Anti-poverty programs are quickly becoming less accessible as the Trump administration claims the “War on Poverty” is “largely over and a success.”
Read more
Economic Justice
Combating inequality means both lifting up and building power at the bottom, and breaking up concentration of wealth and power at the top. That’s why we work at the intersection of economic and racial justice through projects designed to build leadership and self-empowerment of black workers, immigrant workers, and low-wage workers, youth and families affected by incarceration, along with projects aiming to reverse the rules that criminalize poor people of color, and projects fighting to ensure that the wealthy and Wall Street corporations pay their fair share of taxes.
Latest Work
Can a Cap Be Placed on the Incomes of the Super-Rich?
Would this help reduce income inequality were it come to pass?
Read more
We Can Pay For Free College The Same Way We Paid For A Pointless $5.6 Trillion War
Ideas like Medicare for All are written off as fantasy thinking by the same people who support virtually unlimited military spending.
Read more
D.C. Labor Battle Turns Into a Civil Rights Fight
As city council attempts to overturn a minimum wage initiative, district residents demand elected officials respect their vote.
Read more
A Sweet New Century for America’s Most Privileged
America’s elected leaders haven’t ignored inequality since 2000. They’ve made it spectacularly worse.
Read more
How To Level The Playing Field For Workers — Even With Unions Hurting
A federal jobs and income guarantee could protect workers the way unions once did.
Read more
Why I Got Arrested This Summer (And You Should, Too)
With 43 percent of Americans in or near poverty, most of us know there’s something deeply wrong with our democracy. Will we stand up for it?
Read more
Five Powerful Families
We’ve reached the point where a handful of extraordinarily wealthy clans essentially have the power to suffocate our democracy.
Read more
Abolishing ICE Isn’t Radical — It’s Rational
ICE is supposed to keep Americans safe. Instead, it’s terrorizing refugees, families, and small children.
Read more
Poverty Won’t ‘Make America Great’
A recent UN report on international poverty highlighted an unexpected crisis area: the United States.
Read moreIPS Projects
Reports
REPORT: The Warfare State: How Funding for Militarism Compromises Our Welfare
Nearly two-thirds of the federal discretionary budget goes to militarized federal programs, leaving just over a third for our communities — a sliver some lawmakers want to cut even further.
REPORT: A Tale of Two Retirements 2023
Our tax code helps CEOs retire in luxury while ordinary workers struggle. Here’s how to fix it.
Report: High Flyers 2023: How Ultra-Rich Private Jet Travel Costs the Rest of Us and Burns Up the Planet
In this report, we assess the environmental, economic, and security risks of private jet travel — and lay out tax reforms to offset them.
Tax Day 2023: Where Your 2022 Tax Dollars Went
IPS’s National Priorities Project takes a look at where American taxpayers’ money went in 2022, and how skewed our national priorities are.
Wall Street Bonuses Decline But Still Dwarf Worker Pay Increases Since 2008 Crash
Since 2008, the average Wall Street bonus has climbed by more than 75 percent, compared to just a 54 percent increase in average earnings of all private sector workers and a 42 percent rise in manufacturing wages. If the minimum wage had increased as much as Wall Street bonuses since 1985, it would be worth $42.37 today.