I’m sure you’ve seen the news about the double milestone the United States just reached when our national debt hit $40 trillion. Not only is that amount an all-time record, it’s also the first time the debt been so big that it’s exceeded our yearly economic output.

But here’s another tidbit that I’ll wager you didn’t know: If America’s corporations and the wealthy had not been treated to several rounds of hefty tax cuts—first from President Ronald Reagan, in the 1980s; expanded in the early 2000s by President George W. Bush; then boosted again, twice, by President Trump—those old records would still stand. And our national debt today would be sitting where it did in 2010: about 50 percent of annual economic growth.

This is just one of the stunning factoids I’ve found in the abundance of good writing being done these days on what I consider the defining economic issue of our time: economic inequality—which is both massive and rising, not only in the U.S., but across most of the globe.

I have become obsessed with this issue, because economic inequality’s consequences are so severe, and so vast. It’s damaging the livelihoods of the working class (often referred to these days, even in the U.S., as “the working poor”), robbing communities of resources to fix their problems, fueling today’s “affordability crisis,” poisoning our politics, and making millions of working-class Americans feel, accurately, that they’re no longer in control of their own lives.

Fortunately, countless plans have begun circulating, at least among our more honest politicians, on how we could turn things around—and make the economy start working for everyone.

Some of these ideas require nothing more than a simple piece of legislation that would close the loopholes and tax breaks that have metastasized throughout our tax code in recent decades. Whenever someone suggests this idea, it of course provokes waves of protest from the moneyed class. Which is absurd. As billionaire investor Warren Buffett said, “My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress.” Interestingly, Buffett made this comment way back in 2011, when tax breaks for the privileged were a shred of what they’ve become today.

Buffett’s reasoning was spot on, and history backs him up. Consider, for example, the significantly higher tax rates on corporations and the wealthy that we had in the 1950s and 1960s—a period so prosperous for America that it’s often referred to as “The Golden Age of Capitalism.” If we really want to “make America great again,” wouldn’t it be wise to start by returning to those rates, which were up to three times what they are today? That would certainly be an improvement on our current approach, where corporations and the wealthy walk around like welfare kings—while their workers get treated like serfs, and the nation struggles with historic debt.

No matter what we do about taxes, however, a fair economy won’t hold up unless it has a solid floor. That floor is built on raising workers’ wages. Think about it. If there’s no spare cash in your pocket, how are you going to buy all the stuff that the business community produces? Despite the obvious math in this axiom, most of our leaders in Washington keep thinking that the minimum wage should remain where it’s been stalled for 17 years—at $7.25 an hour. That wage earns you about a third of what it costs to pay for basic living expenses today.

This is why some 24 million working Americans now rely on some form of public assistance to survive. And guess who pays that bill? We, the taxpayers, because it’s our taxes that pay for the food stamps, Medicaid, housing assistance, and other programs that the working poor depend on—all because their employers pay poverty wages.

Frustrated by this stalemate, a few enterprising Congress members are getting behind a novel idea: an excise tax meant to coerce big companies that underpay workers to pay a living wage. Other ideas include new ways to rebuild schools, revive workforce training, and make childcare and healthcare affordable—all without adding to the national debt.

None of these plans are perfect, but political change never is. The best we can do, right now, is elect politicians who have not sold their souls to moneyed interests (a sure test is to check whether they’re refusing corporate PAC donations); who have the smarts to see the forces accelerating economic inequality, and the courage and vision to tear those forces out at their roots.

The good news is that dozens of candidates in this fall’s mid-term elections fit that criteria.

While these candidates are still developing their policy positions—and testing out their messages with constituents (which means you and me)—let’s make sure they get the straight story about what’s really corroding the economy.

To that end, I want to use this month’s column to point you to some of my favorite writers on inequality. Many of them, as you will see, publish their essays on Substack.

The valedictorian of this class might be Paul Krugman, a professional economist who for 25 years served as a columnist for The New York Times, writing some of the media’s most incisive commentaries on the intersection of politics and economics. After leaving the Times two years ago, he now publishes on Substack. (Krugman’s recent post is the source for the factoid that opened this column, about how low our national debt would be if Congress had not passed all those unnecessarily tilted tax cuts.)

Another king of economic analysis is, of course, Robert Reich, formerly both a professor and a Secretary of Labor who has written 20 books over the years, many focusing on how we might fix the problematic ways that America practices capitalism. (In one of his recent columns, for example, Reich noted that inequality in the U.S. has finally gotten so bad that even the editor-at-large of The Wall Street Journal, the business world’s best media friend, is calling for a corrective.)

Substack is full of other smart essayists who, while less well-known than Reich and Krugman, are no less thoughtful. There’s Chuck Collins, who directs the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies, a respected think-tank in Washington, D.C.; Jeremy Ney, who publishes a wide range of eye-popping data and other material at American Inequality; Oxfam’s authoritative bulletin, called Equals; and an irreverent feed, aptly named Untrickled, by MIchelle Teheux.

Beyond Substack, there are of course dozens of other experts on inequality, many of whom have written landmark books about economic inequality. If you really want to dig deep, the leading lights include Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate and professor at Columbia University; Thomas Piketty, an influential French economist; and Richard D. Wolff, an economics professor emeritus at University of Mass., in Amherst, who (IMHO) explains the weaknesses in capitalism, at least as practiced now, and the economic potential of Democratic Socialism, better than anyone.

But let’s close this month’s column with some writers who are more focused on solutions—ideas, in other words, aimed directly at building a sustainable economy.

One is Nick Romeo, a New Yorker writer who reports on enterprising initiatives across the globe in his 2024 book, “The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy.” And a more ambitious (some might say idealistic) argument can be found in a December 2025 paper from the academic journal Sustainable Futures.

My personal favorite these days is a fascinating collection put out by the World Business Academy, a small California “think-tank and action incubator” that punches well above its weight. The Academy is run by a serial entrepreneur named Rinaldo Brutoco, who writes about ethical business strategies and environmental sustainability initiatives. A recent example is this article on “cloud brightening,” a new ocean-based technology that could reflect some of the sun’s energy back into space.

Brutoco also publishes an encouraging newsletter called The Optimist Daily. I can’t think of a better way to start my day.