Wealth inequality and social mobility news

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More on that by Reuters:

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump- ... 025-08-10/

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Income inequality dipped and fewer people moved, according to largest survey of US life

https://apnews.com/article/census-burea ... cc274eb862

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Trump administration posts notice that no federal food aid will go out Nov. 1

Source: AP

ADRIANA GOMEZ LICON Associated Press 11 mins ago

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has posted a notice on its website saying federal food aid will not go out Nov. 1, raising the stakes for families nationwide as the government shutdown drags on.

The new notice comes after the Trump administration said it would not tap roughly $5 billion in contingency funds to keep benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly referred to as SNAP, flowing into November. That program helps about 1 in 8 Americans buy groceries.

“Bottom line, the well has run dry,” the USDA notice says. “At this time, there will be no benefits issued November 01. We are approaching an inflection point for Senate Democrats.”

The shutdown, which began Oct. 1, is now the second-longest on record. While the Republican administration took steps leading up to the shutdown to ensure SNAP benefits were paid this month, the cutoff would expand the impact of the impasse to a wider swath of Americans — and some of those most in need — unless a political resolution is found in just a few days.

Read more: https://omaha.com/news/nation-world/gov ... 0ae60.html

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Trump administration cut $500 million in deliveries to food banks across the country.
FactPost @factpostnews
New reporting reveals the Trump administration cut $500 million in deliveries to food banks across the country.

Food banks were expecting more than 27 million pounds of chicken, 2 million gallons of milk, 10 million pounds of dried fruit and 67 million eggs that never arrived and went to waste instead.


In the spring, the Trump administration abruptly cut $500 million in deliveries from a program that sends U.S.-produced meat, dairy, eggs and produce to food banks and other organizations across the country — about a quarter of the funding the program received in 2024. The items that were delivered through The Emergency Food Assistance Program were some of the healthiest, most expensive items that organizations distribute.

The cancellation of these deliveries comes at a critical time for food banks. Food insecurity is higher than at any time since the aftermath of the Great Recession, according to federal data, and many food banks are reporting higher need than they saw at the peak of the pandemic. Demand is only expected to increase; this summer, President Donald Trump signed into law the largest cut to food stamps in the program’s history.

ProPublica obtained records from the Department of Agriculture of each planned delivery in 2025, detailing the millions of pounds of food, down to the number of eggs, that never reached hungry people because of the administration’s cut.

The Emergency Food Assistance Program was created in 1983 to purchase farmers’ surplus food and distribute it to low-income people. The program’s budget is typically authorized every five years as part of the Farm Bill, but in 2018, the first Trump administration added funds to help farmers struggling under retaliatory tariffs the U.S. faced amid trade disputes. The additional, discretionary federal funds helped food banks serve more people; last fiscal year, they got nearly twice as much money from the fund as they did from their congressional allocation.

Now characterizing the additional funding as a “Biden-era slush fund,” the second Trump administration cut $500 million that had already been allocated. The government is still distributing food through other parts of the program, but food banks were caught off guard by the canceled deliveries because it’s rare for funding to be cut mid-year. Food bank managers, some with decades of experience, couldn’t recall a disruption like it. With the Farm Bill slated for renewal this fall, officials who run food banks worry that any additional cuts would cause them to have to scale back the number of people they serve.

https://projects.propublica.org/trump-food-cuts/

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U.S. Billionaire Wealth Surges to $8.1 Trillion as Affordability Crisis Hammers Working Class
By Jake Johnson
January 2, 2025

Introduction:

(Common Dreams) The collective wealth of US billionaires surged to $8.1 trillion in 2025 as working-class Americans faced a cost-of-living crisis made worse by President Donald Trump’s tariff regime and unprecedented assault on the social safety net.

An analysis released Friday by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) found that the top 15 US billionaires saw the largest wealth gains last year, with their collective fortune growing from $2.4 trillion to $3.2 trillion. That 33% gain was more than double the S&P 500’s 16% increase in 2025.

What IPS describes as the “elite group” of US billionaires includes Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the richest man in the world; Google co-founder Larry Page; Amazon founder Jeff Bezos; and Oracle executive chairman Larry Ellison.

IPS emphasized that “these staggering combined billionaire wealth totals come as the Trump-GOP budget bill passed in 2025 defunded health insurance, food stamps, and other vital anti-poverty safety net programs, in order to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy and budget increases for militarism and mass deportations.”

“The affordability crisis is hitting ordinary Americans particularly hard as we head into the new year, but not everyone is feeling the pain: Billionaires are raking in staggering profits off the backs of ordinary workers,” Chuck Collins, director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at IPS, said in a statement.

Read more here: https://www.commondreams.org/news/us-b ... re-wealth

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The article featured in the preceding post cites a statement made by Chuck Collins, director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at IPS. Also from that statement:

The top five current billionaires and their individual wealth on January 1, 2026, compared to January 1, 2025:

Elon Musk of Tesla/X and SpaceX with $726 billion, up from $421 billion a year ago.

Larry Page of Google, with $257 billion, up from $156 billion a year ago.

Larry Ellison of Oracle fame with $245.billion, up from $209 billion a year ago.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon with $242.billion, up from $233.5 billion a year ago.

Sergey Brin of Google with $237 billion, up from $148.9 billion a year ago.

The three wealthiest dynastic families in the U.S. hold an estimated $757 billion, up from $657.8 billion at the end of 2024, a 16 percent gain. These are:

Walton. Seven members of the Walton Family with combined wealth of $483 billion, up from $404.3 billion a year ago.

Mars. Six members of Mars family with combined wealth of $120 billion, down from $130.4 billion a year ago.

Koch. Two members of Koch family have a combined wealth of $154.8 billion, up from $121.1 billion a year ago.

https://ips-dc.org/resource-richest-15- ... e=hs_email

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Nearly 400 millionaires and billionaires call for higher taxes on super-rich

https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... -wef-davos