Marty Levine
October 23, 2025
Headlines and articles about income/wealth inequality are all around us. Here are just a few examples from a quick search:
On October 3, CNN tells us that “the wealth of the top 1% reaches a record $52 trillion. The top 10% of Americans added $5 trillion to their wealth in the second quarter as the stock market rally continued to benefit the biggest investors, according to new Federal Reserve data.”
Earlier in the year, Forbes ran this story: Wealth Inequality: The Existential Challenge To Capitalism
- The Top 10% Own 93% of All Stocks: As of Q3 2023, the top 10% of Americans owned a record 93% of all U.S. stocks. A decade ago, that number was “just” 81%. Meanwhile, the bottom half of American households own less than 1% of stocks and mutual fund shares.
- The Richest 1% Hold $25 Trillion in Stock Wealth: That top 1% owns more than half the total value of the public equity market—a concentration that would have been unimaginable a generation ago, notes Inequality.org.
Over the past decade, for both Nonprofit Quarterly and for ChangeCounts.net, I have been writing about the growing gap between rich and poor. I have been concerned that this message has had difficulty gaining political traction and that the situation just got worse year after year.
Somehow, it seemed that too many of us did not see the connection between the rich getting richer and the rest of us getting poorer and how this affected their lives. Chuck Collins, Director of the Institute for Policy Studies’ Program on Inequality and the Common Good, has taken on that challenge in his new book “Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power are Ruining Our Lives and Planet.”
Here’s how Collins frames his take on this challenge. He cites British journalist Will Hutton who, writing almost a quarter of a century ago for the Observer of London, observed that economic inequality was polarizing and caused “our social arteries to harden. The sumptuousness and bleakness of the respective lifestyles of rich and poor represent a scale of difference and opportunity that is almost medieval-and a standing offense to the American expectation that everyone has an opportunity for life, liberty and happiness.”
Collins then recaps the data of our economic reality, data that may not surprise you. He illustrates how “concentrated wealth is warping virtually every dimension of our daily life: where we get our news and entertainment, how we pay to park our cars, and the cost of groceries.” In rich detail, Collins then shows how wealth imbalance has distorted our society across ten dimensions of our lives:
- Billionaires are trashing our planet.
- Billionaires are making you pay higher taxes.
- Billionaires are wrecking the housing market.
- Billionaires are reinforcing systemic racial economic disparity.
- Billionaires are bad for your health.
- Billionaires are stealing your vote.
- How billionaires are warping nonprofits and philanthropy.
- How billionaires are controlling our food industries and determining what is on grocery store shelves.
- How billionaires are even changing how we care for our pets.
- How billionaires have taken control of our prisons.
Data and facts tell the story of what is today’s reality. For Collins, we have allowed this selfish hoarding of wealth to take place before our eyes for two main reasons.
First, there are powerful narratives of meritocracy, like “people are where they deserve to be”, that justify the billionaires’ siphoning up a huge amount of society’s wealth.
The second reason is that the problem feels intractable: the wealthy and their grip on policymakers are too powerful and entrenched to effect change.
And then, most importantly, he gives us his strategy for creating a more equitable society and stopping the harm from continuing and even worsening.
He suggests we go about changing the narrative. We can challenge their tale that rich people become rich just because they are uniquely smart, skilled, and productive. We can challenge stories that see rich people as succeeding in a vacuum, unaided by others or by governments. Collins recommends that we focus on stories like those shared by the Founders of the Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream company.
We started our enterprise with help from two state universities, the Small Business Administration and a Federal Urban Development Action Grant — all paid for by a previous generation of taxpayers. Our company thrived thanks in part to scientific advances in agriculture, public roads and other infrastructure, intellectual property protections and a regulated marketplace where we could raise capital and ensure the quality of our ingredients. Someone else paid for these public systems that enabled our business to prosper.
More stories like these can undercut the persistent attempt by the wealthy to excuse their greed and by MAGA lawmakers to tell us that wealth is there for everyone, just work harder and smarter. And allow people to hear why a more equitable national economy.
Collins also gives us a policy agenda to consider that can both eliminate the massing of such a great wealth imbalance and mitigate the harm that the current situation has caused:
- Raise the minimum wage to a living wage.
- Provide Universal Health Care.
- Strengthen the right to organize and improve labor standards and protections.
- Provide access to lifelong learning and job retraining.
- Provide Refundable Tax Credits and a universal basic income.
- Reduce money’s influence on politics.
- Implement fair trade rules.
- Shut down global tax loopholes.
- Restore progressive income taxes.
- Eliminate tax preference for income from wealth.
- Expand inheritance taxation and levy a wealth tax.
- Create a tax on global wealth.
- Strengthen antitrust laws.
- Rein in CEO pay.
The broad details of each of these are fleshed out in his book. And while, as I have in the past differed with Collins about the details, the broad scope of what he is telling us must be done is right on target.
Being on target doesn’t mean that it is going to be easy to implement. I just have to look at the politics of my city. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, at the urging of progressives, proposed a budget that included a tax on the wealthiest of corporations doing business in the city. Within days, Governor JB Pritzker came out against it because he feared asking big and profitable companies to pay more in taxes. The heavy political lift that was needed to get the Mayor to include that tax in his proposal now got heavier as those of us working for a better, fairer Chicago need to keep a majority of the City Council behind the plan.
Collins helpfully addresses what those of us who want to build a fairer society should be doing to bring these policies into reality.
- “Strengthen Face-to-Face community” – Build relationships that allow you to understand their perspective and help them connect the dots into a truer picture.
- “Shift to billionaire-free media and social media.” – Isolate yourself (and those in your growing community) from a filtered and distorted set of “facts.”
- “Participate where you have agency.” – There is no shortage of campaigns, about issues and candidates, that need your help. Find those that resonate with you and get engaged as deeply as you can.
The Trump presidency has made the challenge harder. We have a government that is controlled by the rich. It is hell-bent on tilting the balance even further away from equity. That makes doing what we can even more critical. I think that was the lesson of last Sunday’s “No Kings” rallies. I think that is the message of those turning out daily to protect their neighbors from the ICE invaders.
As tough as things are now, we cannot let it stop us from doing the work. Chuck Collins’ book can be one more piece of fuel to energize over the coming months and years of struggle.
