An economy that works for the people who actually run it.

The federal tax code has shifted decisively in favor of capital over labor over the past four decades. Top marginal rates have fallen, capital gains have been taxed at preferential rates, the estate tax has been steadily weakened, and corporate rates have been cut without offsetting base-broadening. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act pushed this further: it lowered the corporate rate from 35% to 21%, opened pass-through deductions worth hundreds of billions to high-income filers, and roughly doubled the estate tax exemption. The cost was financed largely through deficits, which are then used as justification for cutting public spending. Restoring tax fairness means reversing the most regressive of these choices, taxing capital gains and wages at comparable rates, restoring meaningful estate taxation above $10M, and closing the most exploited pass-through and carried-interest loopholes.

For roughly forty years, federal antitrust operated under a doctrine — the consumer-welfare standard — that effectively retired most enforcement. Mergers were waved through unless prosecutors could prove short-run consumer price effects with quantitative precision. The result is the most concentrated US economy in living memory: in healthcare, agriculture, technology, banking, and live-event ticketing, a small number of firms dominate prices, terms, and conditions of work. The 2023 federal merger guidelines reintroduced concerns about labor monopsony, vertical foreclosure, and serial acquisitions. Cases have been brought against incumbents long thought untouchable. State attorneys general now bring antitrust cases that materially shape outcomes. The work is uneven and the courts are skeptical, but the direction has shifted for the first time in a generation.

American corporate governance is unusual among advanced economies. Workers have no formal representation on boards (unlike Germany's codetermination model). Stock buybacks, restricted before 1982, are now the largest single use of corporate cash flow. Executive pay is benchmarked against peers, ratcheting upward in a closed loop. Disclosure of political spending, climate risk, and effective tax rates is contested at every step. Reform options range from incremental (mandate political-spending disclosure, restrict buybacks during layoffs) to structural (codetermination, federal corporate charters for the largest firms). The throughline is that the rules of corporate decision-making are public choices — and the current set has produced an economy where capital flows reliably to shareholders and slowly, if at all, to workers.

The Inflation Reduction Act, CHIPS Act, and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law collectively committed roughly a trillion dollars in public investment. That's the largest deliberate industrial-policy push in two generations. The question is no longer whether to deploy public capital — it's how to do it well. Strong cases for public investment: housing supply, transit, care infrastructure (childcare, eldercare), clean energy and transmission, R&D pipelines that private capital won't fund. Weaker cases: subsidies that flow to incumbents without conditions, tax credits without labor or community-benefit standards, corporate handouts dressed up as competitiveness measures. The principle: public money should buy public benefit, with explicit conditions, transparency, and clawbacks when commitments aren't met.