As federal budgeting experts, we get asked about this a lot—often, it’s something people simply have no idea about.

But if you’ve watched the Trump administration launch one war after another, flood the streets of American cities with Immigration and Custom Enforcement agents, and call the very idea of an affordability crisis a “hoax” by their political opponents, you might be getting the general idea.

Around half of Americans are struggling to afford basic necessities. But last year, instead of investing in programs that help people make ends meet, the president and his friends in Congress passed a Big Ugly Bill that cut taxes for the wealthy, slashed health insurance and food assistance for millions of Americans, and added billions in new spending for war and mass deportations.

Some of those changes, such as the deepest cuts to health insurance, won’t take effect until 2026 or later. Others are taking effect now and are visible in the war on Iran and the deployment of mass deportation forces in our cities.

These enormous sums for the Pentagon and militarism more broadly—now well over $1 trillion—come with enormous costs to ordinary people. That’s true not just in terms of the opportunity cost for other programs, but also for the drain on our wallets.

In a new report for the Institute for Policy Studies, we broke down last year’s typical tax bill and what each household actually spent, on average, for different programs and priorities in 2025.

We learned, for example, that the average taxpayer paid $4,049 for weapons and war last year—a huge sum in a time of rising costs of living and stagnant wages. That’s far, far more than any other program funded by income tax dollars. Medicaid, the next highest item on our income tax receipt, ran a little under $2,500—and that funds healthcare for 1 in 5 Americans. School lunches and other nutrition programs, by comparison, ran just $124. The Postal Service? $19. (Big programs like Social Security and Medicare have their own dedicated funding streams, and aren’t as significant for your income taxes.)

More than half of the Pentagon’s sum went to private, for-profit military contractors—the top CEOs of which now make over $25 million a year on average. Put another way, you spent about 50 days working and paying taxes last year just to feed the war machine—and 23 days working to pay those Pentagon contractors and their millionaire CEOs.

The war in Iran hadn’t started yet when you were paying taxes last year. But if we use last year’s tax data and set the cost for the war at $35 billion—a line we’re likely on the verge of crossing—the average taxpayer will have paid $130 for the war on Iran. And that becomes a double whammy when you count the many hundreds more at the gas pump, grocery store, or on other expenses made worse because of the conflict.

Polls show that Americans don’t want this war that’s causing so many deaths in Iran and elsewhere at the same time people here in the US are left to struggle. Unfortunately, nobody in this administration asked us.

Meanwhile, programs that actually help people trying to make ends meet—a growing population of us, unfortunately—are getting cut. As more of those cuts take effect—especially to Medicaid—the gap between what we spend on the Pentagon and everything else will only keep growing.

Worse still, Trump and his allies are planning a repeat of last year’s Big Ugly Bill. The president has requested $1.5 trillion for the Pentagon next year—a huge increase from the $1 trillion budget this year. That would make the numbers all the more lopsided.

Nobody loves paying taxes, but we all agree we should get our money’s worth. And in a democracy, our hard-earned tax dollars should go toward programs that actually keep us safe and healthy.

Before plowing more money into the war machine, we need to take a long, hard look at how policymakers are using our money. Americans want a government that supports them when times are tough—not one that shakes us down for endless wars.

The post The Average Taxpayer Shelled Out Over $4,000 for War and Weapons Last Year appeared first on Institute for Policy Studies.

On Sunday, the axis lost its littlest member. After 16 consecutive years as the prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban—the joint-custody mini-me of Putin and Trump—went down for the count. His party, Fidesz, didn’t just lose the latest election. It lost bigly.

It wasn’t exactly a swing of the political pendulum in Hungary. The winning party, Tisza, is quite conservative in its outlook. It ran not so much on an ideological platform but against Orban’s corruption, authoritarianism, and deep-seated anti-Europeanism. Simply put, Hungarians had grown sick and tired of Orban’s excesses.

Only three political parties made it above the 5 percent threshold in the parliamentary elections. The opposition Tisza party captured a supermajority of parliamentary seats. Orban’s Fidesz came in a distant second. And the Our Homeland Movement, which is even further to the right than Fidesz, just squeaked in.

Significantly, all vaguely progressive or liberal parties have effectively disappeared from the Hungarian political landscape. This is perhaps Orban’s most ominous achievement, in addition to clinging to power for 16 years (which is a long time in any ostensibly democratic society but a veritable eternity in the quicksilver politics of East-Central Europe).

Like so many of his political brethren, Orban is a world-class opportunist. Long before Trump changed his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican and before Putin traded in his communist credentials for nationalist ones, Orban sniffed the air and sensed an opportunity on the right side of the political spectrum. He swapped out the political identity of his liberal party for a nationalist, anti-immigrant, culturally conservative alternative.

In the 1990s, Orban served as the John the Baptist of illiberalism. Now that he has had his head served on a platter, it is tempting to conclude that Orban’s political end also heralds the end of an era. Of course, Orban could be resurrected in a few years, like Trump. Or, more deliciously, he could be jailed for his malfeasance, like Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.

Regardless of Orban’s specific fate, the more important question is: Will Trump and even Putin be next in line for their political comeuppance?

Orban’s Journey to the Right

I came of political age in a world defined by Viktor Orban.

In 1989, when I was living in Poland and trying to launch a career as a freelance journalist, Orban was a newly minted lawyer in Budapest. That year, the young Orban established his bona fides as an opposition leader at the reburial of Imre Nagy, the leader of the doomed Hungarian experiment in reform in 1956. That ceremony took place on June 16, 1989—several days after the Solidarity movement won Poland’s historic semi-free election—and symbolized the cutting edge of the reform process in Hungary. Orban, 26 years old at the time, tested the limits of the new reform by calling for the removal of Warsaw Pact troops from Hungary.

The previous year, Orban and his friends had put together Fidesz, the Alliance of Young Democrats, to combine the three most salient attributes of the anti-communist youth opposition, its liberal, alternative, and radical strands. Ostensibly, Fidesz was the under-35 equivalent of the major liberal party, the Alliance of Free Democrats (SZDSZ), which was founded by the country’s leading dissidents. But SZDSZ was, by comparison, a bunch of rather predictable intellectuals and proto-politicians. No other country in the region created a party as audacious as Fidesz. One of the famous Fidesz campaign posters of that period showed East German Communist leader Erich Honecker sharing a kiss with Russia’s Leonid Brezhnev. “Make your choice,” ran the tag line separating that photo from another of two young people kissing.

In 1990, I was in Budapest, interviewing Fidesz members and attending one of the party’s summer camps. It was hard not to believe that this cadre of 20-somethings was the future of politics in Eastern Europe. By that point, however, the more alternative and radical members of Fidesz were already complaining quietly about Orban. He was ambitious, thoroughly centrist in orientation, and full of himself. Welcome to the world of real politics, I thought at the time.

Fidesz was not the future of Hungarian politics, at least not that version of the party. Together with SZDSZ, the liberals failed to win Hungary’s first free elections in 1990. Instead, the center-right Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF) won the overwhelming number of parliamentary seats because voters responded more positively to the party’s nationalist, Christian-inflected messages. During that election, SZDSZ posters were defaced with anti-Semitic slogans attacking the many Jewish members of the party. That reactionary undercurrent, not the exuberance of Fidesz or the deep dissident experience of SZDSZ, anticipated Hungary’s political future.

Four years later, the liberals again failed to come out on top as the reconstituted Socialist Party roared back to take control of parliament. SZDSZ decided to form a government with the Socialists, which they did again in 2002 and 2006. Tactically, it was a brilliant move. Strategically, by linking liberalism to Hungary’s communist legacy, the decision doomed the party. It was this left-liberal alliance that Viktor Orban challenged when he guided Fidesz to an electoral victory in 1998.

By 1998, Orban had dragged Fidesz solidly to the conservative side. But he governed, at least at first, like a Christian Democrat. Fidesz was, Hungarian sociology Andras Bozoki explained to me a decade ago,

still in this neoliberal framework, but they were already starting to make some populist arguments for an ethno-nationalist understanding of Hungary: not as a political community but as an ethnic community including every Hungarian living outside the boundaries of the country. Suddenly Fidesz discovered the power of nationalism as a constitutive force. Nationalism substituted for this missing link, the spirit of democracy, and this was how people could be mobilized. Even as it remained within the framework of liberal democracy at that time, Fidesz moved from the liberal center to the conservative-nationalist Right for pragmatic reasons. They realized that there was a space for them to occupy and attract a stronger and longer lasting constituency.

Orban decided, as a result of that first taste of power, that he needed more authority to push through his agenda. The same guy who called for the expulsion of Soviet troops in 1989 now enthusiastically embraced Putin’s illiberal project and the Russian leader’s tactics for turning a weak democracy into a strong autocracy.

The Lost 16 Years

When he regained office in 2010, Orban had a supermajority in parliament that he used to push through legislation. If the courts deemed the changes illegal, Orban simply changed the constitution (multiple times). Among other changes, the new constitution insisted that marriage could only be between a man and a woman and that the state only recognized two genders.

One the economic side, Orban decisively broke with his remaining liberal tenets by pushing for a more “sovereign” approach independent of Brussels and the global economy. Ironically, the initial economic success that his government enjoyed was almost entirely dependent on outside factors, “including an influx of foreign capital, massive European Union funds and a booming industrial cycle in Germany, which had made Hungary its subcontracting base,” writes Stephane Lauer.

The boom didn’t last. Burdened by corruption—Hungary was listed as Europe’s most corrupt country for four years in a row by Transparency International—the economy eventually ground to a halt. Living standards stagnated. The EU froze $21 billion in funds because of concerns over the Orban government’s illiberal moves. And while Europe has worked to cut its dependence on Russian energy sources, Hungary actually relied more on Putin over the last five years. In 2021, Hungary imported 61 percent of its oil from Russia; by 2025, that percentage had risen to 93 percent.

Once showcasing a vibrant mix of parties, the Hungarian political spectrum was overwhelmed by nationalism. SZDSZ folded in 2013, and all subsequent left-of-center efforts have withered away. Civil society has contracted as a result of a series of anti-NGO laws. When I returned to Hungary in 2013, several people requested anonymity and even declined to be interviewed for fear of retribution.

It’s unclear how thoroughly Peter Magyar will hit rewind in Hungary. He was once in the top echelons of Fidesz, he touts his conservative beliefs, and his own nationalist appeals served him well in the campaign (as did his last name, which means “Hungarian” in Hungarian). If he does decide to clean out the Augean stables, he will inevitably encounter opposition. Orban’s “deep state” is not going to give up power without a fight.

Global Implications

Hungary is not the only thorn in the side of the European Union. Both Slovakia and the Czech Republic are currently led by nationalist populists.

Slovakia’s Robert Fico comes out of the left, though it took until last October for the European Socialists to finally expel his party from their ranks. Fico, after all, has borrowed illiberally from Orban’s playbook, even to the point of visiting Moscow several times to pay fealty to Vladimir Putin.

Andrij Babis, who won the Czech elections in the fall, is a billionaire populist in the mold of Donald Trump. He, too, is attempting to steer his country Orbanward. Last month, 200,000 people protested in the center of Prague against an anti-NGO law and a media law that both resemble what Orban imposed in Hungary.

But without Orban, who has built up extensive contacts with far-right forces throughout Europe and the world, the Czech-Slovak populists won’t be able to marshal the same kind of anti-EU and pro-Russian sentiment. Euroskepticism lost one of its major proponents when Orban lost the election.

Of course, Europe also could use Orban as a convenient person to blame for all the tensions accumulating within the Union. With him gone, the EU will have to squarely face disagreements over how to help Ukraine, whether to push forward with expansion, and perhaps most importantly, how to deal with the disintegration of transatlantic ties. Creating an independent military force to replace NATO is a big lift both politically and fiscally. It’s the kind of enormous project that will either kill the EU or make it incomparably stronger.

In the meantime, Hungary under Peter Magyar will remain lukewarm on supporting Ukraine. There are still points of contention around the costs of that assistance, the Hungarian minority in Ukraine, and the tens of thousands of Ukrainian migrants, mostly women and children, living in Hungary. Nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment remain strong in the country. At the least, Hungary will stop blocking the current aid package of around $100 billion that will keep Ukraine afloat. But Magyar has also been clear on his opposition to sending arms to Ukraine, and he might not even support future financial assistance either.

Vladimir Putin has shrugged off Orban’s loss. “We were never friends with Orban,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said after the election, a stunning smackdown after all the love (and secret information) Orban sent to the Kremlin. It’s only the latest proof that Putin, like Trump, only likes winners. The Russian leader, meanwhile, will not be worried about a similar electoral scenario happening in some future Russian election. He has gone much further than Orban in suppressing the opposition and eliminating possible challengers.

Donald Trump, however, should be very worried. Unlike the electoral intervention in Poland that perhaps provided a little boost to Karol Nawrocki’s presidential chances last year, JD Vance’s last-ditch effort to save Orban on the eve of the election was a failure, even proving counterproductive by aligning the corrupt Hungarian with the corrupt Americans. It’s an important reminder that autocrats in more-or-less democratic societies, no matter how much they try to steal elections, must ultimately face the will of the disgruntled.

Trump might believe himself more powerful than the Pope. He might even cast himself as a Jesus figure. Ultimately, as in Hungary, the people will decide. And right now, the very same factors that doomed Orban—his autocratic tendencies and his corruption—are pointing to a similar electoral result for Trump and his party come November.

The post The Axis of Evil Suffers a Big Loss appeared first on Institute for Policy Studies.

Some of those changes, such as the deepest cuts to health insurance, won’t take effect until 2026 or later. Others are taking effect now and are visible in the war on Iran and the deployment of mass deportation forces in our cities. 

These enormous sums for the Pentagon and militarism more broadly come with enormous costs to ordinary people — both in terms of the opportunity cost for other programs and the drain on our wallets. We broke down last year’s typical tax bill and what each household actually spent, on average, for different programs and priorities in 2025.

We learned, for example, that the average taxpayer paid over $4,000 for weapons and war last year — a huge sum in a time of rising costs of living and stagnant wages — even as the programs to help families get by are getting cut. We’ve compiled some of those findings below.

Meanwhile, Trump and his allies are planning a repeat of last year’s Big Ugly Bill. The president has requested $1.5 trillion in war funding for next year – a huge increase from the $1 trillion budget this year. That would make the numbers below — including the shockingly high line items for militarism and the dwindling sums for human needs — all the more lopsided.

Key Findings

The average taxpayer in 2025 paid:

• $4,049 for weapons and war, vs. $2,492 for Medicaid, which provided health insurance to 68.5 million Americans in 2025 — about one in five Americans.
• $1,870 for Pentagon contractors, more than twice as much as the $770 the average taxpayer paid for troops’ pay even as many troops rely on food stamps to feed themselves and their families; and 15 times as much as the $124 the average taxpayer paid for school lunches and other nutrition programs. The school lunch program alone serves about 30 million kids, while the average CEO pay at the top five Pentagon contractors in 2025 was $24,632,610.
• $136 for nuclear weapons, seven times as much as the $19 the average taxpayer paid for the U.S. Postal Service, a provider of good jobs and affordable deliveries, especially in rural areas.
• $119 for mass deportations and detentions, six times as much as the $19 the average taxpayer paid for the Federal Aviation Administration amidst a dangerous shortage of air traffic controllers and a recent deadly crash.
• $57 for aid to foreign militaries, including support for Israel’s attacks on Gaza, Lebanon and Iran, vs. just $49 for diplomacy to foster peace and prevent war.
• Our 2025 tax receipt doesn’t show the cost of the recent war on Iran, which started in February 2026. But if we place the 2026 Iran war costs in the context of our 2025 tax receipt and put the cost at $35 billion — a line the U.S. is likely on the verge of crossing  —  the average taxpayer will have paid $130 for the war on Iran, eight times more than the $16 the average taxpayer paid for a full year of home heating and energy assistance in 2025. In FY 2024, nearly 6 million households received help with heating and energy costs, including 2.5 million households with older adults, 2.1 million households where someone had a disability, and nearly a million households with young children.

If you worked and paid taxes in 2025:

• On 50 workdays your income taxes would have gone to weapons and war; including 23 workdays paying taxes for Pentagon contractors; 
• On 9 workdays your income taxes would have gone toward all federal food and agriculture programs, including food stamps and free school lunches; 
• On fewer than 7 workdays your taxes went toward all federal education programs, including public K-12 schools and higher education; 
• For half a day, your taxes went toward international aid programs, many of which were cut by the Trump administration;
• And for 13 minutes, your taxes went to the now-defunct Corporation for Public Broadcasting. 

Your Tax Receipt

Prior years’ tax receipts can be found here.

The post Tax Day 2026: The Average Taxpayer Paid $4,049 for War and Weapons appeared first on Institute for Policy Studies.

That undertaking will require a wide array of inputs including copper, cobalt, and, maybe most critically, the lithium needed for the batteries that make both possible.

However, much to the consternation of environmental activists, extracting those necessary metals and minerals from the ground almost inevitably results in unsustainable water use and chemical pollution, harming local biodiversity and communities.

Thea Riofrancos uses lithium as a test case to work through this tension, exploring the communities and politics at the sites where extraction is happening, in her new book Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism.

“What does it mean,” Riofrancos asks in the book, “to defend people and the planet from extraction – when others frame this same extraction as necessary to save people and the planet?”

Inequality.org recently spoke with Riofrancos, an associate professor at Providence College, strategic co-director of the Climate and Community Institute, and fellow at the Transnational Institute, about this question and more.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism is out now from W.W. Norton.

Chris Mills Rodrigo: How did you land on Chile as a focus of this book?

Thea Riofrancos: Chile anchors the book, despite the fact that I also traveled to Nevada, Portugal, and other places to look at the politics of lithium. Chile was where I conceptualized the book because I have focused on Latin America as my main kind of region of interest for quite a while now, which is itself the reason that I work on the politics of extraction. It was in Latin America where I learned about the contentious politics and political economy of resource extraction, as well as the growing divides and differences of opinion on the Left — the clashes between those that primarily view the problem as one of ownership and nationalization and those that view it as a problem of ecology and indigenous rights and have a more anti-extractive approach. That’s how I got interested in resource extraction and these contentious politics in the first place.

In parallel, and as a result of my involvement in climate activism and thinking about a just transition and the politics of a Green New Deal in the United States, I started to think about what the implications of a transition here would be for mining and supply chains elsewhere in the world. If we were to undergo a rapid energy transition in the US, where would the lithium and copper come from? And one place that they may very well come from, and have come from, is Chile, which is the world’s number two lithium producer and number one copper producer, both of which are very relevant to the energy transition.

So I decided to do fieldwork in Chile to look at the intersection of mining and the energy transition in a regional context in which people were already thinking about the extractive implications of energy transition technologies.

CMR: What makes Chile an “extractive frontier” and what’s the benefit of understanding mining sites in this framework?

TR: Chile is what the industry would call a “mining powerhouse.” It has enormous copper mines and two mega lithium mines, and there may be more to come. It’s a fascinating place to understand the contentious and polarizing politics of resource extraction, as well as the very volatile economics of it.

Chile has been a major copper producer for many decades now and we have seen major transformations in how it has governed copper, starting with an earlier regime where American multinational companies, British and then American, basically laid claim to Chile’s resources. But beginning in the 1960s, a nationalist orientation in the Chilean government started to reclaim the country’s resource wealth and sovereignty, initially by taking partial ownership of those American mines. That process accelerated under Salvador Allende, who famously fully nationalized Chile’s copper mines in the early 1970s. That fact is not unrelated to the coup and installation of the brutal neoliberal Pinochet dictatorship. The US supported that coup in no small part because of the direct threats to US mining interests that Allende posed.

I want to make a minor point here that’s important for the present. Once he was in power, Pinochet did not privatize those copper mines, which we might have expected him to do as an arch neoliberal. Instead, he not only maintained them as nationalized, but established the state-owned company CODELCO that still manages them. That’s important to note as we see right-wing governments across the world, including in the US, engaging in what we might call state capitalism and blurring the boundary between states, markets, and private firms.

Over time, Pinochet courted more private investment, so while CODELCO continues to operate mines, its role has been diminished, with a growing proportion of privately owned copper mines. Regarding lithium, Pinochet played an important role in opening this sector up to investment by privatizing the company that now owns one of Chile’s major lithium mines. The other company is American, Albemarle, which shows us the enduring US-Chile relationship in the mining sector.

What does this all add up to? We can see big changes in governance, from nationalization to privatization and odd mixtures of the two. Chile is really instructive on that front. We’ve also seen growing socio-ecological consciousness and conflict in these zones of extraction — Chilean people are not quiescent about the impacts of extraction on their livelihoods, on their watersheds, on their indigenous rights. There’s been increasing environmental contention, protests, and pushback in some cases impacting mine operations, troubling financial relationships, and putting the industry on alert that they have to “engage local communities.” Of course, that engagement can be cynical and, in turn, divisive within the community.

What does this tell us about the concept of extractive frontiers? What I learned in the Atacama Desert, where roughly 20 percent of global lithium supplies emanate, is that extractive frontiers are marked by all of the harms, violence, and colonial legacies that we associate with extraction. But they’re not only that, and that’s part of what my book wants to show. Extractive frontiers are designated by powerful people as places where resources are going to come out of the ground, and hopefully people stay quiet — even deploying the framing of terra nullius. However, when we take a grounded perspective and visit those places, if you travel a little away from the mine, there is beautiful biodiversity still worth stewarding and preserving. These places are not empty of people — they are surrounded by indigenous communities that have not only protested the mining but also engaged in alliances with environmentalists. We have interesting coalitions forming around these extractive projects to contest and, in some cases, stall them or change their framework of governance. So extractive frontiers are never only defined by extraction, there’s always more going on, and that’s precisely why people have a stake in whether extraction proceeds or not, and why communities are increasingly feeling empowered to put forth their own demands and visions.

CMR: You visit several extractive frontiers, like Nevada and Portugal, in the book. What unifies them? And you shared some pretty staggering stats about mineral resource proximity to indigenous communities, did that change how you thought about traditional North/South binaries?

TR: This was the biggest challenge to my research plans as initially designed and also my thinking about the global political economy of extraction, even on the cartographic level, the map where extraction takes place. I went into this project with it being a classic Latin American story of yet again being pillaged for its resources over people’s resistance. The only twist was that this all relates to the energy transition, so climate activists need to think about it. That was the story I had in my head and in broad strokes it remains true. But something changed in the early days of the research project, which was that Global North policymakers in the US and Europe were increasingly intent on onshoring or reshoring mining industries that had never really existed in these geographies, or had withered away due to lack of investment and a shift away from manufacturing to more financialized and service-based economies. I should make one caveat, which is that the US is the world’s largest oil and gas producer, but in terms of mining it is mainly import reliant. And Europe is even more reliant on mining imports. The idea that some European policymakers shared with me in 2019 that Europe could be self-sufficient in lithium by 2030 is a very ambitious one.

I started to track this story of onshoring — or supply chain security — before it became big headline news during the pandemic era. Policy concerns about supply chain vulnerability breathed new life into the idea that we should relocalize supply chains, including those related to raw material extraction. Over the course of my research, in addition to going to Nevada and Portugal, I also visited Brussels and DC to speak with policymakers about what I viewed as a puzzling decision, since it previously seemed perfectly fine to import “cheap” raw materials from elsewhere in the world. I wanted to understand policymaker thinking and how communities based in the Global North would receive these projects. Would they believe what government officials and corporations said about doing things more responsibly and ethically than in the Global South? For the most part, in parallel with communities in the Global South, the projects were met with skepticism, alarm, and also resistance. I found that despite these mines being in very different geographies with very different communities and stakeholders, they were just as conflictual as the mines in Latin America. And in some cases, the types of people directly impacted were not very different — in Nevada, for example, we’re looking at marginalized, dispossessed indigenous communities with claims on a territory that have never been respected by the US government. That doesn’t look very different from what the Atacameño people have gone through in northern Chile.

CMR: You describe supply chains as “a set of ecological relations,” can you explain what we gain from thinking about them more holistically in this way?

TR: The typical way to think about the harms of extraction is as being localized. Biodiversity loss, water contamination, noise and air pollution, and also interventions into the social fabric and the exploitation of mine workers — all of these occur locally. That can lead one to think that the way to deal with these problems is also local: better governance at the local or national level, better frameworks to adjudicate conflicts over mining, better economic development policies. And that’s true: For example, we really need to improve the enforcement of rights in countries where mining is happening. Mining is the most violent vector in the world, based on how many people die every year simply trying to protect their land or water contamination, even if that protection just means going to public hearings or community meetings. If people feel at risk of bodily harm by simply attending a meeting to learn more about how a mining project might affect their livelihoods and communities, then we don’t have the basis of full civil society participation. So those local solutions are important, but they’re just half the story. We need a more holistic set of solutions to reduce the harms of mining.

Mining and its harms are not exotic features of the places where mining happens to occur. They’re structurally produced by the volume and rapaciousness of demand for inputs in broader networks of production and consumption. If it’s the case, for example, that we “need” a certain volume of lithium or rare earths each year for an auto industry that’s electrifying its fleet, then what’s driving the demand is at the other end of the supply chain. How we collectively design the built environment of the energy transition — what specific technologies and elements are “needed” — will determine how much demand there is. I say need in quotes because that’s something we can collectively and socially determine. If we understand that scale and harm are correlated, that large mines producing a large amount of minerals create more harm, then we need to think about what’s driving demand for minerals in the first place. Those decisions are currently not being made in extractive frontiers, they’re being made elsewhere in the global economy.

CMR: I’d be remiss to not ask about the Strait of Hormuz here. What does Iran’s tightening of trade show us about supply chains?

TR: My book dwells on the 1970s because it offers us a lot of lessons about how geopolitical battles over energy resources play out, how the Global North might respond to a so-called “energy crisis” and how the Global South might try to assert sovereignty over their natural resource sectors. What we know about the 1973 oil crisis is that it was produced intentionally. Major oil producing Third World states in the Middle East, North Africa, and South America came together to coordinate on pricing and production with the establishment of OPEC (the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) in 1960, and, during the early 1970s, one country after another nationalized their oil resources. Both efforts intentionally put upward pressure on prices to retain more oil income in those countries. I said so-called crisis earlier because this was an oil boom and a development boom for these geographies. It was a crisis for Western consumers, but not, of course, for producers or their societies.

Today, it can feel like we’re reliving the 1970s in terms of pain at the pump and discussions of using oil stockpiles. But an important thing has changed since then — globalization and the interconnectedness of markets. An intervention in supply chains reverberates even more than it did in 1973. The interconnection of logistics, finance, trade and economic production means that something in one part of the world affects lots of other parts of the world. One other thing to add, drawing on the work of Adam Hanieh, is that the political economy of the Gulf has really transformed. It’s insufficient and wrong to describe them as petro-states. These economies have advanced, and now export things like petrochemicals and fertilizer, for example, which means cutting them off can cause price shocks across a variety of essential goods, including energy and food. In addition, according to all analysts, both the standstill at the Strait of Hormuz and the physical destruction of oil and gas assets makes this supply shortfall dramatically worse than either the 1970s or the more recent 2022 oil and gas shock (related to the fallout of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine).

CMR: How could this situation affect the green transition?

TR: I’m of a few minds about this because there are forces working in different directions. It’s also a bit hard to know in medias res, as history is unfolding. With that caveat in mind, there are some structural forces that we can analyze. A major price shock in oil and gas combined with the clear existence of alternative energy sources — technologies that are very affordable and very reliable, with solar panels and batteries being critical — will create a growing constituency for an energy transition. That is one positive outcome of a horrific and illegal war.

But there are forces that work in the other direction, and I don’t know what the balance will be. The first is obvious, which is that oil and gas companies are having a field day. You wouldn’t know that with how much of their discourse is about uncertainty being bad for investment or oil assets being destroyed. But the prices are really high, these companies are benefiting a lot in terms of shareholder value. When oil companies experience sudden surges in profitability they tend to cycle that money into political lobbying. Just look at the incredible amount of money flooding into the US political system during the last oil shock in 2022. So not only might oil and gas companies invest in new fossil fuel production, but they might also contort politics to make an energy transition slower.

The second countervailing force is just the incredibly recessionary, developmental, and inflationary impact of all of this on Global South societies that were really starting to see their industrial capacity grow. Now these places are rationing energy, which means a lot of factories are closed three days a week and people can’t get to work. Finances will be constrained, especially since the cost of capital is always higher in the Global South. Gathering the public or private investment needed for the initial fixed costs of renewable energy deployment will become harder. And, of course, fuel limitations have downstream effects on income, which has downstream effects on people’s human development and ability to survive. It’s a very tragic outcome for people with little to no power over Washington, D.C.

CMR: Lastly, you grappled with these contradictions between climate benefits and damage to the environment and communities from lithium mining. Where did you land after researching and writing the book?

TR: In writing the book and through research I did with the Climate and Community Institute, I became more convinced that there is not a zero-sum conflict between wanting to preserve landscapes and protect communities from violent forms of extraction on one hand and making progress on our climate goals and the energy transition on the other. I went into the book feeling a real sense of contradiction between these truly important goals. And I didn’t finish it feeling there was no tension. But a lot of the same approaches we need to take for a rapid and just energy transition would also result in less extraction needed to furnish the inputs. When we think about an energy transition that focuses more on mass transit, on affordable, dense, and green social housing, on publicly managed grids — which are all pillars of a more just transition, or a Green New Deal as we used to call it — those are all less resource intensive than privatized forms of individual consumption in the form of exurbs and hulking vehicles that many Americans can’t afford anyway.

That is hopeful to me, that the things we need to do for climate justice are the same things we need to do to reduce the harms of extraction. Since finishing the book I’ve been thinking more about the politics of how we implement these things in the United States. A lot of them are already in the mix with the new focus on cost of living. People want access to cheaper mass transit, to affordable housing, to cheap and clean power that is not reigned over by awful companies. These political discussions are not starting with mining, but fighting for them will make headway on reducing the total amount of extraction needed to decarbonize our economy.

The post Exploring Extractive Frontiers: A Q&A with Thea Riofrancos appeared first on Institute for Policy Studies.

A stealth virus, it was embedded in America’s economic DNA for a century, biding its time, waiting for the appropriate conditions to reveal itself. And then we created those conditions, unleashing it to infect our institutions of culture and democracy, replicate, and burst forth to infect anew.

An oligarchy virus.

…

Read the full article on Mother Jones.

The post The Oligarchy Virus appeared first on Institute for Policy Studies.

But, it turns out, the rich aren’t just dodging their obligations under our tax code. They’re actually using it to amass even more wealth.

Ray Madoff, now a professor at Boston College Law School, and I have worked together for 20 years on defending the estate tax, charity reform, and tax policy. We don’t always agree.

For example, I’m a supporter of wealth taxes and Ray is more skeptical. But we love working together, and this past week we sat down to discuss her excellent new book The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Chuck Collins: When you were growing up, did you say, “I want to grow up and be a tax nerd?”

Ray Madoff: I thought I was going to run an orphanage — even though I think the orphanage system was already long gone by then!

CC: So, like a Jewish Mother Teresa?

RF: Hah! Later, when I went to law school, I thought I was going to be like a litigator that focused on battered women or saving the whales. I was kind of shocked to find that what I really liked was taxes. I studied philosophy in college, and a friend of mine has a theory that all philosophy majors that go to law school become tax lawyers, because it’s a certain type of analytic thinking.

CC: What do you think about the statistic that says, “the richest 1 percent pay 40 percent of the taxes,” and “46 percent of Americans then don’t pay taxes?”

RM: The reason those figures are misleading is that when they refer to the top 1 percent, they’re referring to those with the most taxable income. People with the most taxable income do pay a lot of taxes, but the problem is the wealthiest Americans — those with huge assets — are able to avoid taxable income. They are just as likely to be in the 46 percent of non-income taxpayers as they are in the top 1 percent of payers. That statistic makes it sound like a whole bunch of the country is getting off scot-free. It’s failing to account for payroll taxes, which are quite burdensome, and they have gone up as other tax rates have come down over time.

CC: In your book you talk about how the tax code constantly needs to be enforced and updated to address avoidance and loopholes.

RM: Yes, any tax system requires enforcement.  It’s been well proven that a small investment in the IRS enforcement produces tremendous revenue for the country. There is absolutely no justification for the current state a defunded IRS. It only provides an additional benefit to the wealthiest who would otherwise be required to pay taxes. It’s troubling for the country that we would allow flagrant tax avoidance to occur due to a lack of enforcement.

In addition to enforcement, it also needs constant legislative and regulatory oversight. I would say that the income tax has been somewhat regularly revised but where we really see the problem is the estate tax. So, if we start with the fact that wealthy Americans can avoid taxable income because they don’t take salaries and they don’t sell their assets. They instead borrow, and then on top of it, they inherit great wealth, and under our just basic tax rules, any money received by inheritance or gift is free of income taxes, also life insurance, entirely free of income taxes. You don’t even have to report it. Somebody who is given $10 million or $100 million doesn’t have to tell anyone that they’ve received that money. What we count on instead is the estate tax system, and that’s where we’ve seen a huge problem in terms of lack of upkeep.

We should get rid of the estate tax and instead expand the base of the income tax to include investment gains and inheritances as taxable income. It’s critically important that we have systems that feel fair to people.

CC: I’m curious, what do you think of an annual wealth tax?

RM: I can totally understand why the wealth tax is so appealing and attractive, and why it seems like the obvious solution to the problem. However, I worry about the practical limitations of such a system insofar as it counts on annual valuation. The problem is particularly acute with respect to the enormous amounts of wealth owned through complex partnerships and other assets that are difficult to value. What you’re going to have is the whole estate planning world hiding value.

In addition, wealthy people would be incentivized to move their money out of the easy to value stock market and instead invest in privately held interests that are more difficult to value, and this would impose significant hardships on the tens or hundreds of millions of Americans who count on the stock market for their retirement and other savings. While it would work great in theory, it is ultimately both unworkable and unwise.

CC: In terms of building support for taxing the very wealthy, how about this scenario. We say to save the earth, we need to tax the climate destructive behaviors and concentrations of wealth that are causing the most harm”?

RM: My problem with this approach is that it seems to describe the status quo as one where the rich are already paying taxes and we need for them to pay more. But a far bigger problem is how the wealthy have been able to write themselves out of the tax system altogether.

I think that our first step in tax policy is bringing the wealthiest Americans into our tax system. Our total government revenue in 2024 was $5 trillion and we had a deficit of about 2 trillion because we spent almost $7 trillion. And then you realize that the wealthiest 1 percent owned $50 trillion it matters whether this group pays taxes. It matters because our growing debt is a problem.

CC: Well, if only the message could get out further, then people could shift that narrative.

RM: I feel so urgent about my project, which is really a project about public awareness. How do we grow public awareness? And my concern is that politicians across the political spectrum have effectively spread a message that you don’t need to understand taxes. And that is baloney.

The Second Estate is available now from University of Chicago Press.

The post The Second Estate: A Q&A with Ray Madoff appeared first on Institute for Policy Studies.

Budgets are both policy and moral documents. The Trump-GOP budget agenda, which cuts programs for the poor to give tax cuts to the wealthy and big corporations and more money to the war machine and mass deportations, is not a moral policy agenda.

This brief report summarizes some of the Trump-GOP’s most immoral budget priorities, from those that have already been enacted to those that are now being proposed.

Failed Budget Priorities: Making the Poor Poorer to Help the Rich and Fund Violence

In March, the president summed up his own approach: “‘The U.S. can’t take care of daycare…. We’re fighting wars. Medicaid, Medicare — they can do it on a state basis. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. But all these little scams that have taken place, you have to let states take care of them.”

Last year’s Big Ugly Bill, praised by Trump and narrowly passed by Congress, did three big things: cut social safety net and health care programs, give tax cuts to the wealthiest, and spend billions for war and mass deportations.

This year, Trump and his GOP allies are planning to do more of the same. Their priorities for this year include supplementing the war budget to bring the total from $1 trillion in FY 2026 to $1.5 trillion in FY 2027; providing more money for the president’s immoral mass deportation and detention agenda; and cutting off more poor and low-income people from programs that help counter the injustices in our economy.

The theme of these budget priorities is clear and consistent: taking from the poor to enrich the wealthy and inflict violence at home and abroad.

More People Struggle to Get Healthcare or Go Without

The Big Ugly Bill and other policy changes have made health insurance and healthcare more expensive or unavailable:

• The Big Ugly Bill’s cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, combined with new administrative hurdles to accessing benefits, could result in an estimated 51,000 preventable deaths per year.
• More than 14 million people are at risk of losing health insurance due to cuts to Medicaid, cuts to assistance with health insurance costs through the Marketplaces (also known as Affordable Care Act), cuts to Medicare, and other policy changes.
• So far, early data indicate that one million fewer people signed up for health insurance through the Affordable Care Act marketplaces after costs rose in January 2026. That’s likely an undercount of those who are losing their marketplace insurance, because some people drop out once they are required to start making payments.
• For people who buy their health insurance through the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, a survey found that more than half said their health insurance costs were “a lot higher,” and 55 percent said they planned to cut back on other household spending to afford health insurance after GOP policy changes cut back on government assistance for health insurance premiums.

• The Big Ugly Bill required evidence of employment for many people who get insurance through Medicaid. Research shows that the rigid, red tape-laden work requirements in the bill are unlikely to actually increase employment. Most Medicaid enrollees already work, and even those who do work can end up without healthcare if red tape trips up their ability to prove it. Those who do not work are often caring for family members or attending school or have a disability. Formerly incarcerated people also face particularly high barriers to employment.
• The law’s changes to Medicaid financing mechanisms pose a particular threat to rural hospitals because they rely more heavily on Medicaid revenue than urban facilities. More than 700 rural hospitals are already at risk of closure, and at least 338 rural hospitals are at increased risk due to changes in this law. To buy off critics, Republicans included a rural health fund that is expected to cover less than a third of projected rural Medicaid losses.

More People Go Hungry

• Nearly half of Americans in a November poll said they were struggling to afford basic necessities like groceries, utility bills, transportation, housing, and healthcare.
• All of the forty million people who rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) will see their benefits cut under the Big Ugly Bill. Four million people are expected to see their food assistance benefits terminated or cut substantially.
• Similar to the changes for Medicaid, the Big Ugly Bill put in place new requirements to provide evidence of work for certain SNAP recipients. The new  requirements will make SNAP harder to access for older adults, caregivers, veterans, people experiencing homelessness, and youth leaving the foster care system. Again, these red tape-laden work requirements in the bill are unlikely to actually increase employment, but they can result in a loss of benefits even for those who do work.
• Over time, SNAP benefits will shrink for all forty million people who use the program, because of changes to how benefits are calculated. These changes are designed to help pay for tax cuts for the rich and war spending at the expense of people struggling to put food on the table.

More Money for Endless War and Mass Deportations

• The Big Ugly Bill gave $156 billion more to the Pentagon for war and weapons. The law brought total war spending to over $1 trillion during peacetime, for the first time ever. That $1 trillion war budget enabled the invasion of Venezuela and the kidnapping of that country’s president, and then the unjustified and immoral war on Iran, all in the space of just two months.
• The president started a major war on Iran, with deaths mounting and costs in early April 2026 reaching near $31 billion. The war is completely unjustified, illegal, and unpopular.
• As of early April 2026, the U.S. war on Iran had caused the deaths of 4,000 people and displaced 4 million people in the wider region seeking safety from the war, according to the World Health Organization. Costs for the war on Iran were reaching $31 billion, and still mounting.
• Half of Pentagon spending goes to corporate contractors. The top five Pentagon contractors paid their CEOs an average of $24,632,610.
• The Big Ugly Bill added $170 billion for the Trump-GOP mass deportation machine. Spending for the mass deportation and detention agencies, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) would more than double since FY 2024 if the GOP enacts their planned spending increases this year.
• Mass deportations and detentions are terrorizing communities. As of early April 2026, fifteen people had already died in ICE custody since the beginning of the year. That doesn’t include the deaths of Renee Good or Alex Pretti at the hands of immigration agents.
• The Big Ugly Bill provided $45 billion to expand immigrant detention centers. The Trump administration resumed the practice of detaining immigrant children, detaining 6,200 children during his second term so far.
• The president has abused the National Guard to take over the cities of Washington, DC; Portland, Oregon; Los Angeles, California; Memphis, Tennessee; and Chicago, Illinois; at a cost of $496 million in 2025 alone – and with troops still deployed in Washington, DC and Memphis, the costs continue to mount.

The Rich and Big Corporations are the Winners

• The richest 1 percent will receive more than $1 trillion in tax cuts over the next decade thanks to the Big Ugly Bill.
• For working families, cuts to health care, student loans, and other vital services under the law wipe out the minor tax benefits. A Penn Wharton analysis found that the poorest one-fifth of households would be expected to lose $885 in 2030 under the bill’s provisions, while eighty percent of the bill’s benefits would flow to the top ten percent.
• Many of the Big Ugly Bill’s tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations are permanent, while tax cuts targeted to working people, like no tax on tips or overtime, are temporary, ending after 2028.
• Despite modest increases in the maximum Child Tax Credit, the Big Ugly Bill will still deny benefits to an estimated 17 million children whose parents earn too little to receive the full credit, denying help to the poorest children. An estimated two million more children will lose access because of their parent’s immigration status, even though they were previously eligible.
• The Big Ugly Bill kept the corporate tax rate at 21%, a drastic reduction from the 35% pre-2018 rate – despite the fact that ordinary workers have not benefited from this rate reduction.

What’s Next on Their Agenda: More of the Same

The Trump-GOP’s budget priorities for 2026 and beyond promise more of the same, enriching the wealthy and inflicting violence while cutting programs for poor and struggling people:

• Increasing the war budget by 42 percent, from $1.05 trillion to $1.5 trillion in a single year. The last time military spending topped $1 trillion was World War II. It has been reported that the president will also ask for an additional $80-$100 billion for the war on Iran. Every dollar added to the war budget by any means will enable more wars, whether that means the continuation or expansion of the war on Iran, or invasions or attacks on other countries. The president has expressed interest in using military force against Greenland, Mexico, Cuba, Colombia, and other countries.
• Increasing the mass deportation budget, adding more funds on top of the $170 billion passed in last year’s Big Ugly Bill and targeting Black and Brown communities for violent treatment. More funding for mass deportation means more violence by immigration agents, more abuse of immigrants in detention, more racial profiling, and more family separation.
• Slashing $4 billion in home heating and cooling assistance for low-income households (Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program/ LIHEAP). In FY 2024, nearly 6 million households received help with heating and energy costs, including 2.5 million households with older adults, 2.1 million households where someone had a disability, and nearly a million households with young children.
• Slashing nutrition funding for low-income women and children (Women, Infants and Children/WIC). Cuts would mean that fruit and vegetable benefits for young children would drop from $27 per month to just $10.
• Cutting at least $3.8 billion from housing, homelessness, and community development programs. The proposal would completely eliminate an eviction protection program that provided legal services to people at risk of eviction, and the Fair Housing Initiatives Program, which provided testing, evaluations and outreach to prevent housing discrimination.

Over all, the president’s budget proposes $73 billion in cuts to non-military programs and $446 billion in new military spending. GOP leaders are reportedly discussing additional healthcare cuts to pay for military spending, including the war on Iran.

State Impacts: How Many People Could Have Medicaid or SNAP Instead of $156 Billion in War Spending?

The Big Ugly Bill added $156 billion in war spending – money that has enabled the war on Iran and other military misdeeds, like the invasion of Venezuela and the occupation of U.S. cities by the National Guard. That money brought the war budget to more than $1 trillion for the first time since World War II.

Trump and his GOP allies now want to increase the war budget by 42 percent, to $1.5 trillion – a sum that would only enable more wars, and impoverish our country further.

Instead of spending tax dollars for war, we could spend them restoring the cuts from the Big Ugly Bill – and have enough to expand health insurance and food assistance for more people.

The table shows that in the vast majority of states, returning the tax dollars from the $156 billion war spending in the Big Ugly Bill would be enough to more than cover Medicaid and SNAP for the people losing health insurance and food assistance under the Big Ugly Bill.

Overall, the $156 billion for war from the Big Bad Bill is more than enough to cover all of the people in every state expected to lose insurance and food benefits – and provide Medicaid to an additional 4.8 million people, besides.^[1]

^[1] Of the four million people at risk of losing food assistance, the table shows the state breakdown for the 3.5 million at risk due to new work requirements, but $156 billion is enough to restore benefits for all four million, with enough leftover to provide Medicaid to 4.8 million people.

People Who Could Receive Medicaid or SNAP for State Taxpayer Share of $156 Billion

Totals may not add due to rounding. Sources: Author’s calculations based on IRS tax data, Kaiser Family Foundation Medicaid cost and at-risk estimates, USDA cost estimates for SNAP, and CBPP at-risk estimates for SNAP.

The post Trump’s Budget Policies Make the Poor Poorer to Pay for War and Help the Rich appeared first on Institute for Policy Studies.

Press contacts below

Washington, D.C. – Ahead of Tax Day, April 15, the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies released its latest annual Tax Receipt, highlighting exactly where Americans’ 2025 income taxes went and what those numbers say about our national spending priorities. 

As the war in Iran drives gas prices sky-high while the cost of living crisis threatens Americans’ ability to afford basic necessities here at home, the majority of ordinary Americans across the political spectrum are deeply concerned about where our tax dollars actually go and how the government will prioritize our communities’ needs.

Overall, in 2025, the average taxpayer contributed $4,909 for militarism and its support systems – including war and the Pentagon, veterans’ programs, and mass deportations and border militarization. Meanwhile, NPP’s new analysis found that Americans’ tax dollars only paid for $2,492 for Medicaid.

Last year, the president requested and received deep cuts to Medicaid and food stamps that will result in millions of Americans losing health insurance and food assistance, deepening the affordability crisis thanks to the Big, Ugly Bill. 

While most Americans will know whether they get a tax refund, many have no idea where their income tax dollars actually go. NPP’s new analysis spotlights how much of taxpayers’ money goes towards militarism and its support systems – including the war and weapons, and mass deportation and border militarization – compared to how many tax dollars go toward funding vital programs and services on which American communities rely in order to survive and thrive.

The average taxpayer in 2025 paid:

• $4,049 for weapons and war, vs. $2,492 for Medicaid, which provided health insurance to 68.5 million Americans in 2025 — about one in five Americans.
• $1,870 for Pentagon contractors, more than twice as much as the $770 the average taxpayer paid for troops’ pay, even as many troops rely on food stamps to feed themselves and their families; and fifteen times as much as the $124 the average taxpayer paid for school lunches and other nutrition programs. 
• $136 for nuclear weapons, seven times as much as the $19 the average taxpayer paid for the U.S. Postal Service, a provider of good jobs and affordable deliveries especially in rural areas.
• $119 for mass deportations and detentions, six times as much as the $19 the average taxpayer paid for the Federal Aviation Administration amidst a dangerous shortage of air traffic controllers and a recent deadly crash.
• $57 for aid to foreign militaries, including support for Israel’s attacks on Gaza, Lebanon and Iran, vs. just $49 for diplomacy to foster peace and prevent war.

The 2025 Tax Receipt doesn’t show the cost of the recent war on Iran, which started in February 2026. But estimating 2026 Iran war costs in the context of data from NPP’s 2025 tax receipt and putting the cost at $35 billion — a line the U.S. is likely on the verge of crossing  —  the average taxpayer will have paid $130 for the war on Iran, eight times more than the $16 the average taxpayer paid for a full year of home heating and energy assistance in 2025. In FY 2024, nearly 6 million households received help with heating and energy costs, including 2.5 million households with older adults, 2.1 million households where someone had a disability, and nearly a million households with young children.

“It’s shameful that our tax dollars are doing more to bomb children in Iran and other countries than to feed and educate children here. Instead of spending even more of our hard-earned dollars on war and mass deportation, we deserve a massive reinvestment in making this country a place where we can all survive and thrive,” said Lindsay Koshgarian, Program Director for the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.

This analysis follows an announcement regarding the President’s new FY 2027 budget request, including a $1.5 trillion war budget request that will only pave the way for more and longer wars, more deaths of civilians abroad, and higher costs for people here – all paid for with American taxpayers’ hard-earned money. 

“Our tax receipt shows why so many people in this country are struggling. We’re facing chronic underinvestment in this country, from healthcare to education and more. That money has instead been funding a $1-trillion war machine and a class of Pentagon contractors getting rich off our tax dollars. The good news is that if we reverse our backwards priorities, we can start to make Americans’ lives better,” said Koshgarian.

View a comprehensive breakdown of key findings and the full analysis.

View the previous year’s Tax Receipt.

Press contacts:

Olivia Alperstein, olivia@ips-dc.org

Lindsay Koshgarian, lindsay@ips-dc.org 

###

The post NEW: In 2025, the average American’s income taxes funded $4,049 for war and weapons and only $2,492 for Medicaid appeared first on Institute for Policy Studies.

Basic democratic rights are disappearing. Unarmed people have been executed in the streets and smeared as “terrorists” by the government. Entire families are being kidnapped and denied basic rights in inhumane detention centers. And journalists are being arrested for doing their jobs.

Against this backdrop, working for climate justice might seem like a distraction.

But a clear-headed look at how we ended up in this grim situation in the first place shows that the movement for climate justice, far from being a distraction, is an essential part of the fight to defend and deepen democracy.

The Trump administration has received major political backing from fossil fuel oligarchs—in response, in fact, to Trump’s open solicitation to trade favors for their support. The government has subsequently followed an energy and environmental policy agenda that benefits the industry.

The administration has expanded the industry’s access to resources at home through leases and permits for drilling in public lands and waters. It has attacked Venezuela, kidnapped its president, and is attempting to open up the country’s oil reserves to US corporations.

And of course it launched an unprovoked war on Iran, sending the price of oil skyrocketing—and leading to genocidal threats from the president against Iran unless the country reopens the Strait of Hormuz, through which Gulf oil passes.

Meanwhile at home, the Trump administration has weakened environmental standards, including mercury pollution standards for power plants. By attacking motor vehicle fuel economy standards, it has effectively grown the captive market for the industry’s products. And it has abused the federal permitting process to try to kill the fossil fuel industry’s main competitors, wind and solar energy.

This is not merely a case of an administration that supports the fossil fuel industry and also happens to be authoritarian. The industry directly supports and benefits from an authoritarian government that curtails democratic rights and silences dissent. It also benefits from a government that upholds white supremacy and enforces racial hierarchy.

Several years ago, a report I worked on for the Institute for Policy Studies documented how the fossil fuel industry has used its money and influence to push for state-level legislation to criminalize protest against fossil fuel infrastructure projects. These so-called “critical infrastructure laws” are now on the books in 19 states. The industry has also used strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs) to intimidate and silence critics.

This is a predictable response of a powerful, politically connected industry that is under assault on two fronts.

First, competition from cheap, widely available wind and solar energy poses a serious economic threat to the industry. Renewable energy is cheaper than fossil fuels in most of the world, and new generation capacity is dominated by renewables.

Simultaneously, the industry faces serious political and reputational threats. Growing numbers of people worldwide are experiencing extreme heat, wildfires, storms, floods, and toxic air and water pollution attributable to the industry’s activities. Many of them are connecting the dots, and refusing to be passive victims of a powerful industry and its political backers.

Social movements against particular fossil fuel projects, or against the industry more broadly, have multiplied on every continent. What’s more, they are already winning. The industry faces restrictions in several political jurisdictions, and likely recognizes that it could even be expropriated in the not so distant future.

Faced with these twin crises, the fossil fuel industry is increasingly resorting to relying on the repressive apparatus of state violence to crush dissenting voices and maintain its dominance.

The industry has also historically benefited from a racially and economically unequal society. The lack of political power of Indigenous, Black, and other racially marginalized communities, and of poor communities of every race, has enabled the industry to locate polluting infrastructure in these communities, treating them as sacrifice zones. This has let the industry avoid the protracted zoning and legal battles they would have to contend with if they tried to locate their infrastructure in more privileged communities, greatly reducing the cost and lead time for their projects.

In recent years, the growing strength of the environmental justice movement has threatened the ability of the industry to continue to reap the benefits of racial and economic stratification. It is therefore no surprise that the industry is supporting an openly white supremacist political agenda that seeks to bring old racial hierarchies back and eliminate the very concept of environmental justice.

In sum, the far-right agenda in the US is deeply intertwined with the political and economic objectives of the fossil fuel industry that is at the root of climate change. We cannot defeat authoritarianism without breaking the stranglehold of the fossil fuel industry on our economy and our political system.

Finally, it is worth pointing out that these observations are mainly based on US politics, but are applicable to many parts of the world. Fossil fueled fascism has become a global phenomenon, and our resistance to the fossil fuel industry must be similarly global in scale.

The post We Must Fight Fossil Fuel Oligarchs to Save Democracy appeared first on Institute for Policy Studies.

It’s high time for President Claudia Sheinbaum to join with other Latin American leaders who are rejecting this corporate-driven, anti-democratic system.

One of the largest suits Mexico has ever faced is a pending claim from Alabama-based Vulcan Materials Company. In 2022, the Mexican government found evidence that Vulcan’s limestone quarrying operation on the Yucatán coast was causing severe damage to underground water tables and local ecosystems. The government halted operations and declared the area a protected natural zone.

Vulcan retaliated against the government’s efforts to protect the environment and public health by filing a claim for $1.9 billion in compensation. The company claims that Mexico’s actions violate the investment rules of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

With this case still pending, the U.S. House of Representatives has just ratcheted up pressure on the Mexican government by passing a bill to impose sanctions on governments that seize U.S. corporate assets.

In rare bipartisan action, the Defending American Property Abroad Act of 2026 passed by a vote of 247 (including 41 Democrats) to 164. The bill’s champion, Texas Republican August Pfluger, referenced the Vulcan case in his celebratory press release. The Senate has not yet voted on the bill.

On top of the Vulcan case, Mexico is facing a number of other expensive lawsuits over the government’s actions to ensure that their people benefit from extraction of lithium and other strategic minerals — instead of letting foreign corporations suck this natural resource wealth out of the country.

If Sheinbaum decides to finally take a stand, she would have important allies.

On March 25, Colombian President Gustavo Petro announced that his country, in the face of similar challenges to its sovereignty, will withdraw from the international arbitration system.

The Colombian leader’s historic decision comes after years of civil society advocacy. In 2023, more than 300 organizations called on the Colombian government to lead in the dismantling of a system that empowers transnational corporations, particularly in extractives industries, to destroy lives, ecosystems, and communities in which they operate.

A few weeks ago, 220 economic and legal experts, including renowned economists Joseph Stiglitz, Ha-Joon Chang, and Thomas Piketty, sent Petro a letter urging him to take this action. The letter also calls on him to use the upcoming First International Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels in Colombia to galvanize coordinated international action to reject the investor-state system.

Enrique Daza, a founder of the Colombian Network Against Free Trade, had also recently sharply criticized the Colombian government for conducting officials reviews of its trade agreements with the United States and the European Union but without these reviews leading to a clear break with the arbitration system. Daza, a tireless fighter for Colombian sovereignty and fair trade in the hemisphere, died just days before Petro’s March 28 announcement.

Brazil would also be a strong partner. Latin America’s largest economy has never signed a trade agreement or investment treaty that gives private foreign investors recourse to supranational arbitration bodies. Sheinbaum’s just-announced meeting with Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva this summer offers an opportunity to move forward.

Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia account for between 65 percent and 70 percent of the total GDP of Latin America and the Caribbean. This represents a far more powerful potential economic bloc than the rightwing governments from the region that have allied with President Donald Trump in his new so-called “Shield of the Americas.” These conservative-led nations account for not more than a quarter of the region’s combined GDP.

In terms of population, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico are home to about 400 million inhabitants (60 percent of the region), while the “Shield” countries have just 160 million (24 percent).

No country can take on a system that benefits powerful transnational corporate interests alone. But together these three powerful nations could strike a strong blow to these anti-democratic rules and begin building an alternative that respects the rights of national governments to act in the interest of their own people and the environment.

The post An Opening for a Latin American United Front Against Corporate Lawsuits appeared first on Institute for Policy Studies.