A budget shows our values more clearly than any tweet, campaign speech, or political slogan.
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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
Stop Saying We Can’t Afford a Green New Deal
If top U.S. corporations can afford to spend over $5 trillion buying back their own shares of stock, the United States can afford a Green New Deal.
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Meet the Billionaires Profiting off Job Losses at GM
Hedge fund heads buy up mansions and NFL teams, all on the tab of autoworkers.
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A New Moneyball for Our Deeply Unequal Age
Outfielder Mike Trout has just signed the richest contract in pro sports history, and no one may be happier than America’s staggeringly overpaid CEOs.
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It’s March Madness. Unionize the NCAA!
“Student-athletes” make billions for others while putting their own futures at risk.
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The Real College Admissions Scandal
Wealthy families have rigged college admissions for generations, but they want you to blame affirmative action.
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Has America’s Concentrated Wealth Finally Reached a Tipping Point?
The scary arithmetic of grand fortune is shrinking our household nest-eggs.
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There’s Plenty of Wealth to Go Around — It Just Doesn’t
We’ve “grown the pie” massively since the 1980s, but it hasn’t resulted in ordinary Americans getting a bigger slice.
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Trump’s $174 Billion Budget Lie
Trump tells us we can’t afford PBS funding or preserve affordable housing, but his budget doesn’t have any trouble finding billions of dollars for the endlessly expanding Pentagon budget.
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After Trump
Centrist liberalism is dead, and Trump is a disaster. But progressives can use what he’s done to remake America and its place in the world.
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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.