The Economic Issue

Not just Affordability

Most Democratic candidates in this year’s midterm election are embracing ``affordability’’ as the country’s major economic issue – the rising cost of housing, health care, food and similar necessities. But the economic issue is actually bigger. The bigger issue is increasing inequality – specifically, the so-called ``K-shaped’’ trend in economic well-being. The rich are getting richer while ordinary low- and middle-income Americans are becoming worse off.

CNBC television reports it this way:``Higher earning consumers, encouraged by rallying stock holdings and elevated property values, are splashing out on vacations and premium goods. . . . On the other hand, after years of higher than ideal inflation rates, lower-income cohorts are struggling to afford necessities.’’ The ``Gini Index,’’ which measures the concentration of wealth, had been dropping to ``multidecade lows’’ as a result of pandemic stimulus measures.

Following a slight improvement in 2020 and 2021, the index of inequality reached a 60-year high in 2025, when the share of national income going to workers declined to its lowest level in more than 75 years. ``The average non-farm business worker is seeing an increasingly small slice of an economy that has largely boomed over the last 15 years.’’ According to Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, ``This is not a cyclical or temporary phenomenon. This is a structural, fundamental issue.’’

In its February 2026 ``Roundup of Money in Politics,’’ the Brennan Center reports that, since he took office for a second term in 2025, ``President Trump has added approximately $3 billion to his net worth.’’ Two thirds of those gains came from his family’s cryptocurrency venture (World Liberty Financial) and ``hundreds of millions more’’ from international real estate deals. The scale of President Trump’s enrichment is unique even if few of his dealings are illegal given that the President, like members of Congress and Supreme Court justices, is ``exempt from ethics rules that bind most other federal officials.’’ Eric Petry, counsel to the Brennan Center for Justice, writes that, since returning to office, Donald Trump’s net worth has increased by almost $3 billion. According to Petri, President Trump ``has enriched himself financially on a scale that dwarfs even the most infamous scandals in American history.’’

The Brennan Center has produced a chart showing the scale of ``Notable U.S. Corruption Scandals’’ in order to make that comparison. The Teapot Dome scandal in the 1920s, which resulted in a cabinet official going to prison, involved bribes totaling $27 million (in today’s money). Watergate involved bribes totaling $22 million in illegal campaign contributions and hush money. The Credit Mobilier scandal in the 1860s involved bribery and inflated construction costs for the Union Pacific Railroad totaling $1.4 billion (in today’s money) – roughly half the increase in President Trump’s net worth in 2025.

For much of U.S. political history, resentment of wealth has been a major issue. It has never really been ideological. Unlike most Western democracies, the U.S. has never had a mass socialist movement, largely because the U.S. working class – at least working class white men – did not have to struggle for political rights. There was, of course, an intense political struggle over the right of labor unions to organize in the early 20^th century that gave rise to the New Deal Democratic majority.

Corruption and ill gotten financial gains have been persistent political issues. President Trump’s financial wheelings and dealings are essentially comparable to the behavior of Americans of great wealth during the Gilded Age of the late 19^th century.

The corruption scandals of the Gilded Age gave rise to the political reforms of the Progressive Era before World War I (including the establishment of the civil service system, the Federal Trade Commission and the graduated income tax in 1913).

President Trump is clearly concerned about this year’s midterm election – enough that he is calling for extraordinary measures to try to ensure that Republicans keep control of Congress (such as his desire to``nationalize’’ the midterms and call on states to use unconventional mid-decade redistricting as a way to create more Republican House districts). Trump will lose a lot of clout if Democrats win a majority in the House this year, which seems more and more likely as the Iran war loses public support.

There is even the likelihood that Trump will be impeached by a Democratic House (for the third time). Democratic political strategist James Carville has predicted that President Trump will resign and turn the presidency over to Vice President Vance. (Carville has produced a video titled ``Trump Will Chicken Out of the Presidency’’). However, resignation seems highly unlikely because it would discredit everything Trump has done in the White House. He clearly enjoys the ``perks’’ of the presidency, such as having his name added to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and putting his signature on the nation’s currency. And he certainly would not want to end up in the same category as Richard Nixon, another Republican President who resigned in disgrace.