September 4th, 2025
In this issue:
- As Progressive Elected Officials, We Choose Both Economic Populism and Abundance
- How the Richest People in America Avoid Paying Taxes
- Washington’s Food Banks Face a Crisis
- Conservatives Should Take the Growing Wealth Gap Seriously
Yet another study confirms that the super rich pay less in taxes than the rest of us. Meanwhile, food banks in Washington state are forecasting a pandemic-like crisis due to budget cuts from Congress – a crisis that was completely avoidable.
The simple reality is our tax code is working great for the wealthiest few, while leaving everyone else behind.
We don’t have to accept an economy built on scarcity for working families and handouts for the ultra-rich. If you agree and you want to help us spread information about progressive revenue, then help us grow our movement by giving us a follow on Instagram and our new TikTok!
These platforms have already allowed us to reach hundreds of thousands more people, and we’re just getting started. Follow us, and together we can grow this movement for a fair tax code in Washington.
-Treasure
AS PROGRESSIVE ELECTED OFFICIALS, WE CHOOSE BOTH ECONOMIC POPULISM AND ABUNDANCE
The abundance movement envisions the government enabling society’s greatest needs to be met with ample, easily available resources, while efficiently and effectively delivering on its promises. Through that lens, abundance and economic populism are ingredients that work better together. That’s because making essentials like healthcare, affordable housing, energy, and transportation easier to build—and thus cheaper—makes it even easier to pay for them through progressive taxation and allows us to serve our communities more equitably. Abundance makes economic populism more effective.
At the local level, housing is the policy where you can most clearly see how abundance policy and economic populism work together. According to the view that abundance and progressivism are in inherent conflict, local officials should have to choose between pro-housing regulatory reform and policies like displacement protections and affordable housing investments. But in Seattle, local official Teresa Mosqueda has done both: She supported a citywide upzoning and crafted the JumpStart Housing Community Self-Determination Fund, which steers money from a new progressive payroll tax into anti-displacement projects.
More – Burhan Azeem, Teresa Mosqueda, Zo Qadri and Anna Brawley, The Nation
HOW THE RICHEST PEOPLE IN AMERICA AVOID PAYING TAXES
According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, the richest of rich Americans pay an average tax rate of 34 percent, higher than any other cohort’s. In reality, as everyone has long known, they pay less than that. A new study by some of the country’s most preeminent economists has finally put concrete numbers to the disparity. The average rate that the richest Americans pay, they find, sits at just 24 percent. That number has fallen markedly in recent years and will remain low for the foreseeable future, thanks to Donald Trump.
More – Annie Lowrey, The Atlantic
WASHINGTON’S FOOD BANKS FACE A CRISIS
Aaron Czyzewski, advocacy and public policy director at Seattle-based Food Lifeline, likens the current circumstances to “going into another pandemic.”
“But this time without the disease, and this time without the federal government coming to help,” he says. “In fact, they’re running away and then taking things with them.”
The West Seattle Food Bank, for example, has had to offer cheaper ground turkey or turkey hot dogs as protein options instead of chicken thighs, as it navigates slashed funding and unprecedented need, says Robbin Peterson, the food bank’s development director. The organization also only provides milk every other week now.
More – James Goldstein-Street, Washington State Standard
CONSERVATIVES SHOULD TAKE THE GROWING WEALTH GAP SERIOUSLY
I’m often astonished at the indifferentism that I encounter among older people (read Boomers) who insist that young people who say they can’t buy a home are just lazy and need to get a better job.
Now I know what you might think. I, a 28-year-old still early in his career who gets paid to write his opinions on the internet, is trafficking in a time-honored cliche of blaming older people for my problems. And yes, I’ll admit, to some degree, that is what I am doing.
There’s a stereotype about politicians that they generally see the world through the lens of the year they were first elected, no matter how different it may be now. If you were elected in 1992, and the year before there had been a wildly successful Middle East military operation, then, obviously, after being reelected in 2002, supporting another Middle East military operation will yield great success and definitely won’t destabilize the entire region for a generation.
More – Jeremiah Poff, Washington Examiner
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