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Designing a Wealth Tax for Today’s Robber Barons

Alex Hemingway Jacobin
A proposed wealth tax on Canada’s richest 0.6% could raise hundreds of billions of dollars — enough to tackle housing, transit, and care. The sheer scale of what a tiny slice of billionaire wealth could fund is staggering.

Polling Conundrums: Activist Government, Sí; Democrats, No!

Harold Meyerson The American Prospect
Building a progressive populist movement requires Democrats to talk about Wall Street, which most are reluctant to do. If they’re going to benefit from the public’s anti-oligarch turn, however, they’re going to have Bernie-fy themselves.

Trump, Historians, and the Lessons of U.S. Tariff History

Elizabeth McKillen Labor and Working-Class History Association
Labor historians should be particularly concerned about Trump’s misuse of tariff history because his tariff policies remain popular with many working-class voters and labor union leaders despite the recent economic meltdown they have caused.

Waiting for the Supply Shock

David Dayen The American Prospect
It’s coming, and we know approximately when. The economy contracted by 0.3 percent, and imports have contracted. Tariffs of 145 percent on China are a trade embargo for many sectors. China’s retaliatory measures are an embargo in the other direction.

Everybody Hates Elon

Paul Krugman Paul Krugman's Substack Blog
The closest thing we have to a Trump economic spokesman is Elon Musk, who sees dead people collecting Social Security. And here’s the thing: while there’s still a dwindling Musk/Tesla cult, to a first approximation everyone else hates Elon.

Polling Shows Voters Want To See Action on Corporate Power

Luke Goldstein The American Prospect
Despite these detractors’ claims, a new polling survey commissioned by More Perfect Union and provided exclusively to the Prospect finds that the populist messaging Harris has leaned into is good politics.

Moving Past Neoliberalism Is a Policy Project

Matt Stoller, David Dayen The American Prospect
In order to test whether improving people’s lives can convince them to support Democrats, you have to, well, improve people’s lives. Deepak Bhargava, Shahrzad Shams, and Harry Hanbury, in a piece called “The Death of ‘Deliverism,’” argued otherwise.
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