Valery Vasilyeu/Vecteezy
Americans of all political stripes are concerned about affordability. Some politicians would like to change the subject.
Billionaires and their allies in politics have tried everything, from falsely blaming the rising costs of food and housing on immigrants, to dismissing the entire concept of affordability as a “hoax,” as President Donald Trump called it.
The truth is, billionaires themselves are driving up costs and inflaming the crisis. In my new book, “Burned by Billionaires,” I chronicle the many ways that billionaires and their investments are squeezing the rest of us.
Besides lobbying against raising the federal minimum wage (now unchanged for sixteen years) and opting out of their tax responsibilities, shifting the bill to everyone else, here are four ways that billionaires are directly driving the crisis the president claims does not exist.
Monopolizing food: The food sector has become increasingly dominated by a small number of producers who exercise monopoly power over our dinner plates. Four giant conglomerates control more than 80 percent of the market for beef, including JBS, owned by the billionaire Batista family and the Cargill-MacMillan clan, a dynastic family with twenty-one billionaires. These companies deploy their monopoly power to dictate pricing and fend off oversight and regulation.
Squeezing health care: The rising cost of health care has many drivers. But one cause is that billionaire-backed private equity funds treat the health care system—a sixth of the U.S. economy—as ripe for plundering. Investors are buying up emergency rooms, hospitals, and medical practices, all with the goal of extracting more profits from health workers and consumers. In New England, a private equity fund called Cerberus Capital bought ten hospitals and squeezed several into bankruptcy after extracting massive fees and profits
Hoarding housing: In cities throughout the nation, the ultra-wealthy are fueling a luxury construction boom, absorbing huge amounts of land, resources, energy, and construction trade skills. Billionaire-backed private equity funds are also buying up single family homes, mobile home parks, and rental housing to convert to short-term vacation rentals. Blackstone, owned by billionaire Stephen Schwartzman, is the biggest landlord in the country, eagerly exploiting tenants with few other options.
Taxing animal lovers: It’s not your imagination: The cost of veterinary care, pet food, and even dog-walking apps has risen as billionaire investors endeavor to squeeze more dollars out of our love for animals. As billionaire-backed private equity firms buy up animal care resources, the share of household income spent on pets has been steadily increasing. In some cases, people have been forced to relinquish their animals when they can no longer afford the cost of care.
Going forward, we don’t need more empty rhetoric about affordability. We need campaigns that directly address affordability while reducing these democracy-distorting levels of extreme wealth and power. In Burned by Billionaires, I chronicle examples of these game-changing campaigns—such as efforts to tax luxury housing transactions to fund affordable housing, or taxing private jet fuel to fund green transit and infrastructure.
These ideas are gaining steam across the country.
In 2022, Massachusetts voters approved a 4 percent tax on incomes over a million dollars to fund education and infrastructure. New York City’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, ran on a platform of free buses, expanded child care, and affordable housing paid for by a 2 percent income tax on millionaires in the city. And in 2026, California voters will consider a one-time, 5 percent emergency wealth tax on the state’s billionaires to fund health care for millions of Californians.
Taxing the billionaire class to address the affordability problem is wildly popular. Polls show that more than three-quarters of Americans support taxing billionaires to solve major economic problems.
While it’s hard to imagine such proposals passing in today’s hijacked democracy, a new generation of leaders is stepping forward to work for an economy that lifts everyone, not just the billionaires.
This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.