the border in New York, where the average worker in these occupations earns roughly the same amount as someone in New Jersey.

Yet, because the salary threshold in New York is higher, at $1,199 per week or $62,348 annually (and even higher in the New York City region), the majority of these New York workers will automatically be covered by overtime protections, since most earn less than the threshold.1 All the while, in New Jersey, these relatively lower-salaried workers too often don’t receive overtime pay because they earn more than the outdated salary threshold in their state ($35,568 annually) and might perform certain managerial activities in their job.

Outdated Overtime Rules Are Holding Workers Back

But it’s not just supervisors in retail or food service industries who are left behind in New Jersey. Workers across a range of occupations—such as social workers, health technicians, human resource specialists, and certain workers in the construction, manufacturing, and hospitality sectors—are too frequently ineligible for overtime pay.

New Jersey is far from the only state in which overtime laws are in dire need of updating. Virginia similarly pegs its overtime protections to federal standards, even as its minimum wage rose to $12.77 in 2026, 76 percent above the federal minimum wage rate. In Minnesota, overtime rules are so outdated that they serve no real purpose, since the standards on the books are less generous than the federal protections.

Policymakers are right to focus on making life more affordable for families across the country. But those who are serious about providing real results must pull all the policy levers available to them, including those that have been sitting right in front of us for nearly 90 years.

In many states, governors and legislators who want to deliver for workers in the short term have an obvious opportunity available: Update overtime standards to ensure workers are paid fairly for the hours they work.

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But what I now understand, through my own life, advocacy, and thousands of conversations in town halls and community events across the country, is that what we label as “individual failure” is so often a public policy failure: institutions, systems, and policies that allow the rich to keep getting richer while the rest of us fall further behind. The result is a vicious cycle in which shame for falling behind is trained inward, causing people to blame themselves for the hardships they face. And bad policy thrives on the silence that shame fosters.

Shame Is the Billionaire Class’s Most Reliable Shield

As the executive director of Fair Share America, I’ve spent the last year traveling across the country on the Stop the Billionaire Giveaway bus tour to hear from Americans directly about how the Trump administration’s reconciliation bill is harming their families through lost health coverage, rising premiums, food insecurity, and higher household costs. These events were the first public outlet many of these people had to speak out against the billionaire-first agenda in Washington.

From churches to community centers, rural front porches to packed town halls, I attended over 55 community events in 17 states to engage with people impacted by the relentless assault on what remains of our social programs. Over and over again, I heard my own experience reflected back as participants described what losing their health care or food assistance would mean for them, their children, and their entire communities. I could sense pain and shame blooming in their stories as they shared them in a room full of strangers.

Someone’s voice shakes as they talk about choosing between rent and medicine. A parent admits they skip meals so their kids can eat. A senior describes the quiet terror of watching their grocery bill rise faster than their Social Security check. And almost always, they preface their story with an apology: “I should have done better. I wish this wasn’t happening to me.”

That apology is the most devastating lie our political culture has ever sold.

Shame is a powerful tool of social control. It tells people their suffering is private, that their struggle reflects bad choices instead of public policy failures. Shame isolates and silences us. It keeps us from demanding better. The corporations and the billionaire class at the top of that system thrive off of—in fact, depend on—our fear, our shame, and our isolation.

Breaking the Neoliberal Script—and Rewriting It Ourselves

For decades, neoliberalism has heavily shaped our culture and our economy. This culture glorifies “free” markets (with fewer rules and guardrails for big companies), treats public support as inherently suspect, and teaches us to see financial struggle as personal failure rather than structural design. It falsely promises security through self-sufficiency but, in reality, delivers widespread uncertainty, loneliness, and shame.

The Stop the Billionaire Giveaway town halls explicitly disrupted this toxic neoliberal script—that suffering is shameful, that asking for help is weakness, that economic hardship reflects personal failure. There is power in putting a fine point on exactly who is profiting from their suffering. While a data center’s tax burden is subsidized, a single mom turns off her heat for fear of an unaffordable utility bill. While a local food pantry watches its shelves go bare, the White House is breaking ground on a ballroom.

Again and again, I watched people experience an almost physical release when they realized: This isn’t just happening to me. Once one person breaks the silence, more follow. This collective recognition is where real power begins—where we can connect the dots between our personal suffering and the policy decisions that have not only enabled but encouraged it.

They begin to reframe their story from “Why did I mess up?” to “Why does the system keep setting us up to fail?” They start to see that the barriers they’ve faced—not lack of will, but lack of good policy, safety nets, and collective investment in dignity—are shared. My team has worked hard to make sure these communities leave events knowing explicitly who they’re up against—that their private pain is evidence of structural failure.

I know this because I’ve experienced that release and recognition myself. At one town hall, I chose to share my deepest shame: how an $886 dental bill led to a medical debt doom loop and ultimately the foreclosure of my home. After sharing my story, I realized that it wasn’t a shortfall in my work to be this vulnerable, but rather a superpower. I’d always been an organizer, but now I could finally channel the energy I once spent blaming myself directly toward the people and systems that caused my economic suffering.

In this sense, what we’re doing in town halls and community rooms is not just organizing—it’s building a new culture, a new moral order, that rejects shame and isolation and instead builds solidarity. That means reimagining what it means to be supported. What it means to belong. What it means to be worthy. And then building institutions, workplaces, communities, and governments that embody those values.

What Better Policymaking Looks Like When We Break Silence and Shame

At a forum Fair Share America hosted in October, Roosevelt Institute President and CEO Elizabeth Wilkins said, “If we are building a new kind of world, then policy has to be deeply informed by—motivated by—the lived experiences of people.”

If we want better policymaking, we need more policymakers and more advocates who are willing to say, “This happened to me” or “Listen to this person’s experience.” We must refuse to hide the parts of our own stories that contradict the myth of endless self-sufficiency. Because every time someone with power breaks that silence, they widen the doorway for everyone else. Just as importantly, we need policy imagined and written by the people who actually live it. Lived experience is expertise, and it’s time we started treating it that way.

We must also understand that we don’t just need better programs—we need a better story about why people are entitled to those programs in the first place. That story is not about dependency, scarcity, or who “earned” help. It’s about decency, autonomy, and living a life that is enjoyable, not one to be suffered through.

When people leave these town halls, they don’t walk out as victims. They walk out as authors who understand their story differently. They see how their struggle connects to others. They recognize that change is not something done to them or for them but something that we are capable of shaping.

That mental shift is cultural. It is political. And, with the right tools and the right folks in leadership, it’s scalable. We are still early in this work. When it comes to the 2025 reconciliation bill, we are just beginning the process of transforming private shame into public demand, turning diagnosis into design, and imagining policies that grow out of lived reality instead of economic theory detached from human life.

But I am convinced of this much: The future of effective policymaking will not be built in boardrooms in Washington, DC. It will be built in circles of chairs, in church basements, in public spaces where communities gather with a clear understanding of their problems and what it will take to fix them. It will be built by people who no longer believe their suffering is a personal flaw and who now know, together, that they have the power to change the systems that caused it and create something better, something more equitable, something more just.

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Tax-Code Tweaks Won’t Solve the Health-Care Affordability Crisis

After a historic government shutdown, the battle over the extension of the enhanced ACA subsidies remains unresolved. Now the 24.3 million Americans currently enrolled in ACA plans face massive premium hikes due to the expiration of enhanced premium tax credits (EPTCs). In fact, those currently receiving subsidies (that is, those earning up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level) could face a 114 percent increase in their monthly premium, on average.

To put this in real dollar amounts, a 40-year-old in Pittsburgh, PA, earning $50,000 annually would go from paying $270 per month to paying $415 for a silver plan. And this is happening at a time when people are facing the financial strain of job losses and higher grocery bills.

Sen. Hawley may have voted for the Senate’s recent bill to extend enhanced marketplace subsidies, but he has not been a proponent of making the marketplace stronger for Americans. For instance, despite being familiar with the struggle of those enrolling in health plans during this open enrollment period, recently noting that “health care is just out-of-control expensive,” he has actively campaigned in support of ACA repeal.

So, how would he address these costs?

Hawley’s plan would allow individuals to deduct up to $25,000 per person for medical expenses from the income they report for tax purposes. The deduction doesn’t appear to be refundable, meaning that individuals with no tax liability will see no further benefit from the deduction. This is a shift from the current policy, whereby taxpayers who itemize can deduct unreimbursed medical expenses that exceed 7.5 percent of their adjusted gross income.

This is not the first time that a conservative in Congress has sought to use the tax code to advance policies to address acute needs. Earlier this year Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL) successfully introduced legislation to extend childcare tax credits, allowing for the deduction of up to $7,500 in child care expenses.

While efforts to reduce health-care and childcare costs are a start, reliance on tax deductions as the primary mechanism for reform fails to address some obvious and fundamental problems. Namely, it assumes people will be able to access the benefit in the first place, and that people will have cash to manage these large up-front expenses while they wait for an eventual tax refund. However, much of the American public is not positioned to reap the benefits of this approach to policymaking.

Tax Deductions Don’t Insure People

The Tax Policy Center estimates that 40 percent of Americans will not pay federal income tax in 2025. Thus any tax policy intervention immediately misses a vast swath of Americans who simply won’t claim the benefit (and even if they did, they would get no money back, since Hawley’s health expense deduction does not appear to be refundable).

What’s more, a tax deduction doesn’t help keep people insured on the marketplace as premiums increase. Researchers at the Brookings Institution estimated that 34 percent of marketplace enrollees currently have a $0 net premium, which helps promote health insurance access. In fact, scholars at Harvard University found that compared to Massachusetts’s insurance plans that maintained $0 premiums, those that introduced a nominal monthly premium (under $10 per month) saw enrollment fall by 14 percent.

In addition, reliance on tax deductions is a poor substitute for comprehensive health insurance offered through the ACA. The uninsured don’t benefit from lower rates negotiated with health insurers, and thus often face higher cash prices. With the average American unable to afford a $1,000 emergency expense, it is notable that without insurance, the typical emergency department visit costs in the neighborhood of $2,500. These costs may inevitably overwhelm family’s budgets, strain hospitals’ bottom lines, and force the same families into medical debt.

In fact, challenges with medical debt are felt throughout the US population. The Commonwealth Fund estimates that an astonishing 79 million Americans have problems with medical bills or are paying off medical debt. Those with medical debt are more likely to forgo additional needed medical care to avoid accumulating additional debts, and they often struggle to meet basic needs. And like so many inequities in America, these challenges are not only particularly prominent among the poorest, but also among communities of color and in particular, Black Americans.

What Looks Generous on Paper Will Fail in Practice

Sen. Hawley’s proposal to allow for more expansive deductions for medical care may well be a sincere effort to expand health-care access. However, it reflects a fundamental lack of appreciation for not only the tax filing status of the target population, but also the difficulty that so many face in affording rising health-care costs.

If the average American can’t cover an unexpected $1,000 emergency medical expense, how can they be expected to shoulder up to $25,000 in medical expenses with the hope of recouping that amount when they file their taxes?

Indeed, the maximum deduction in Sen. Hawley’s plan is more than double the out-of-pocket maximum of the average silver plan. And in the meantime, to absorb these additional health-care costs, it will require millions to go into medical debt—putting them at risk of worse credit ratings, among other financial impacts—or forgo or delay needed care. Simply put, this tax deduction is an empty gesture that papers over the systemic harm that is about to unfold for those enrolled in ACA plans.

Without comprehensive and affordable health insurance protections, a seemingly generous tax deduction will still leave behind the millions of Americans who require health care and cannot afford to wait for reimbursement later.

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It’s something millions of Americans want to believe. Because the American Dream feels further out of reach than ever and this new proposal looks like it might offer a way in, even as it sets off alarm bells.

The Scam Works Because the Crisis Is Real

People don’t just fall for scams when they’re careless. They fall for them when they’re exhausted, stretched thin, and desperate for relief, especially in a housing market designed to push hope further and further out of reach.

Right at the beginning of the holiday season, when financial anxiety spikes and scams spread, the president floated a 50-year mortgage policy, a message echoed on social media by Bill Pulte, lackey-in-chief of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA).

The housing affordability crisis is real, and 30-year mortgage products have not delivered the generational wealth–building opportunities promised to American families—especially for Black families. But serious solutions are on the table. Stretching a mortgage to half a century is not one of them.

A 50-year mortgage would fundamentally reshape a family’s financial life, especially for Black families. Homeownership remains one of the most powerful pathways to stability and generational wealth. But this proposal would lock Black families into cycles of generational debt and stalled economic mobility. The average life expectancy for Black people is four years lower than that of white people. The median age of first-time homebuyers recently reached an all-time high of 40, while the median age for repeat homebuyers is 62.

The administration’s 50-year proposal is a return to the literal meaning of the word “mortgage”: a death pledge. A 50-year mortgage is a death pledge that follows a family to the grave instead of building something they can pass on. With a 50-year mortgage, someone buying a first home at 40 would most likely die still owing at least a decade of payments without passing down the generational wealth the American Dream promises to homeowners.

A 50-Year Mortgage Turns Today’s Pressures into Generational Debt

As terrible as the implications of this proposal are, the length is not even the most damaging thing about it. Longer mortgages don’t address the factors driving up the real costs of homeownership: insurance and taxes.

A 2025 J.D. Power study found that nearly half of homeowners saw insurer-initiated premium increases last year. Industry data show double-digit premium hikes two years in a row—an 11.6 percent year-over-year increase from 2022 to 2023, followed by an 18.8 percent increase the following year.

Over roughly the same period, property taxes surged. ATTOM’s 2023 US Property Tax Report found that taxes on single-family homes jumped 6.9 percent in a single year, with the average annual bill rising to more than $4,000. Together, these insurance and tax increases outpace inflation and wage growth, quietly driving up the real cost of homeownership even before a family makes a single mortgage payment.

What does this have to do with the 50-year mortgage proposal? It means families would be locking themselves into half a century of payments while additional drivers of housing costs—taxes and insurance—keep rising faster than wages.

A longer mortgage doesn’t shield homeowners from these increases; it exposes them to even more years of them. Instead of providing stability, a 50-year mortgage stretches financial vulnerability across two generations, guaranteeing that families will pay more over time for a home that grows less affordable every year.

Black Families Face Higher Costs and Fewer Protections by Design

But what makes this moment even more alarming is what’s happening alongside the 50-year mortgage proposal.

As the regime tries to sell a multigenerational loan under the guise of “access,” FHFA is simultaneously attempting to eliminate or weaken Special Purpose Credit Programs (SPCPs). These programs were first authorized as a tool for lenders under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 to provide flexibility in underwriting criteria and financial support, including assistance with down payments and closing costs, to help marginalized buyers purchase homes.

Although these programs have been around for over 50 years, they have become more popular in the past five years after the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued clarifying guidance to help banks establish these programs and remain compliant.

SPCPs exist because discrimination is real, ongoing, and measurable. Black borrowers continue to face higher interest rates, more denials, and biased appraisals, even with the same financial profile as white borrowers. The establishment of SPCPs acknowledged this history of discrimination and showed what can happen when we interrupt those patterns: Black families secure safe, affordable mortgages. They build equity in communities long shut out by redlining.

Yet the Trump FHFA wants them gone. So at the exact moment a 50-year mortgage is being pitched as a path to homeownership, the actual pathways to fair credit and equitable housing access are being dismantled. The communities most harmed by discrimination, especially Black families, are being set up to face a housing market where the only “solution” is a mortgage that outlives them.

This Isn’t a Policy Mistake—It’s Policy Design

Look at the pieces together—the 50-year mortgage, the dismantling of SPCPs, the weakening of civil rights enforcement, the cuts to federal programs—and a pattern emerges. This appears to be a coordinated effort to usher in policies that would disproportionately harm Black communities.

Black homebuyers already carry heavier burdens. We rely more on savings and retirement accounts for down payments. We face lower appraisals and higher interest rates. We fight through discriminatory credit scoring, predatory lending, and decades of policies that made homeownership the primary engine of wealth for white families and the primary barrier for us.

And that is exactly how these policies are designed to work.

This is a coordinated effort to push through policies that would keep Black families indebted, immobile, and economically vulnerable for the next half-century. A country that expects people to take on 50 years of debt while dismantling the programs that make fair access possible isn’t trying to build a stronger future. It’s building a future where fewer people have one.

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First, the vibes are bad (just ask anyone coming out of a grocery store). Second, the real economy—prices, jobs, and consumer and business spending, among other factors—is worse than it was a year ago, but holding up OK (4.4 percent unemployment, GDP growth over 2 percent, and inflation around 3 percent is hardly the stuff of recession). Third, a small number of people and companies are doing extremely well.

Depending on where you stand, you’re hearing very different things about the economy, but a pretty consistent theme is an administration that has not delivered on promises made to voters—while delivering to the president’s family and friends.

Under the Hood, the Story Gets More Complicated

It’s been a predictably rough year for the US economy. Tariffs have raised goods prices and hit manufacturing jobs, immigration crackdowns have crippled the labor force, and reversing energy policies dramatically has unwound an energy investment boom. As a result, the job market is softer, prices are still high, and inflation is up and apparently rising based on the data flow that has (finally) started to trickle back in.

That said, if the data are weaker, the economic mood of the country is, in a word, awful. Consumer sentiment in October was only exceeded by lows from the worst of the early 1980s recession, the peak of the 2022 inflation, and the months following the “Liberation Day” tariff announcement this year. Since January, consumer sentiment has plunged, giving up essentially all gains from a steady rise after the inflation peak of 2022.

That pessimism isn’t purely emotional—it reflects months of higher grocery and utility bills. In fact, across both the major household expectations surveys, families expect inflation to keep going up next year—which most economists expect as well. And roughly twice as many consumers surveyed by the Conference Board expect the jobs picture to be weaker rather than stronger in the next six months.

This view is both pessimistic and realistic given the data we’ve seen so far this year. It’s unmistakably true that the labor market and the inflation picture are weaker than last fall. What’s worrying to the wonkier economy watchers, however, is that the pressures on both inflation and unemployment are in the wrong direction. There are real risks that both inflation and the jobs picture could get worse, but (short of policy reversals) few predictable shocks are likely to make either improve in the near term.

Job growth has stayed positive but slowed dramatically, from an average 167,000 jobs a month in January to just 109,000 in September (and will likely be revised down further with annual revisions early next year). Over 87 percent of all jobs added this year are in health care and social assistance (a given in an aging country), while the rest of the economy has added just 71,000 jobs all year. And there’s little sign that tariffs are about to bring down prices, nor are there signs that the demand side of the economy is about to pick up.

It’s Not Great, but There’s Plenty of Time to Panic Later

The closer you are to the data, the less pessimistic you probably are right now. But, as we can see in recent Fed meeting minutes, the debate is largely between two camps: The first is those who think the labor market is middling and the risks of rising inflation are serious. The second is those who think the risks of rising inflation are less worrisome than the chances the labor market deteriorates further.

It’s clearly too soon to panic about a recession, and the best labor market data we have say things are holding up well by historical standards—September’s 4.4 percent unemployment is better than about 80 percent of months since 2000—it’s just that there’s little to suggest things are about to improve significantly.

That said, the economy continues to chug along on the strength of spending by resilient, yet quite frustrated, consumers. The final reading on second quarter GDP shows US consumer spending keeping the economy going, even as savings deplete.

Early holiday spending numbers look strong, so it seems like US consumers are going to muddle through tariffs. The distribution of consumer spending remains pretty narrow—high earners are doing much more of the broad-based spending in the economy

However, if you get your news from stock markets, or even from retirement statements, the world is different entirely, and much more optimistic—at least from a high level. After a massive swoon in April, the US stock market has had a great year, powered by tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy and an AI investment boom that looks bubble-like to some inside it.

Yet, like in the real economy, the more you dig into the data the farther from the extremes your views can go. Job and corporate earnings growth are concentrated in increasingly narrow slices of the economy. Corporate earnings are notoriously concentrated at this point, with the top 1.4 percent of S&P 500 companies accounting for almost all of stock market gains this year—just seven companies are now one-third of the value of S&P 500.

How Do We Square These Takes?

Overall, the data are on a more even keel than either the awful vibes most Americans are feeling from an affordability crisis or the anxiously warm vibes of investors. We’re not living through the economic boom tech investors see everywhere, nor the near-term dystopia consumers are feeling. The economy is weaker than last year and likely to continue to soften a bit more over the first part of next year, but the good news is at least for now things are not as bad in the data as in the headlines. The bad news is . . . that’s the good news.

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The policy debates of the day suggest that there is widespread support for taxing the vast resources of the very wealthy to ensure basic levels of care and security for children and families. We can see this playing out in New York City, where Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has championed care-centered policies to tackle affordability, and in Colorado, where voters approved a wealth tax to fund school meals.

People Know What’s Possible

Time and again, the American people have told almost anyone who will listen that they are deeply concerned about the fact that households in the top 10 percent hold over two-thirds of the country’s wealth, while many families can’t afford childcare or eldercare, children go hungry, and so many live in tenuous precarity because we lack a true social safety net. Surveys show not only that most Americans are concerned about affordability and economic insecurity, but also that most people support raising taxes on corporations and higher-income households.

Americans know that it’s not that we lack the resources to deliver economic security. It’s that lawmakers appear to lack the will to collect those resources. Since 1981, the US tax code has favored tax cuts for corporations and wealthy individuals, despite evidence suggesting that tax cuts for the wealthy have little effect on economic growth or employment levels.

Meanwhile, taxing the wealthy to ensure that the government can tackle major social problems is very popular. This popularity is pushing Americans to redefine what’s possible—especially when it comes to caring for the most vulnerable.

New York Is Betting Big on Families

Mayor-elect Mamdani has shown how policies like universal childcare and paid family leave draw broad support. In fact, in the same week that voters expressed their support for investments in childcare, New Mexico launched its first-in-the-nation statewide universal childcare program, proving that, regardless of the naysayers, this is indeed possible.

Crucially, Mamdani’s new administration is packaging childcare as an affordability issue and has proposed solutions to enable the government to deliver. For instance, his administration aims to generate $9 billion in revenue by raising taxes on the city’s wealthiest through a 2 percent tax on incomes more than $1 million and an increased state corporate tax rate that would match neighboring New Jersey’s.

Many New Yorkers have expressed an eagerness for this kind of progressive tax policy in the face of so much economic hardship. And for all the concern in the media about billionaires fleeing the city in the wake of a wealth tax, the reality is it’s not the wealthy fleeing New York—or anywhere else, for that matter—it’s the parents of young children. Parents with children under age six are 40 percent more likely than other groups to leave New York State. And that isn’t good for the local economy. The exit of young families costs the city an estimated $23 billion in lost economic productivity each year.

Simply put, childcare is an affordability issue, and Mamdani’s administration is rightly focused on connecting childcare policy to a larger platform that also includes rent freezes, public transit reform, and city-run grocery stores. These are policies that can make the lives of those who need them most a little easier.

Colorado Votes for Universal Meals

Two successful ballot measures in Colorado are also significant. Colorado voters overwhelmingly approved two tax measures that will boost funding for the state’s free school meals program, which provides free school breakfast and lunch for all children, regardless of income.

Though the program has been in place since 2022, funding it has become difficult in recent years, thanks to rising inflation and other state budget shortfalls. In the absence of more revenue, school districts in Colorado were preparing to have to limit meals to only certain students next year.

Rather than accept this outcome, Coloradans voted to raise income taxes on households making $300,000 or more, which will only impact about 6 percent of households but will raise as much as $95 million more a year for the school meals program. A second proposition that passed will also allow Colorado to keep millions in excess revenue raised for the program to ensure that these meal programs are built to last. These propositions will also allow Colorado to use some of the tax revenue to fund any future gaps in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the federal food program that has been under increasing strain.

Notably, there was no organized opposition to the propositions. Instead of accepting the school lunch program’s slow decline, Colorado voters overwhelmingly came together to willingly raise taxes to feed children. This is also largely a nationally popular policy: A 2023 poll found that 57 percent of Americans support providing free breakfasts for all students, and 60 percent support free lunch.

A Care Agenda Worth Fighting For

As these new policies are implemented, they’ll help redefine what’s possible—and perhaps help rebuild trust for those who have felt abandoned by a government that’s artificially constrained itself with the notion that it can’t take big swings on behalf of its people.

People have made clear that they don’t want to live in a country where children go to bed hungry or parents can’t make ends meet because they lack childcare, while the richest among us keep getting richer. Rather, they want the government to make sure everyone can build a good life for themselves. These emerging policy agendas and public budgets centered on building systems of collective care are a bold step in that direction.

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A significant body of research suggests that they will not. But this question has come into sharper focus as Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani prepares to take office after months of the richest New Yorkers suggesting that they’ll pick up and leave if he succeeds at raising the corporate tax rate and adding a new 2 percent tax on millionaires.

Yet, before debating who might leave, it’s worth asking: Why are these taxes needed in the first place?

While Mamdani’s proposals are also pitched to fund vital government services, it is ever-widening wealth inequality that has kept federal tax reform on the docket.

Between 2018 and 2020, the top 400 earners in the US paid an average of 24 percent of every dollar earned in tax. This is significantly less than the national average tax rate of 30 percent—and even lower than what many middle- and working-class Americans pay. Regressive tax reforms, like President Donald Trump’s recent budget reconciliation bill, increased taxes for the poorest Americans while lowering them for the richest.

The result is an average tax rate that is progressive until the very top of the distribution, where it starts bending down, as shown below.

This ultra-wealthy class of individuals—the top 0.1 or even 0.01 percent—earns in a very different way than the median earner. Most of their income comes from capital, including pass-through business income, capital gains, dividends from stocks, and rent—compared with almost everyone else, who mostly earn income through labor. Income derived from capital is generally taxed at a lower rate compared to labor income, leading top earners to face a very different tax landscape.

Jeff Bezos, for instance, paid himself a little over $80,000 per year as Amazon’s CEO, because, in his words, “I just didn’t feel good about taking more.” The move likely saved him millions in taxes: ProPublica analysis of leaked tax records from 2014 to 2018 estimated Bezos’s own personal federal tax rate at less than 1 percent, compared with the top federal tax rate of 37 percent. He likely avoided that top rate again this past July when he sold $666 million of Amazon stock, a transaction subject to the 23.6 percent capital gains rate with no state tax at all, since he lives in Florida (an intentional move on Bezos’s part, which supports the argument for higher federal rates).

The Fear That Shapes Our Tax Debates

Any discussion of tax must, however, engage with the idea of distortion—that is, the potential for taxes to change behavior by altering incentives. And one particular distortion seems to dominate every debate: capital flight.

The rich pay a large share of total taxes, even if their average rates can be low; the top 1 percent of Americans (earning $663k or more in 2022) paid 40 percent of all income tax in 2022. If these taxpayers left, the story goes, their absence would reduce the overall tax base, undermining essential government services.

If the goal of a government is to address rising inequality, however, then a tax that raises exactly as much revenue as it loses through tax flight would be a good policy if it reduces the wealth gap while remaining revenue neutral. A tax that shrinks the tax base may also be acceptable, if a government is willing to “spend” money in the form of reduced revenue.

For cash-strapped countries, this trade-off is less palatable, but it becomes more viable during periods of high growth. So, what weight should we give to threats by billionaires to leave in response to tax reform, as they have been making in New York since Mamdani’s election?

Research from the Fiscal Policy Institute highlights just how sticky location preferences can be. Their report found no evidence of an increase in mobility among the rich in response to city tax increases in 2017 and 2021. In general, the top 1 percent of New York’s earners migrate at one-quarter of the rate of the rest of the population. And when they do move, it is disproportionately to other high-tax states like Connecticut, California, and New Jersey.

If anything, research suggests that it is the middle class who are leaving New York, and the affordability crisis seems to be a stronger push factor than tax. Households with young children are more than twice as likely to move out of New York City, and 36 percent of households leaving the state cited unaffordable housing as the reason. We will be able to measure the actual extent of wealth flight in time, but some of Andrew Cuomo’s high-profile backers are already striking a more conciliatory tone.

Willingness to move is context dependent, yes, but wider evidence supports the conclusion that even outside of New York City this is not as serious a problem as many fear. Relatively few may actually be prepared to become former New Yorkers.

Moreover, after a millionaire’s tax in Massachusetts and a capital gains hike in Washington in 2022, the number of millionaires actually grew by 39 and 47 percent respectively, with the taxes raising billions for those states.

And outside the US, a new paper analyzes Scandinavian administrative data, the gold standard in empirical economics research. While the authors found modest evidence of mobility (perhaps aided by the free movement of people and capital within the EU’s common market), only 20 cents of every dollar raised by the new tax was lost to capital flight. It would have needed much larger migration responses than those observed for the taxes not to raise substantial revenue.

This new work suggests previous findings that people are reluctant to migrate apply to the rich as well. The authors note that distortions of a tax—changes to savings and investment decisions, and a rise in avoidance and evasion—are more important than migration threats.

How to Tax Without Fear

Certain policy levers can mitigate migration. The US is one of the only countries to apply its full tax code internationally on the basis of citizenship and not only residence. This creates a stronger disincentive to leaving, which other countries could emulate. Coordination could also help. The US could (re)join 130 other countries that have agreed to minimum global corporate tax rates, and one could imagine a similar agreement targeting high-net-worth individuals too.

Yet, the myth of millionaire mobility has done its job: It’s made policymakers nervous and kept billionaires comfortable. The evidence tells a simpler story—most of them stay put.

Several serious reforms are being discussed, including changing capital gains or estate taxes; introducing new measures such as wealth taxes on unrealized gains, land taxes, or consumption taxes; or even a more holistic reform of the tax system. The first challenge, however, shouldn’t be figuring out whether the rich will flee; it’s whether we’ll finally stop letting that fear write our tax policy.

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Its lead author, Hannah Garden-Monheit, is a seasoned policymaker who treats the subject not as an abstract institutional problem but as a democratic one. If the government can’t deliver quickly and visibly for ordinary people, its legitimacy erodes.

Learn more about the report in Fireside Stacks’s inaugural video conversation, featuring Hannah Garden-Monheit, below.

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Part of my trip included a stop at the Michigan Union—the same place where President Lyndon B. Johnson outlined his vision for a Great Society 60 years ago—and it was hard not to feel the echoes of that moment. The students filling that room reminded me that greatness still depends on moral clarity—the kind that demands empathy, urgency, and imagination.

We need that boldness again, not as nostalgia, but as the foundation for a response this moment demands. If we’re looking for boldness, young progressives are an essential voice.

As in generations past, the student left remains “the most reliably correct constituency in America.” Over and over—often at great personal sacrifice—they’ve held the line on what is moral, only to see institutions and leaders catch up. Columbia University is one example: It once worked to crush its 1968 student uprising, and now it markets that same protest as a symbol of its “activist Ivy” legacy.

Far too often, young people have been treated as “nice to have” in the strategy of a progressive ecosystem—when they’re not being painted as an actual threat to the success of the progressive movement. This time, instead of treating students’ moral conviction as a challenge to pragmatic politics, what if we saw it as the foundation of any civic movement capable of meeting this moment?

Listening to the Generation That’s Getting It Right

My time in Michigan crystallized my understanding of something that’s been building for more than a decade. Far from giving in to resignation, the student left today—alongside their millennial predecessors—feels a profound sense of betrayal toward the leaders, institutions, and organizations whose choices have enabled the twin economic and authoritarian crises we are confronting.

In my time thinking about what drives the student left, I have yet to come up with something shorter or clearer than “People like people / They want alive people,” lines in a song by The 1975. Progressive young people are looking for honesty and emotional intelligence from leaders who are willing to fight for people—while also being alive to, or energized and animated by, their concerns.

When you live under the current status quo—students snatched off the street, a climate crisis denied, families left to the whims of the market—isn’t empathy for that pain, and honesty about its scale, the bare minimum we should expect from our leaders? That’s the spirit that should guide how progressive institutions and leaders approach policy: starting from what is necessary, not what polls as popular.

For instance, in a recent conversation I had with students and organizers, one student told me: “People [in my community] were more scared of poverty than death. They were trying to escape a certain condition of life by working themselves to death.” To the student left, the question isn’t whether a minimum wage increase is popular or which mechanism makes it happen; it’s that our economy makes working yourself to death seem necessary. They want their leaders to name that violence and refuse it.

The students in Michigan saw the country’s deepest divide not as ideological, but economic. They pointed to complacency in Washington as proof: Most political leaders have the wealth to weather a crisis, but most people do not. As one student put it in another conversation: “When eggs are more than an hour of minimum wage work, it doesn’t matter to me that inflation is less bad here than across the world.”

That’s why having conversations with young people on the ground around the country is vital—rebuilding trust in democracy requires listening to the people whose future is on the line. Young progressives aren’t just a constituency; they’re a source of institutional renewal. Unbound by the habits of the past, and with a clear moral compass, they can help us imagine what government could be if it finally worked for everyone.

And we know that the student left of this generation has never known “normal” times: Their adolescence was shaped by COVID isolation and uncertainty, their college years shaped by the horror in Gaza and increasing repression at home. Now they face a job market that can’t deliver stability, rents that defy reason, and debts that will define adulthood.

And yet, despite it all, they are building new forms of solidarity, imagination, and civic courage. They remind us that moral clarity is not naive—it’s the starting point for renewal. If we’re serious about a people-powered future, we have to meet their urgency with our own.

Fireside Stacks is a weekly newsletter from Roosevelt Forward about progressive politics, policy, and economics. If you enjoyed this installment, consider sharing it with your friends.

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