GOP Vote Scheme Finally Imploding: Why the End May Be Here

By Brad Friedman, Salon

12 May 14

 

From landmark ruling in Wisconsin, to new signs from top Republicans in other states, a shameful ploy may unravel

ust over a week ago, The BRAD BLOG’s legal analyst Ernie Canning posited that the decision by a federal court in Wisconsin to strike down that state’s polling place Photo ID law could signal “the beginning of the end” for such disenfranchising, Republican-enacted laws around the nation.

Since that landmark ruling in the Badger State, new signs from top elected Republican officials in Pennsylvania and Iowa, and even in Wisconsin, suggest that the (at least) decade-long GOP “voter fraud” fraud may have finally peaked, and will now begin the inevitably long slide into abandoned, historical shame.

We don’t want to be too quick to declare the demise of this insidious attempt at reviving Jim Crow with a sophisticated and nefariously misleading legal patina, but after covering this beat for a decade — long before much of the general public, much less the Democratic Party itself, seemed to notice — it seems that the recent landmark court ruling in WI, followed by last week’s towel toss in Pennsylvania and embarrassing revelations in Iowa, may be seen in the not-too-distant future as the moment that the GOP “voter fraud” fraud finally began to permanently unravel.

Wisconsin’s federal ‘precedent’

The decision by federal district court Judge Lynn Adelman at the end of last month, decimating both the polling place Photo ID restriction law passed by Republicans in Wisconsin along with every last one of their disingenous claims about the law’s necessity for preventing voter fraud, will be appealed to a higher court. Where Adelman found [PDF] the law in violation of both the U.S. Constitution and the federal Voting Rights Act, prohibiting laws which discriminate against certain classes of voters, some election law experts say there is a promising possibility that the conservative 7th Circuit Court of Appeals might roll back Adelman’s decision, based on elements of the 2008 Crawford vs. Marion County, IN ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court.

As Canning detailed, however, if the 7th Circuit (and perhaps, eventually, the U.S. Supreme Court itself) follow the guidance offered by the Court’s majority during the 2008 case — which is often wildly and knowingly misinterpreted by blatantly partisan “voter fraud” fraudsters and other disingenuous proponents of Republican Photo ID laws – they may have a difficult time coming up with justification to overturn Adelman’s decision and re-instate WI’s law. After a full trial on the merits and several months of deliberation, Adelman found it “absolutely clear” that the restrictions imposed by Republicans in the Badger State would “prevent more legitimate votes from being cast than fraudulent votes.”

So thorough was the federal judge’s 90-page dismantling of the GOP law and its supposed justifications, Republican Gov. Scott Walker — who, just weeks earlier, had announced that he might call a special session of the state legislature to tweak the law after two different state courts had struck it down as a violation of the state’s Constitution — had to concede that it couldn’t be fixed in time for his own 2014 re-election bid.

After previously describing such a legislative fix as the only issue “pressing” enough to justify convening a special session before the November election, Walker admitted, after the federal decision came down, that he “didn’t see any evidence to suggest that Judge Adelman gave any suggestion that this could be upheld if a tweak was made here or there.”

Indeed, in his ruling, Adelman stated in no uncertain terms that, “given the evidence presented at trial showing that Blacks and Latinos are more likely than whites to lack an ID, it is difficult to see how an amendment to the photo ID requirement could remove its disproportionate racial impact and discriminatory result.”

“The decision from Adelman was basically just an outright opposition to the concept,” Walker conceded. “This was just basically a full-out rejection of the position.”

For now then, Walker’s hopes, and those of his similarly-partisan Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen, rest only on their beliefs that the conservative-leaning 7th Circuit or, if not, the U.S. Supreme Court, will ignore the directive in the SCOTUS Crawfordruling to find the WI statute Constitutional and not in violation of the federal Voting Rights Act.

Given this particular Supreme Court’s proclivity for simply making stuff up as they go along in order to comport with their radical Rightwing activist beliefs (even where such rulings bely their own claims of strict constructionist conservatism), we’ll not put it beyond them to ignore their own rulings from just 6 years ago, in order to find in favor of blatant Republican voter suppression.

Still, if the higher federal courts instead choose to follow SCOTUS’ own precedent, as detailed by the meticulous findings of Adelman, not only is the WI law likely to find itself in the dustbin of history, but that same fate could await the almost identical GOP voting restrictions currently being challenged at the federal level in Texas, in North Carolina and in Arkansas. In fact, the U.S. Dept of Justice, one of the plaintiffs in the federal case against the TX law, has now amended their complaint [PDF] to include Judge Adelman’s WI decision in full.

Pennsylvania’s towel toss

The federal judge in the WI case found that “defendants could not point to a single instance of known voter impersonation occurring in Wisconsin at any time in the recent past.” Those following the facts of the GOP Photo ID scam, rather than Fox “News”, could have told you that long ago.

In 2012, there was much ado as Republicans in control of the state legislature worked with the Republican Governor and the Secretary of the Commonwealth to enact a Photo ID restriction law in advance of that year’s Presidential Election. While state Republicans, as usual, claimed the new restrictions were needed to fight voter fraud, once the case made its way to court, the state was forced to admit in a formal pre-trial stipulation, that “[t]here have been no investigations or prosecutions of in-person voter fraud in Pennsylvania,” that they were “not aware of any incidents of in-person voter fraud in Pennsylvania and do not have direct personal knowledge of in-person voter fraud elsewhere.”

“Respondents will not offer any evidence in this action that in-person voter fraud has in fact occurred in Pennsylvania or elsewhere,” they conceded, along with the admission that they would “not offer any evidence or argument that in person voter fraud is likely to occur in November 2012 in the absence of the Photo ID law,” during the trial.

In other words, before the trial even began, the state was forced to admit that the only type of voter fraud that could possibly be deterred by their own Photo ID restrictions had never actually happened, to their knowledge, and wasn’t likely to happen in the future. That, even as PA’s Republican House Leader Mike Turzai appeared to let slip the real reason they had passed the new law. “Voter ID,” he boasted at a Republican State Committee meeting, “is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.”

The law, challenged in state court as a violation of the Pennsylvania Constitution’s fundamental right to vote, was temporarily blocked by a state judge that year, until a full trial could be held on the merits.

In January of this year, Judge Bernard L. McGinley of the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania ruled, just as The BRAD BLOG’s Canning had predicted back in 2012, that several sections of the GOP law, including the polling place Photo ID restrictions, were in violation of the Keystone State’s constitution, after finding that “hundreds of thousands” of otherwise legal voters were at risk of being disenfranchised for “no compelling state interest”. That was essentially the same thing Judge Adelman would later find in the federal WI case.

While the WI decision faces appeals (in both the state and federal court cases), PA’s Republican Gov. Tom Corbett decided on Thursday to toss in the towel. He said he would not appeal McGinley’s decision that the law represented a violation of the state’s fundamental right to vote.

Like Walker, Corbett, who also faces his own tough re-election contest this year, still claims to believe that such laws are perfectly constitutional, even though the courts continually find otherwise. Unlike Walker, however, Corbett is choosing to not expend any more Big Government funds in the hopes of keeping perfectly legal, largely Democratic-leaning voters from being able to cast their votes this year. He has decided, for now, to abandon the restrictions on voting that are neither necessary, nor even effective at deterring voter fraud (which, where it exists, is almost exclusively carried out via absentee voting, rather than in-person, voter impersonation at the polling place).

Pennsylvania’s law had already cost the supposed “conservatives” in the state some $6 million to advertise, and another million for outside legal counsel in their fruitless, now-abandoned attempt to defend the law.

Iowa’s embarrassment

While the federal and state courts in WI and the state court in PA all recently struck down GOP polling place Photo ID restrictions as violations of law and Constitution (the same was found by an Arkansas state court late last month as well, where a federal case is now also pending), each court also eviscerated the purported justifications for such laws, after Republican defendants were unable to present any evidence of the crime they were pretending the laws were intended to prevent.

Meanwhile, in Iowa, where that state’s Republican Photo ID restriction law has so far been blocked by Democrats, Republican Sec. of State Matt Schultz was, nonetheless, spending Big Government money to crack down on the massive voter fraud he was certain — absolutely certain – has been proliferating in the Hawkeye State.

Sadly, as has been shown to be the case everywhere else, it ain’t happening in Iowa either, as Schultz himself has now discovered, even if he’s having trouble coming to terms with those facts.

On Friday, the Sec. of State released the long-awaited results of his two-year, $250,000 investigation into Iowa voter fraud. Iowa’s Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI), commissioned by Schultz to carry out the probe, was able to find just 117 cases of illegal voting in the last two years.

Out of more than 1.5 million votes cast in the 2012 general election alone, the allegedly illegal votes cast in the state amount to an infinitesimal 0.008427933%. Still, even that number overstates the incidences of voter fraud Schultz was able to find in Iowa, which happens to include zero cases of in-person voter impersonation that Photo ID laws are supposedly meant to deter.Zero.

As Josh Israel explained, “In 2012, Schultz attempted to launch an illegal voter purge to remove up to 3,582 foreign nationalshe suspected of being illegally registered to vote in the state.”

Schultz’ attempted purge was similar to the failed attempt by Florida, just before the 2012 Presidential election, to purge vast numbers of voters from the rolls, based on speculative information and a hope to compare registration rolls against bad information from a federal database. Also like Florida, where initially 182,000 voters were identified by the Republican Sec. of State there as non-citizens illegally registered to vote, almost none of the thousands of registered voters originally identified by Schultz were actually found to have violated the law.

Schultz’ 3,582 non-citizen voters were narrowed to just 147 potential cases by the DCI. Of those, only a handful are being charged with violations of law. Out of those cases, and another handful of former felons and a few voters who may have voted in other states as well, just 27 voters were charged with voter fraud crimes — none for voter impersonation.

So far, according to AP, six have pleaded guilty, one was found not guilty by a jury (in just 40 minutes, after it became clear the former felon “believed her right to vote had been restored when she left probation last year,” following a 2008 conviction), another received deferred prosecution and 15 cases are still pending. Again, none of those cases are for the crime that Photo ID is meant to deter.

Schultz, who is now running for Congress, has long claimed a rampant epidemic of voter fraud in Iowa, ever since taking office the Sec. of State’s office in 2010. Yet he has come up with virtually nothing, despite last year telling a “Tea Party” conference that without Photo ID restrictions, nothing else mattered.

“There are a whole lot of issues that we care about, abortion, gay marriage, a whole lot of social issues that we care deeply about. But you have to start caring about voter ID,” he told the crowd at the April 2013 gathering. “Because if you don’t have that, you’ll never be able to make a difference in any other issue you care about. Never. Because they will cheat! They’ll cheat. And we need to make sure we stop them. So what do I need you to do? I need you start telling your friends and neighbors that you love voter ID. You love voter ID.”

Well, apparently Iowans don’t love such laws. A Des Moines Register poll taken in March of this year found that, by a 46-point margin, voters believe it’s more important that “every eligible registered voter has the opportunity to vote” than it is to make sure that “no person ineligible to vote slips through the cracks and casts a vote.” As Ian Millhiser noted at the time, 71% of Iowans preferred the first option, while just 25% percent chose the latter.

But it’s not only the general public in Iowa which prefers free access to the polls for all, rather than unnecessary restrictions that might disenfranchise thousands of perfectly legal voters. Republicans themselves, clearly, feel the same! Including Matt Schultz and the Republican Party which held the Iowa 2012 GOP Presidential caucuses without requiring voters to present Photo ID before voting.

That’s right: when the Republican Party had the opportunity to set any rules for their own elections — without being burdened by Democrats, the courts, the laws or those pesky Constitutional values – they chose to not require that their own voters present Photo ID before participating, even after the party had worked very hard in the year prior to require such restrictions for all voters in the 2012 general election. (For the record, the Iowa GOP also chose to use hand-counted paper ballots rather than optical-scan or touch-screen computers in their Presidential caucuses that year as well. Thanks only to that public oversight of the balloting the real winner of the 2012 Iowa GOP Caucus was eventually determined.)

“There are people who voted who weren’t supposed to,” Schultz stated after the release of his underwhelming report on Iowa voter fraud. “And this is a situation where we tried to do something about it. I think it was the right thing to do and I stand by that.”

Peak GOP “Voter Fraud” Fraud

While prosecuting criminal voter fraud is indeed important — no matter how small the amount — the utter failure to cite anyevidence of voter fraud at the polls that might be deterred by Photo ID restrictions has perhaps hit a tipping point. In case after case, at both the state and federal level, repeated findings by courts that far more votes stand to be blocked than illegal ones prevented seems to be reaching a critical mass. It’s reasonable to expect that Judge Adelman’s findings in WI will resonate in the federal cases now pending against TX, NC and AR.

Republican dead-enders will, no doubt, continue to make fraudulent, evidence-free claims about an “epidemic of Democratic voter fraud” just as they have since the days following the 2004 Presidential election when a little-noticed group of George W. Bush’s Republican operatives kicked off what has now been a decade of the polling place Photo ID “voter fraud” scam. (The BRAD BLOG noticed the well-funded, well-coordinated effort at the time, though it took some years for others to fully appreciate Republicans’ insidious plans for this well-planned, direct assault on voting rights.)

There are, indeed, states where similar Republican laws are in place or moving forward, and the Supreme Court can, once again, blow everything up with a stroke of their partisan, activist pens. But the chances now seem almost as good that we may finally be looking at a future where the mask has fallen away on such schemes, where they are being found — by the courts, the media, the people, and even the elected officials who ran on phony “voter fraud” claims — to be little more than the blatant voter suppression schemes they were always designed to be.

As conservative demi-god Paul Weyrich, founder of the American Legislative Exchange Counsel (ALEC), the Rightwing organization pushing these laws in state legislatures for years, declared at a convention of Evangelical Republicans in 1984: “I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people, they never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

After a decade-long attempt at keeping the voting populace down, Republicans may have to move on to tactics other than polling place Photo ID laws, at least if the last several weeks have been any indication. While it’s far too early to know for certain, history may eventually look back to early 2014 as the moment when the entire GOP “voter fraud” fraud finally began to fall apart.

How to Shrink Inequality

By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog

12 May 14

 

ome inequality of income and wealth is inevitable, if not necessary. If an economy is to function well, people need incentives to work hard and innovate.

The pertinent question is not whether income and wealth inequality is good or bad. It is at what point do these inequalities become so great as to pose a serious threat to our economy, our ideal of equal opportunity and our democracy.

We are near or have already reached that tipping point. As French economist Thomas Piketty shows beyond doubt in his “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” we are heading back to levels of inequality not seen since the Gilded Age of the late 19th century. The dysfunctions of our economy and politics are not self-correcting when it comes to inequality.

But a return to the Gilded Age is not inevitable. It is incumbent on us to dedicate ourselves to reversing this diabolical trend. But in order to reform the system, we need a political movement for shared prosperity.

Herewith a short summary of what has happened, how it threatens the foundations of our society, why it has happened, and what we must do to reverse it.

What has Happened

The data on widening inequality are remarkably and disturbingly clear. The Congressional Budget Office has found that between 1979 and 2007, the onset of the Great Recession, the gap in income—after federal taxes and transfer payments—more than tripled between the top 1 percent of the population and everyone else. The after-tax, after-transfer income of the top 1 percent increased by 275 percent, while it increased less than 40 percent for the middle three quintiles of the population and only 18 percent for the bottom quintile.

The gap has continued to widen in the recovery. According to the Census Bureau, median family and median household incomes have been falling, adjusted for inflation; while according to the data gathered by my colleague Emmanuel Saez, the income of the wealthiest 1 percent has soared by 31 percent. In fact, Saez has calculated that 95 percent of all economic gains since the recovery began have gone to the top 1 percent.

Wealth has become even more concentrated than income. An April 2013 Pew Research Center report found that from 2009 to 2011, “the mean net worth of households in the upper 7 percent of wealth distribution rose by an estimated 28 percent, while the mean net worth of households in the lower 93 percent dropped by 4 percent.”

Why It Threatens Our Society

This trend is now threatening the three foundation stones of our society: our economy, our ideal of equal opportunity and our democracy.

The economy. In the United States, consumer spending accounts for approximately 70 percent of economic activity. If consumers don’t have adequate purchasing power, businesses have no incentive to expand or hire additional workers. Because the rich spend a smaller proportion of their incomes than the middle class and the poor, it stands to reason that as a larger and larger share of the nation’s total income goes to the top, consumer demand is dampened. If the middle class is forced to borrow in order to maintain its standard of living, that dampening may come suddenly—when debt bubbles burst.

Consider that the two peak years of inequality over the past century—when the top 1 percent garnered more than 23 percent of total income—were 1928 and 2007. Each of these periods was preceded by substantial increases in borrowing, which ended notoriously in the Great Crash of 1929 and the near-meltdown of 2008.

The anemic recovery we are now experiencing is directly related to the decline in median household incomes after 2009, coupled with the inability or unwillingness of consumers to take on additional debt and of banks to finance that debt—wisely, given the damage wrought by the bursting debt bubble. We cannot have a growing economy without a growing and buoyant middle class. We cannot have a growing middle class if almost all of the economic gains go to the top 1 percent.

Equal opportunity. Widening inequality also challenges the nation’s core ideal of equal opportunity, because it hampers upward mobility. High inequality correlates with low upward mobility. Studies are not conclusive because the speed of upward mobility is difficult to measure.

But even under the unrealistic assumption that its velocity is no different today than it was thirty years ago—that someone born into a poor or lower-middle-class family today can move upward at the same rate as three decades ago—widening inequality still hampers upward mobility. That’s simply because the ladder is far longer now. The distance between its bottom and top rungs, and between every rung along the way, is far greater. Anyone ascending it at the same speed as before will necessarily make less progress upward.

In addition, when the middle class is in decline and median household incomes are dropping, there are fewer possibilities for upward mobility. A stressed middle class is also less willing to share the ladder of opportunity with those below it. For this reason, the issue of widening inequality cannot be separated from the problems of poverty and diminishing opportunities for those near the bottom. They are one and the same.

Democracy. The connection between widening inequality and the undermining of democracy has long been understood. As former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis is famously alleged to have said in the early years of the last century, an era when robber barons dumped sacks of money on legislators’ desks, “We may have a democracy, or we may have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”

As income and wealth flow upward, political power follows. Money flowing to political campaigns, lobbyists, think tanks, “expert” witnesses and media campaigns buys disproportionate influence. With all that money, no legislative bulwark can be high enough or strong enough to protect the democratic process.

The threat to our democracy also comes from the polarization that accompanies high levels of inequality. Partisanship—measured by some political scientists as the distance between median Republican and Democratic roll-call votes on key economic issues—almost directly tracks with the level of inequality. It reached high levels in the first decades of the twentieth century when inequality soared, and has reached similar levels in recent years.

When large numbers of Americans are working harder than ever but getting nowhere, and see most of the economic gains going to a small group at the top, they suspect the game is rigged. Some of these people can be persuaded that the culprit is big government; others, that the blame falls on the wealthy and big corporations. The result is fierce partisanship, fueled by anti-establishment populism on both the right and the left of the political spectrum.

Why It Has Happened

Between the end of World War II and the early 1970s, the median wage grew in tandem with productivity. Both roughly doubled in those years, adjusted for inflation. But after the 1970s, productivity continued to rise at roughly the same pace as before, while wages began to flatten. In part, this was due to the twin forces of globalization and labor-replacing technologies that began to hit the American workforce like strong winds—accelerating into massive storms in the 1980s and ’90s, and hurricanes since then.

Containers, satellite communication technologies, and cargo ships and planes radically reduced the cost of producing goods anywhere around the globe, thereby eliminating many manufacturing jobs or putting downward pressure on other wages. Automation, followed by computers, software, robotics, computer-controlled machine tools and widespread digitization, further eroded jobs and wages. These forces simultaneously undermined organized labor. Unionized companies faced increasing competitive pressures to outsource, automate or move to nonunion states.

These forces didn’t erode all incomes, however. In fact, they added to the value of complex work done by those who were well educated, well connected and fortunate enough to have chosen the right professions. Those lucky few who were perceived to be the most valuable saw their pay skyrocket.

But that’s only part of the story. Instead of responding to these gale-force winds with policies designed to upgrade the skills of Americans, modernize our infrastructure, strengthen our safety net and adapt the workforce—and pay for much of this with higher taxes on the wealthy—we did the reverse. We began disinvesting in education, job training and infrastructure. We began shredding our safety net. We made it harder for many Americans to join unions. (The decline in unionization directly correlates with the decline of the portion of income going to the middle class.) And we reduced taxes on the wealthy.

We also deregulated. Financial deregulation in particular made finance the most lucrative industry in America, as it had been in the 1920s. Here again, the parallels between the 1920s and recent years are striking, reflecting the same pattern of inequality.

Other advanced economies have faced the same gale-force winds but have not suffered the same inequalities as we have because they have helped their workforces adapt to the new economic realities—leaving the United States the most unequal of all advanced nations by far.

What We Must Do

There is no single solution for reversing widening inequality. Thomas Piketty’s monumental book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” paints a troubling picture of societies dominated by a comparative few, whose cumulative wealth and unearned income overshadow the majority who rely on jobs and earned income. But our future is not set in stone, and Piketty’s description of past and current trends need not determine our path in the future. Here are ten initiatives that could reverse the trends described above:

1) Make work pay. The fastest-growing categories of work are retail, restaurant (including fast food), hospital (especially orderlies and staff), hotel, childcare and eldercare. But these jobs tend to pay very little. A first step toward making work pay is to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, pegging it to inflation; abolish the tipped minimum wage; and expand the Earned Income Tax Credit. No American who works full time should be in poverty.

2) Unionize low-wage workers. The rise and fall of the American middle class correlates almost exactly with the rise and fall of private-sector unions, because unions gave the middle class the bargaining power it needed to secure a fair share of the gains from economic growth. We need to reinvigorate unions, beginning with low-wage service occupations that are sheltered from global competition and from labor-replacing technologies. Lower-wage Americans deserve more bargaining power.

3) Invest in education. This investment should extend from early childhood through world-class primary and secondary schools, affordable public higher education, good technical education and lifelong learning. Education should not be thought of as a private investment; it is a public good that helps both individuals and the economy. Yet for too many Americans, high-quality education is unaffordable and unattainable. Every American should have an equal opportunity to make the most of herself or himself. High-quality education should be freely available to all, starting at the age of 3 and extending through four years of university or technical education.

4) Invest in infrastructure. Many working Americans—especially those on the lower rungs of the income ladder—are hobbled by an obsolete infrastructure that generates long commutes to work, excessively high home and rental prices, inadequate Internet access, insufficient power and water sources, and unnecessary environmental degradation. Every American should have access to an infrastructure suitable to the richest nation in the world.

5) Pay for these investments with higher taxes on the wealthy. Between the end of World War II and 1981 (when the wealthiest were getting paid a far lower share of total national income), the highest marginal federal income tax rate never fell below 70 percent, and the effective rate (including tax deductions and credits) hovered around 50 percent. But with Ronald Reagan’s tax cut of 1981, followed by George W. Bush’s tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, the taxes on top incomes were slashed, and tax loopholes favoring the wealthy were widened. The implicit promise—sometimes made explicit—was that the benefits from such cuts would trickle down to the broad middle class and even to the poor. As I’ve shown, however, nothing trickled down. At a time in American history when the after-tax incomes of the wealthy continue to soar, while median household incomes are falling, and when we must invest far more in education and infrastructure, it seems appropriate to raise the top marginal tax rate and close tax loopholes that disproportionately favor the wealthy.

6) Make the payroll tax progressive. Payroll taxes account for 40 percent of government revenues, yet they are not nearly as progressive as income taxes. One way to make the payroll tax more progressive would be to exempt the first $15,000 of wages and make up the difference by removing the cap on the portion of income subject to Social Security payroll taxes.

7) Raise the estate tax and eliminate the “stepped-up basis” for determining capital gains at death. As Piketty warns, the United States, like other rich nations, could be moving toward an oligarchy of inherited wealth and away from a meritocracy based on labor income. The most direct way to reduce the dominance of inherited wealth is to raise the estate tax by triggering it at $1 million of wealth per person rather than its current $5.34 million (and thereafter peg those levels to inflation). We should also eliminate the “stepped-up basis” rule that lets heirs avoid capital gains taxes on the appreciation of assets that occurred before the death of their benefactors.

8) Constrain Wall Street. The financial sector has added to the burdens of the middle class and the poor through excesses that were the proximate cause of an economic crisis in 2008, similar to the crisis of 1929. Even though capital requirements have been tightened and oversight strengthened, the biggest banks are still too big to fail, jail or curtail—and therefore capable of generating another crisis. The Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial- and investment-banking functions, should be resurrected in full, and the size of the nation’s biggest banks should be capped.

9) Give all Americans a share in future economic gains. The richest 10 percent of Americans own roughly 80 percent of the value of the nation’s capital stock; the richest 1 percent own about 35 percent. As the returns to capital continue to outpace the returns to labor, this allocation of ownership further aggravates inequality. Ownership should be broadened through a plan that would give every newborn American an “opportunity share” worth, say, $5,000 in a diversified index of stocks and bonds—which, compounded over time, would be worth considerably more. The share could be cashed in gradually starting at the age of 18.

10) Get big money out of politics. Last, but certainly not least, we must limit the political influence of the great accumulations of wealth that are threatening our democracy and drowning out the voices of average Americans. The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision must be reversed—either by the Court itself, or by constitutional amendment. In the meantime, we must move toward the public financing of elections—for example, with the federal government giving presidential candidates, as well as House and Senate candidates in general elections, $2 for every $1 raised from small donors.

Building a Movement

It’s doubtful that these and other measures designed to reverse widening inequality will be enacted anytime soon. Having served in Washington, I know how difficult it is to get anything done unless the broad public understands what’s at stake and actively pushes for reform.

That’s why we need a movement for shared prosperity—a movement on a scale similar to the Progressive movement at the turn of the last century, which fueled the first progressive income tax and antitrust laws; the suffrage movement, which won women the vote; the labor movement, which helped animate the New Deal and fueled the great prosperity of the first three decades after World War II; the civil rights movement, which achieved the landmark Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts; and the environmental movement, which spawned the National Environmental Policy Act and other critical legislation.

Time and again, when the situation demands it, America has saved capitalism from its own excesses. We put ideology aside and do what’s necessary. No other nation is as fundamentally pragmatic. We will reverse the trend toward widening inequality eventually. We have no choice. But we must organize and mobilize in order that it be done.