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MAYBE WE NEED A NEW WORD FOR “INEQUALITY”  
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David Moscrop
May 28, 2025
Jacobin
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_ America’s richest earn in hours what ordinary workers earn over
lifetimes. As Donald Trump’s tax bill seeks to make the plunder of
the filthy rich permanent, “inequality” no longer feels like a
strong enough word for what we’re facing. _

Guests including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos,
Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Tesla CEO Elon Musk arrive before Donald
Trump's second-term presidential inauguration in the rotunda of the
U.S. Capitol on Jan. 20., Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP Pool

 

It’s something beyond tragedy, beyond farce. The Trump
administration and its Republican congressional allies are trying to
pass
[[link removed]] the
“One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which would, among other measures,
make Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts permanent. The total cost of the
bill’s revenue-slashing provisions is expected to come in at $3.8
trillion [[link removed]] over ten years. The
rich will be the beneficiaries.

Republicans argue the tax cuts will create wealth. It’s simple,
misleading, debunked trickle-down nonsense. As a growth strategy, it
won’t work. It never does. Indeed, it’s hard to believe it’s
even meant to. But as a giveaway to oligarchs — many of whom support
the Trump administration and some of whom literally work for it —
well, it will work just fine.

Over the last year or so, the richest handful of Americans did quite
well for themselves while millions of others struggled to get through
the day. The ten richest people in the country increased
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wealth by $365 billion. Elon Musk himself managed to make a cool $186
billion — over half of the total increase.

As Matt Egan writes for CNN, the 2024–25 growth, from April to
April, accounts for roughly a billion dollars a day in growth for the
top ten. “By contrast,” he notes, “the typical American worker
made just over $50,000 in 2023.” To put that in perspective:
according to Oxfam
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it “would take a staggering 726,000 years for 10 US workers at
median earnings to make that much money.”

The Mega-Haves and the Have-Nots

A2022 report
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that the top 10 percent of Americans hold 60 percent of the
country’s wealth, with the top 1 percent nabbing 27 percent for
themselves. Donald Trump’s bill would further entrench their
advantages and expand their fortunes. To call this “wealth
inequality” seems inadequate. It’s certainly unequal, but the
scale, the magnitude of the disparity, warrants its own word. At some
point, we’ll need to invent one to describe and capture the breadth
and depth and perversity of this abomination.

Wealth and income inequality aren’t the same thing, but they track
similarly skewed distributions of resources — and power. On both
fronts, the United States performs poorly compared to its peer
nations. When it comes to income inequality, it doesn’t even compare
well to chapters of its own history. Historical parallels give some
sense of just how extreme American inequality has become — and how
deeply compromised, how utterly in the pocket of the wealthy, its
executive and legislative branches now are.

In 2012, researchers [[link removed]] found that
incomes were “much more equally distributed in colonial America than
in America today,” even accounting for chattel slavery. They
estimated a Gini coefficient — a measure of inequality where 0
represents perfect equality and 1 represents total inequality — of
0.437. At the time, the top 1 percent took in 7.1 percent of gross
income. In 2023, the US Gini score
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0.47, though some sources have it at 0.41
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The data and methods vary, but the conclusion is the same: the United
States is a land of entrenched inequality.

For comparison, researchers have estimated
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the Gini coefficient for the Roman Empire was 0.46 and the Han Dynasty
years in China was 0.48. As a 2011 _Business Insider _headline
bluntly put it
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“Even The Ancient Roman Empire Wasn’t As Unequal As America
Today.” In contrast, European states tend to have scores in the 0.2
to 0.35 range.

For and by the Few

None of this data should surprise anyone who’s been paying the least
amount of attention to the trajectory of the United States in the
previous several decades — particularly since the Reagan Revolution
went all in on turning the country into a playground for the wealthy.
Decades of deregulation and tax cuts for the rich have only deepened
inequality in the US, both economic and political.

In 2012, scholars Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page released a paper
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“Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and
Average Citizens.” They found that “economic elites and organized
groups representing business interests have substantial independent
impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based
interest groups have little or no independent influence.”

Gilens and Page didn’t use the word “oligarchy” to describe the
US, exercising a measure of scholarly restraint. Still, the word came
up in the paper and a few times in the bibliography, suggesting that
the theme was quite clearly present. The media
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had no such reservations. Coverage of the paper included the term
“oligarchy” over and over again. And rightly so. Accounting for
wealth and income inequality and the fact that laws quite plainly were
being written by and for the few rich and powerful, it was obvious.
The United States was — and still is — an oligarchy.

The Road to Unrest

There’s a chance that Trump’s “Big Beautiful” bill could fail
— but the battle to secure tax breaks for the rich, as a project,
will continue either way. The wealthy in the US write the laws; they
own the politicians; they are firmly ensconced in the White House. It
may matter whether a Democrat or Republican is president; it may
matter whether the Democrats or Republicans hold a majority in the
House of Representatives or the Senate; it may matter whether
Democrats or Republicans are appointing justices to the Supreme Court;
but for the purposes of serving oligarchy, it’s a matter
of _degree_, not of type. The state and its constituent branches are
thoroughly captured by and serve the wealthy.

Around the time of the French Revolution, France’s Gini coefficient
score was an estimated
[[link removed]] 0.59, which
is high, but not wildly higher than that of much of Europe at the
time. Of course, the decades that followed, particularly in the middle
of the next century, saw waves of popular revolutions. And while the
causes of popular revolution are complex, particularly when sorting
the immediate and long-term origins of uprising, there tends to be a
common, if not universal, thread among them: namely, that the state
doesn’t adequately address the needs of its people.

The United States isn’t on the brink of revolt — but it’s far
down the sort of path that has, historically, led to popular unrest,
or something far greater. The state has thoroughly abandoned everyday
Americans and let oligarchs write its laws and reap the rewards —
rewards made possible by the labor and sacrifices of the many. The
rise in right populism is a symptom of, and a response to, this
reality. Trump is both a beneficiary and cause, though not
exclusively, of this populist surge, which is a form of contempt for
the people he’s ostensibly meant to serve. His tax bill, which will
only make things worse for the workers who support him, is emblematic
of this contempt: a policy of extraction, a stress test of just how a
people can be pushed before they finally say, “No more.”

_David Moscrop is a writer and political commentator. He hosts the
podcast Open to Debate and is the author of Too Dumb For Democracy?
Why We Make Bad Political Decisions and How We Can Make Better Ones._

* wealth inequality
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* Republican Tax Cuts
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