Seven ways Democrats can help ordinary Americans and stand up to the oligarchs

The historic repudiation of President Donald Trump’s agenda on Election Day had lots of ingredients. Voters were outraged over data centers, ICE cruelty, DOGE’s trashing of the federal workforce, the gutting of science funding and environmental protections, and more, but blatant corruption and high prices seemed to be the top concerns.

The incoming Congress will conduct hearings and investigations, and perhaps even impeach a few officials, but if the Democrats don’t promptly address the economic elephant in the room, as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told the New York Times last week, “we’re going to be screwed.”

The inflation resulting from Trump’s ill-conceived tariffs and war of choice in the Middle East have caused Americans’ living expenses to grow faster than their wages, while the AI-fueled stock market boom has only paid off for America’s wealthiest 10 percent (which holds more than 88 percent of the stock).

Taming consumer costs is one obvious goal, and Democrats have floated a number of interesting proposals, but voters may also appreciate efforts to redistribute back to the poor and middle class some of the economic spoils that Republicans redistributed to the rich in 2017 and 2025.

The scale of the Democratic sweep, as Paul Krugman wrote in a recent Substack post, “showed that Americans want fundamental change, a decisive break with Trumpism. Yet with Trump still wielding the veto pen, what should they do in the remaining two years of his term?” His answer: “Pass highly popular legislation that would clearly benefit ordinary Americans and not the oligarchs, knowing full well that Trump will veto the legislation.”

Here are seven ways the Dems could help the people who delivered them their landslide—along with ideas to pay for them. Ambitious stuff, but who knows: With 2028 approaching, and Republicans desperate to win back voters, maybe some of it will even survive the veto pen.

Trump stubbornly refuses to accept that the world needs to wean itself off its oil addiction, but the Iran war he launched without congressional approval has made that point crystal clear. For now, though, we depend on the global flow of oil to keep prices in check. Congress could help restore that flow by refusing to keep funding the war, which will pressure the administration to end it quickly. For that to succeed, Democrats will need to completly reject the nearly 50 percent raise Trump is seeking for the Pentagon. His budget request is totally bananas—especially given that actual US military spending already exceeds $1.5 trillion, and the increase Trump desires would boost it to between $2 trillion and $3 trillion, according to an analysis by the Project on Government Oversight. That exceeds the combined military spending of every other nation combined.

How to pay for it: No need. Ending the war would save the government tens of billions—and the American people much more.

Pretty basic. Congress has the power to place limits on a president’s tariff authority. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, introduced just such a bill in July, and the odds of it passing have now increased dramatically. Plenty of Republicans are not down with the tariffs, which are costing American families a lot of money. With Trump weakened, they may be willing to defy him, at least on tailored legislation. The tariffs on Canada, for instance, have badly damaged the US relationship with one of our best allies and trading partners, and imposed high costs on US consumers and businesses—especially in northern border states, but elsewhere, too, because America’s automobile and construction trades rely on Canadian inputs. Unless he’s reined in, Trump will keep doubling down—literally. Just yesterday, he threatened to double tariffs on another top trading partner, Mexico.

How to pay for it: More like, how can we afford not to do it?

Under the Working Americans Tax Cut Act, introduced in March by Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), a single filer would pay zero tax on their first $46,000 in earnings ($92,000 for a couple filing jointly), a baseline tied to median income. An eligibility phaseout ensures that people earning up to $80,500 (couples: $161,000) get a partial exemption, but no freebies for anyone who makes more. The main winners, according to the Penn Wharton Budget Model‘s analysis, are households in the second through fourth income quintiles—whose average 2024 earnings ranged from $49,380 to $136,800. Depending on which quintile, they would see average tax cuts of $465 to $1,545. Families in the 81st through 99th income percentiles are not affected.

How to pay for it: Van Hollen and Beyer propose a hefty surcharge on taxable income in excess of $1 million a year, starting at 5 percent and rising to 12 percent on income over $5 million ($7.5 million for a couple). Don’t weep for these folks: Most families with income that high are reaping far more in untaxed investment gains. Subtracting the middle-class breaks from the zillionaire surcharges, Penn Wharton calculates a net revenue gain of about $264 billion over a decade if the bill becomes law.

This would address affordability concerns for many low- and middle-income Americans. The ironically named One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which slashed the safety net for America’s poorest by about $900 billion, was projected to cost the average family in the lowest income quintile $805 a year (after taxes and transfers) while boosting the average income of top 10 percent households by more than $15,000—top 1 percent households got about $63,000 extra. A Yale study conducted prior to the bill’s passage found that, when likely voters were informed of such effects, Republican opposition more than doubled and overall public support for the bill fell to 11 percent.

The Medicaid and food stamp (SNAP) cuts are being accomplished largely by imposing burdensome bureaucratic requirements that cause people to fall off the rolls. Recipients, for example, must repeatedly provide proof of employment, which may sound reasonable but is actually a nightmare for people just scraping by—even more so now that the world’s richest man has gutted the federal workforce, resulting in extra-abysmal customer service. (See: “The IRS is imploding.”)

The Affordable Care Act, meanwhile, helped millions of families get health insurance, but the premiums are increasingly unaffordable. Congress increased premium subsidies for low-income people in 2021. The next year, as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, lawmakers temporarily extended subsidies to middle-income households that had been priced out. Then the Republicans took over and let the expanded subsidies expire at the end of 2025, a move the Congressional Budget Office has projected will result in up to 7.4 million people losing health insurance by 2030. Retaining the expanded subsidies for a decade, the office calculated, would cost about $335 billion.

How to pay for it: Restoring all of these cuts will cost roughly $1.2 trillion over a decade, which is substantial, but the government spends more than twice that much on undeserved tax breaks for investors. The top marginal tax rate on wage and salary income, which applies only to earnings in excess of $751,601 for a couple, is 37 percent. But if that same couple gets all its income from long-term investments, not work, they pay just 23.8 percent on the portion over $600,050, and only about 19 percent up to that amount.

I’ve covered tax policy for a while now, and I’ve never once heard a reasonable rationale for the steeply discounted rates, which, based on estimates from the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), will cost the federal government more than $2.5 trillion over the coming decade.

The Equal Tax Act, introduced in March by Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.), tackles this worker vs. investor disparity by applying the 37 percent wage rate to any investment earnings in excess of $1 million a year ($1.5 million for a couple). That portion of the bill alone could raise hundreds of billions of dollars, and more if the cutoff were reduced to $500,000.

The tricky thing is that tax legislation always prompts changes in people’s behavior: Faced with a higher tax on income from selling stocks and other assets, some wealthy taxpayers will opt to hang onto those assets and instead take out loans against their holdings to cover expenses—part of a popular strategy known as “buy, borrow, die.”

Markey and Ramirez address this by placing limits on “step up in basis”—the rule that lets wealthy people pass unsold investments to their heirs at death without anyone paying tax on these gains they accumulated over a lifetime. The Equal Tax Act, which includes protections for family farms and small businesses, treats these intergenerational wealth transfers as “liquidity events”: heirs are taxed as though the inherited assets were sold at fair market value on the day of transfer. The bill also has provisions to prevent families from using complex trusts to avoid taxation. Eliminating the “step up in basis” rule entirely, based on JCT’s estimates, would save the government some $618 billion over a decade—and even with this bill’s $1 million allowance, it could save hundreds of billions.

Markey and Ramirez go even further by capping the “pass-through” deduction. That’s a provision of the tax bill Congress passed in 2017 that lets owners of private businesses deduct 20 percent of “qualified business income” from their personal taxable income. It’s basically a $400 billion giveaway to the rich. Pass-through businesses, as I’ve written previously, are “dominated by S corporations and limited liability partnerships, nearly 70 percent of whose profits flow to the wealthiest 1 percent of the population…while ‘virtually no‘ pass-through income goes to people in the lower 80 percent.” The Markey-Ramirez bill caps the deduction at $200,000—and one could go lower.

Congress created the CFPB to rein in the sort of predatory Wall Street behavior that brought about the Great Recession of 2007-2009 and devastated middle-class wealth—Black wealth in particular.

Launched in 2011, the CFPB was funded by the Federal Reserve to safeguard its independence. Championed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), it tackled sleazy junk fees, abusive debt collectors, and discriminatory lending practices, and it didn’t hesitate to go after giants like Wells Fargo and Bank of America. The agency claims to have secured some $14.4 billion in consumer relief in its first 10 years alone, collecting $1.7 billion in civil penalties from the offending institutions.

Then, last year, Elon Musk crushed it. By June 2025, according to the nonprofit group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, DOGE had “effectively shuttered an agency which returned over $26 billion to the American people…but only cost taxpayers a fraction of that amount to run.”

Reviving the CFPB would help protect consumers, who are now even more vulnerable to predatory corporations in this age of AI enshittification. The big challenge is to protect the agency in a way the Supreme Court would tolerate, so that nobody can come back and DOGE it again.

How to pay for it: It pays for itself.

The elders among us remember how, when Congress was working on Obamacare, Republicans wouldn’t even allow a public option to compete with private health plans. That would be “socialism,” they claimed—and by god, they will make that accusation 1,000 times over with Medicare for All, which would kneecap the private health insurance industry. But is that a bad thing? Americans who are forced to deal with private insurers on a regular basis are fed up and frustrated—so frustrated that when a United Healthcare exec was gunned down in the street, plenty of people shrugged and said the guy had it coming.

The core problem with for-profit insurance, Dr. Ed Weisbart, national board secretary for Physicians for a National Health Program, told me in an interview soon after the killing, “is that the system is designed to return profits rather than to improve health.” It does so largely by delaying and denying claims—and placing patients who try to appeal the decisions into a bureaucratic labyrinth, the goal of which is to wear people down until they give up.

For-profit insurance is tremendously inefficient, Weisbart told me; the industry has overhead costs of roughly 15 percent, compared with about 2 percent for traditional Medicare. In 2018, JAMA published a study conducted at a large academic medical center that calculated the annual cost of dealing with insurance and billing red tape at nearly $100,000 per physician, which is bonkers. “And where does that money come from? ” Weisbart said. “It comes from jacking up prices.”

Indeed, a Yale analysis published earlier this year concluded that replacing commercial insurers with an expanded Medicare system that covers everyone would reduce US healthcare expenditures by more than $1 trillion per year and save 114,000 lives annually.

How to pay for it: It pays for itself.

By JCT’s estimates, over the next decade, the government will expend a mind-boggling $5 trillion on tax breaks to help Americans save for retirement. Encouraging people to save is laudable, but the majority of the population gets next to nothing out of this arrangement, and there’s no ceiling at the top end. (See “How Congress Made Sure the Rich Retire in Luxury—at Our Expense.”)

In 2021, JCT reported that more than 28,000 Americans had IRA (individual retirement account) balances exceeding $5 million, and nearly 500 had holdings of more than $25 million—Peter Thiel had managed to accumulate more than $5 billion in a Roth IRA, from which any disbursements are tax free. That’s in addition to any other tax-advantaged accounts they might hold, including pensions and 401(k)s.

Such people need no handouts, and the government could save a fortune by limiting tax breaks to people with no more than, say, $2 million in their combined retirement accounts. It could use the savings to shore up Social Security, which benefits everyone.

How to pay for it: See above.

These two quickies (and there are many others), won’t put money into the pockets of the middle class—directly, anyway—but they would help put a dent in this nation’s runaway wealth.

Tax unrealized investment gains: The untaxed growth of unsold investments is the foundation of the soaring oligarchic wealth that remains a dire threat to our republic. Imposing such a tax, Wall Street propaganda notwithstanding, is doable in theory, but as I wrote in “How to Tax a Billionaire,” the Supreme Court has signaled that it won’t tolerate such a thing. The Fair Tax Act, which is discussed in the article, offers a partial workaround. It has yet to be introduced as a bill, but the primary author, economist Brian Galle, told me he’s been meeting with legislators. We’ll see how he fares.

Neuter the GRATS: Estate lawyers and wealth managers for the richest families in America have embraced grantor retained annuity trusts (GRATs) as a zero-risk way to transfer hundreds of millions of dollars, even billions, to their heirs without paying a dime in inheritance tax. Congress “blew it,” the lawyer who pioneered the so-called Walton GRAT told me prior to his death—circa 1990, it unwittingly passed legislation that enabled these trusts and has yet to undo its mistake. A bill introduced in April by Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Angus King (I-Maine) would do precisely that, if—like any of the above—it can get past Trump’s Sharpie.