The MAGA/Trump economic message, directed mostly at non-college-educated whites, is that MAGA sides with them while progressives side only with people of color. We must take back the economic narrative by asserting that progressives stand with middle-class and low-income Americans of all backgrounds, including communities of color, while conservatives and the far-right side with the wealthy.
Let us first understand some economic realities.
Even in times when the overall U.S. economy seems good and the stock market is strong, average American families barely get by. About 60 percent of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck; more than 40 percent couldn’t pay for an unexpected expense of $400; on average, credit card holders are carrying negative balances of more than $8,000; and students are leaving college tens of thousands of dollars in debt. In short, only the richest Americans are economically secure. But why?
From the post-war period into the Nixon Administration, workers got a fair share of the wealth they created through increased productivity.
But starting in the 1970s and accelerating further during the Reagan Administration, real compensation (that is, wages and benefits adjusted for inflation) stopped rising. From 1980 to 2025, while productivity doubled, workers received only one-fourth of the new wealth while the rich skimmed off the other three-fourths.
This can also be seen another way. The chart below demonstrates that since the end of the Reagan Administration, the richest 10 percent of Americans tripled their wealth and now own 60 percent of all assets in the U.S. Of this, the top 1 percent—about 3.5 million people —owns 27 percent of all wealth, while the other families within the top 10 percent own 33 percent. The bottom half of Americans—about 170 million people—own only three percent of all wealth, mostly in home equity.
Source: Congressional Budget Office, Trends in the Distribution of Family Wealth (2024)
This concentration of wealth was not a normal function of “the market.” The redistribution of wealth to the wealthy was intentionally carried out in myriad ways, large and small. Monopolies were built, management pay was exponentially increased, workers’ benefits were minimized, key government regulations were amended or abolished, taxes were evaded, unions were destroyed, corporations sent factory jobs overseas, businesses cut costs by minimizing customer service and instead making their customers do part of the work, and most recently, the wealthy embraced money-making schemes that are little more than scams. The wealth that all Americans created together didn’t just passively flow to the rich; they actively took it for themselves.
This economic shift is what underlies the popularity of both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Without knowing any of the details of these charts and statistics, typical American workers feel that they have been treated unfairly, that their families are worse off than they were decades ago, and somebody is to blame for it.
A Hart Research poll demonstrated the importance of explicit language by asking persuadable voters which candidate they would support in two circumstances. When given a choice between a Republican who “will grow the economy” and a Democrat who “will make the economy work for all of us,” these voters chose the Republican by 55 to 45 percent. But when given the choice between a Republican who “will grow the economy” and a Democrat who “will make the economy work for all of us, not just the wealthy,” they chose the Democrat by 61 to 39 percent. By explicitly indicting the wealthy, the Democrat gained 16 points.
So, there are two keys to winning the economic debate. One is to point out that Americans are being victimized by the rich, and we’ve provided many ways to do that in Chapter 5. The other key is to insist that economics is about “fairness” and other values in the “opportunity” family, rather than about “freedom.”
For more than 50 years, conservative philosophy has used the language of free-market economics, a fairy tale about a place that does not exist. American markets are not, and never were, free of government influence.
We’re all familiar with some of the laws that police markets to protect employees, consumers, stockholders, and competing businesses. The government inspects food and drugs, keeps unsafe consumer products off the market, regulates air and water pollution, requires minimum safety and health standards for employees, prevents monopolies, protects consumer privacy, insures bank deposits, and so on.
Americans are less familiar with how governments warp markets on behalf of the rich and powerful. To name just a few: direct subsidies (like farm subsidies), indirect subsidies (like loan guarantees), tax abatements (for construction), tax credits (for many special interests), and tax loopholes. Governments may overpay favored firms or industries for construction, products, or service contracts, or allow unconscionable cost overruns; governments set up markets with only a few privileged owners (like the gambling industry).
Now more than ever, wealthy interests that fund the far right want markets distorted to their advantage. The question is not whether the government should be involved in the marketplace. It is. The question is, what principles should guide the government’s involvement?
We suggest that progressives favor “fair markets.” By fair, we mean markets that are balanced—with government as a counterweight when necessary—so that weaker individuals and organizations compete on a reasonably equal basis against more powerful ones. In many cases, balancing markets doesn’t require more government involvement. It requires less: removing the subsidies, loopholes, and other unfair advantages that some individuals and businesses enjoy over others.
It is fair markets that would do the most to lower prices, spur innovations, and encourage the kind of hard work that benefits all of society. In contrast, society does not benefit—instead, everyone loses—when people get rich by gaming the system, exploiting tax or regulatory loopholes, dismantling viable companies, or creating scams that aren’t technically illegal but should be. (Chapter 5 provides narratives to help explain an economy that’s fair to everyone.)