The real costs, for most, of Trump tax policy

This has graphs and other more specific information.

Taking all the policies of President Trump and the Republican majority in Congress into account, all but the richest Americans are paying higher taxes on average in 2026 than they did last year. These policies include:

- Dramatically increased tariffs on goods from abroad, a tax that economists widely agree is mostly borne by American consumers.

- The termination of the Enhanced Premium Tax Credit (EPTC), which had made health care more affordable for millions of people.

- The so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), which overwhelmingly benefits the rich and corporations. - ITEP

Death to private equity!

The article I'm quoting from is just one in an issue of Mother Jones largely devoted to explicating p. equity's foulness.

If you were to sit down with a focus group and a whiteboard, you would have a hard time coming up with a policy with less populist appeal than the nearly three-decades-old loophole that cuts private equity billionaires’ tax rate almost in half.

The carried-interest loophole, Barack Obama said, upset “the balance between work and wealth.” Donald Trump claimed the fund managers who availed themselves of this tax break were “getting away with murder.” Joe Biden, like both of his predecessors, ran for president on a pledge to end it.

“People get this really easily—we’re giving a whole lot of rich people more money for no reason other than them being rich,” says Mandla Deskins, advo­cacy manager at Take on Wall Street, an organization pressuring members of Congress to jettison this tax break.

On paper, it’s an idea that almost nobody says they want. Polls show the public is overwhelmingly against it. Mitt Romney lost his bid for the presidency in part because of it. Tax experts think it’s unfair. Carried interest has no real constituency outside certain corners of Nantucket. But for a decade and a half, private equity’s favorite tax break, which delivers hundreds of millions of dollars annually to the guys in blue button-downs and matching fleeces who bought your company and laid you off, has been the most unkillable bad idea in a town with no shortage of them, a testament to the unstoppable combination of money and inertia.

Well, money mostly. - Mother Jones

The pandemic is costing some way more than others

It's the same deal in Minnesota, as everywhere else.

When it comes to the front lines of the pandemic, Asian women, Native American women, and Black women are disproportionately employed in high-risk essential health care, retail, and service jobs in Minnesota, according to researchers at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs.

At the same time, pandemic-related layoffs have disproportionately affected women, Native Americans, and Blacks, compared to other groups. And differences in demographic composition across jobs categories and industries explain only a fraction of these job losses.

New research published by the Center on Women, Gender, and Public Policy this week highlights the ways that different groups of workers were unequally impacted as the pandemic tightened its grip on Minnesota over the spring and summer months. - Humphrey School of Public Affairs

How to deal with pandemic profiteering

For anyone who doesn't have his head permanently up the billionaires' butts, this makes complete sense.

America's 651 billionaires have gained so much wealth during the coronavirus pandemic that they could fully pay for one-time $3,000 stimulus checks for every person in the United States and still be better off than they were before the crisis.

That's according to new research released Wednesday by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), groups that have been tracking the "pandemic profits" of U.S. billionaires since mid-March.

In the nearly nine-month period between March 18 and December 7, American billionaires gained more than $1 trillion in wealth as people across the U.S. lost their jobs, their businesses, their homes, and their lives to the pandemic. The collective net worth of U.S. billionaires now sits just above $4 trillion—nearly double the combined wealth owned by the bottom 50% of the American population. - Common Dreams

Pandemic profiteering should be a much bigger story

A lot of people seem to be just resigned to this. A lot of others apparently honestly believe that backing the likes of Trump is the way to change it. It's all really unfortunate.

As over a thousand people in the U.S. alone die each day during the deadliest pandemic in a century, plutocrats and their businesses are thriving like never before, in no small part due to a system rife with profiteering, opportunism, and worker exploitation. So says the report, entitled Billionaire Wealth vs. Community Health: Protecting Essential Workers from Pandemic Profiteers, which focuses on 12 of the most egregious pandemic profiteers—the "Delinquent Dozen"—who include the owners of Walmart and the CEOs of Amazon and Target.

These companies and their owners and executives have benefited from their "monopoly positions," the report states, but their success "hasn't translated into better pay or safer working conditions for the employees showing up to work in a pandemic." - Common Dreams

The plutocrats are screwing us maybe worse than ever

Great current summary, well worth saving for reference.

When Dr. Jonas Salk was asked about a patent on his polio vaccine in 1955, he said, “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” When Gilead Sciences recently developed an anti-Covid drug for about $12 per treatment, they set the price at $3,200.

As Republicans and business leaders decry the word ‘social’ as anti-American, they continue to promote the free-market “winner take all” philosophy that has caused over half of our nation to try to survive without adequate health care and life savings and job opportunities. Our richest corporations are much to blame. A review of the facts should make this clear. - Nation of Change