The chart above reflects the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between August 14th and 17th of a nationwide sample of 1,611 adults (including 1,450 registered voters). The margin of error is 3.4 points for adults and 3.2 points for registered voters.
The chart above reflects the results of the YouGov Poll -- done between January 27th and 30th of a nationwide sample of 1,106 adults, with a 4.1 point margin of error.
I live in Shenandoah County, Virginia. I’m a factory worker, a farmer, and a father of two girls, one still in diapers. I get up before the sun, and most days I don’t sit down until after it’s gone.
My partner Hannah and I raise our girls on a small farm in the Valley. She works full-time too—though nobody calls it that. She’s a caregiver, a homemaker, a livestock handler, and a mother. She doesn’t get a paycheck. She doesn’t get a break. She doesn’t get counted.
We’ve relied on a cistern for water for over three years. I’m trying to save up to dig a well before it runs dry. We heat with firewood I cut myself. We raise animals for milk, eggs, and meat, because the grocery bill outpaces my paycheck.
We’ve stayed unmarried—not because we don’t love each other, but because getting married would kick my partner and our daughters off the Medicaid that keeps them healthy.
My employer offers insurance, sure—but only if I pay nearly as much as our mortgage. I can’t, so we stay as we are: in love but locked out.
I’m not ashamed of our life. It’s honest work, and it’s full of love. However, I am ashamed that in a country as wealthy as ours, people like us are left out in the cold.
When the so-called “Big, Beautiful Bill” passed, it was marketed as a win for working Americans. From where I stand, it looks like the opposite: cuts to Medicaid, reduced support for struggling families, and a ballooning deficit that somehow still leaves us more exposed than before.
You can dress it up however you want, but if it leaves working families behind, it’s not serving the people.
This bill, like so many before it, rewards the already powerful while punishing the people who hold up the economy in invisible ways. It gives to those who lobby and takes from those who labor. It reinforces a message I’ve felt in my bones for years: You’re on your own.
I’m not writing this as a Democrat or a Republican. I’m writing this as a man watching families like mine wear themselves thin—working hard, doing the right things, and still falling behind.
This isn’t about Red or Blue. It’s about the fact that we’re being divided against each other while both sides forget that real Americans bleed the same when the cost of insulin triples or the cost of groceries goes up again.
You shouldn’t be able to carry a hundred dollars’ worth of groceries in two hands. But these days, you can—and that’s not just wrong, it’s dangerous.
I’m writing to ask one simple thing: Who is this country really for?
Because if it’s not for parents doing their best to raise good kids in a broken system; if it’s not for factory workers and farmers who show up every day, no matter how little is left in the tank; if it’s not for families trying to make a life from the land and a paycheck. . . then maybe the flag doesn’t wave for all of us after all.
I don’t want handouts; I want fairness. I don’t want politics; I want policy that works.
I don’t want a revolution of violence. I want a revolution of responsibility—one where we take care of each other, where people can raise a family without choosing between groceries and medicine, and where love doesn’t have to take a back seat to red tape.
So, if you’re in power, hear me: We are not okay. We are drowning quietly.
And if you’re not in power, but you’re reading this and nodding along, then know this: You’re not alone either.
We’re not enemies. We’re neighbors. We’re parents, workers, and caretakers. And it’s time we start acting like it.
FOR THREE DECADES after World War II, America created the largest middle class the world had ever seen. During those years, the earnings of the typical American worker doubled, just as the size of the American economy doubled.
Over the last 40 years, by contrast, the size of the economy has more than doubled again, but the earnings of the typical American have barely budged (adjusted for inflation).
Then, the CEOs of large corporations earned an average of about 20 times the pay of their typical worker. Now, they rake in over 300 times.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the richest 1 percent of Americans took home 9 to 10 percent of total income. Today they take home more than 40 percent.
Then, the economy generated hope. Hard work paid off. The living standards of most people improved through their working lives. Their children enjoyed better lives than they had. Most felt that the rules of the economic game were basically fair.
Although many women, Black people, and Latino people were still blocked from getting a fair share of the economy’s gains, the nation committed itself to changing this. New laws guaranteed equal opportunity, barred discrimination, promoted affirmative action, and expanded educational opportunity for all.
Today, confidence in the economic system has sharply declined. Its apparent arbitrariness and unfairness have undermined the public’s faith in it. Cynicism abounds. Equal opportunity is no longer high on the nation’s agenda.
To the contrary, our economic and political system now seems rigged.
That’s because it is.
THE THREAT TO CAPITALISM is no longer communism or fascism but a steady undermining of the trust modern societies must depend on.
When most people stop believing they and their children have a fair chance to make it, the tacit social contract begins to unravel. And a nation becomes susceptible to demagogues such as Donald Trump.
We have the power to change all this, recreating an economy that works for the many rather than the few. But to determine what must be changed, and to accomplish it, we must first understand what happened and why.
The conventional explanation is that globalization and technological change have made most Americans less competitive. The tasks we used to do can now be done more cheaply by lower-paid workers abroad or by computer-driven machines. Presumably, artificial intelligence will accelerate this trend.
The conventional solution — at least among people who call themselves liberals, Democrats, and progressives — has been an activist government that raises taxes on the wealthy, invests the proceeds in excellent schools and other means people need to get ahead, and redistributes to the needy.
This solution has been vigorously opposed by people who called themselves conservatives and Republicans, who believe the economy will function better for everyone if government is smaller and if taxes and redistributions are curtailed.
BUT THE CONVENTIONAL EXPLANATION for what has happened overlooks a critically important phenomenon — the increasing concentration of political power in a corporate and financial elite that has been able to alter the rules that run the economy.
And the conventional solution is in some ways beside the point, because it takes insufficient account of the corruption of government by these moneyed interests.
The debate over the merits of the “free market” versus an activist government has diverted attention from how the market has come to be organized differently from the way it was a half-century ago, why its current organization is failing to deliver the widely shared prosperity it delivered then, and what the basic rules of the market should be.
The diversion of attention is not accidental.
Many of the most vocal proponents of the “free market” — including executives of large corporations and their ubiquitous lawyers and lobbyists, denizens of Wall Street and their political lackeys, and numerous multimillionaires and billionaires — have for many years been actively reorganizing the market for their own benefit and would prefer these issues not be examined.
MARKETS DEPEND for their very existence on rules governing property (what can be owned),
monopoly (what degree of market power is permissible), contracts (what can be exchanged and under what terms), bankruptcy (what happens when purchasers can’t pay up), labor unions (how much power should workers have), and how all of this is enforced.
Such rules do not exist in nature. They must be decided upon, one way or another, by human beings.
These rules have been altered over the past four decades as large corporations, Wall Street, and wealthy individuals have gained increasing influence over the political institutions responsible for them.
Simultaneously, centers of countervailing power that between the 1930s and 1980s enabled America’s middle and lower-middle classes to exert their own influence — labor unions, small businesses, family farms, and political parties anchored at the local and state levels — have withered.
The consequence has been a market organized by those with great wealth for the purpose of further increasing their wealth.
This has resulted in ever-larger upward distributions inside the market, from the middle class and poor to a minority at the top. Because these distributions occur inside the market, they have largely escaped notice.
As we’ll see, the meritocratic claim that people are paid what they are “worth” in the market is a tautology that begs the questions of how the market is organized and whether that organization is morally and economically defensible.
In reality, income and wealth increasingly depend on who has the power to set the rules of the game.
CEOs of large corporations and Wall Street’s top traders and portfolio managers effectively determine their own pay, advancing market rules that enlarge corporate profits while using inside information to boost their fortunes.
Meanwhile, the pay of average workers has gone nowhere because they have lost countervailing economic power and political clout. The simultaneous rise of both the working poor and non-working rich offers further evidence that earnings no longer correlate with effort or with the common good.
All of this has brought us Donald Trump and America’s lurch toward fascism.
The underlying issue is not the size of government. It’s whom the government is for.
The remedy is for the vast majority to regain influence over how the market is organized. This will require a new countervailing power — allying the economic interests of the majority who have not shared the economy’s gains.
The battle pitting the “free market” against government is needlessly and perversely preventing such an alliance from forming.
The biggest political divide in America in years to come will be between, on the one side, the complex of CEOs of large corporations, top executives and traders at Wall Street banks, private equity and hedge-fund managers, and other moneyed interests who have fixed the economic and political game to their liking. And on the other side, the vast majority who have been left behind.
Some of the people who have been left behind are susceptible to the lies and bigotry of neofascists like Trump.
But the answer is not to give up on democracy.
To the contrary, the only way to reverse course is for the vast majority who now lack influence over the rules of the game to become organized and unified, in order to reestablish the countervailing power that was the key to widespread prosperity five decades ago.
IF WE DISPENSE with mythologies that have distracted us, we can make the system work for most of us rather than for only a relative handful.
History provides some direction as well as some comfort, especially in America, which has three times in our short history readapted the rules of the political economy to create a more inclusive society, while restraining the political power of wealthy minorities at the top.
In the 1830s, the Jacksonians targeted the special privileges of elites so the market system would better serve ordinary citizens.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, progressives enacted antitrust laws to break up the giant trusts, created independent commissions to regulate monopolies, and banned corporate political contributions.
In the 1930s, New Dealers limited the political power of large corporations and Wall Street while enlarging the countervailing power of labor unions, small businesses, and small investors.
The challenge is not just economic but political. Economics and politics cannot be separated.
It’s time for the Democratic Party and its leaders to give full-bodied voice to the forces — labor unions, small businesses, worker cooperatives, worker-owned businesses, family farmers, nonprofits, bottom-up politics, and all of us who are still committed to the common good — that together can countervail the overwhelming power of the big monied interests.
The chart above is from the YouGov Poll -- done between July 1st and 6th of a national sample of 1,000 adults, with a 3 point margin of error.
