TINA Never Die: Is Taxing the Rich Unthinkable Forever?

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TINA remains in full effect.

There is no alternative,” was the slogan of neo-liberal patron saint UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who, along with US President Ronald Reagan, architected the wealth pump that has dramatically increased income and wealth inequality for the last 45 years.

Unfortunately, all mainstream Western political parties continue to insist there is no alternative to ever increasing inequality.

The Western center left seems willing to try, and do, virtually anything in response to the polycrisis, anything, that is, except address financial inequality.

There have been some exceptions in the past decade, but both Bernie Sanders in the U.S. and Jeremy Corbyn in the U.K. were utterly crushed by 2020.

Now that both the Democratic party establishment and Keir Starmer’s Labour are plummeting in popularity, is there any hope for a revival of redistributionist politics?

Sometimes It’s Time To State the Obvious

A recent episode of Gary Stevenson’s Gary’s Economics podcast on YouTube reiterated the doom loop we have been in all decade and all century.

Stevenson, a former Citibank trader turned anti-inequality crusader was new to me before the YouTube algorithm put him in my path. He’s an author and has been featured in The Guardian and other MSM publications.

But here’s what he said that was of interest to me:

I was able to predict that Labour would be really unpopular, really quickly. What I said was, we are in the midst of an economic crisis that is being caused by economic mismanagement. Inequality has increased massively. The assets are increasingly owned by the rich. If you don’t tax the rich, living standards will keep falling. This is why we could predict very easily that Labour would become very unpopular.


The truth is actually much more interesting than that in my opinion, which is once you take a bit of a step back and start looking at things on a grander scale, there is another way in which Labour actually have been unlucky.

Earlier this year, I explained that Labour and Donald Trump would both fail again for the exact same reason.
So what you have here is centre-left Labour, centre-right Conservatives, even far-right Donald Trump.

It’s not even just these parties. The Democrats made the same mistake under Joe Biden. Macron made the same mistake in France. The centre left and the centre right made the same mistakes in Germany, in Italy, in Spain, in Japan.

If you take a step back even further, it’s even bigger than that because this is not a case of the politicians failed, and for example, the economists were right, or the journalists were right, or even the traders were right.

I say we have an economy which has cancer, and we have a group of doctors who do not believe in cancer. I think that really captures really very nicely what’s happening in the economy.

The problem is the very rich are rapidly, rapidly increasing their wealth share. They’re growing and they’re growing and they’re growing and they’re growing their wealth and they’re squeezing everybody else’s wealth out.

That has really obvious consequences. The most obvious consequence is just that other groups in society lose their wealth… and that is really the primary cause of most of our economic problems.

But most modern economists and politicians and journalists simply do not think of the economy in terms of distribution and inequality.

This is what you would expect to happen if you were constantly misdiagnosing the problem, if you had a patient who had cancer but you didn’t know cancer exists.


It wasn’t really a problem of the Conservative Party. It isn’t really a problem of Labour. It’s not even a problem of Donald Trump. It is a problem of a failure to recognise the correct cause of the problem by the Western intellectual class.

Yes, of course Stevenson is stating the obvious, but sometimes that gets my attention.

He’s also got political ambitions and that gets my attention, per The Guardian:

…his sights are all on politics. “Andrew Tate is seeing the same thing I’m seeing. Politics is dying,” he says. “The far right are settling now. They know what their plan is: anti-immigration is the big idea, Muslims are the bad guys, tariffs. There is a battle of ideas in society, but there is a battle of ideas on the left. I’m putting my pitch forward – I’m going to build something about inequality, taxing the rich, and I’m going to build it on YouTube. These are very ambitious plans, but what else am I supposed to do?”

Wait a second: does he actually want to be prime minister? “This is quite a simple idea: if you don’t do something about inequality, it will get worse, and living standards will continue to fall. That idea is pretty simple. It doesn’t need to be all on my shoulders. I’m trying to set a fire under the people. I’m trying to get them pumped on it.”

Stating the obvious and repeating it endlessly is the most effective form of persuasion. Stevenson’s off to a good start with his simple message and stamina. It’s going to take a lot of that to dislodge the mighty grip TINA on Western minds.

The Democrats Try Everything But Economic Populism

After Zohran Mamdami’s June win in the New York City mayoral primary, hope began to stir in the hearts of those who would like to see the deathgrip of TINA neoliberalism on American politics broken.

But instead, what we’ve seen is a parade of Democratic politicians and pundits desperately trying anything and everything but economic populism because TINA to neoliberalism in their minds.

I’ve covered Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s “Abundance” spiel which has flopped so badly that Klein has no taken to praising the politics of Charlie Kirk, platforming Ben Shapiro, and repeatedly suggesting that Democrats run anti-abortion candidates in states that overwhelmingly voted in favor of abortion rights.

I’ve also covered the “Dark Woke” faction headed up by California Governor Gavin Newsom and Texas Representative Jasmine Crockett who have chosen to do a lot of cursing and trolling rather than engage with economic populism because TINA.

I’ve covered TINA Vice-President Kamala Harris and her claim that if she’d only had more time, she could have beaten Trump. Never mind that she still can’t come up with a significant policy difference with her old boss Joe Biden and still hasn’t noticed that genocide is deeply unpopular.

I haven’t covered Brat Summer Daddy Minnesota Governor (and Kamala Harris VP selection) Tim Walz’ decision to greenlight Blackrock’s acquisition of one of his state’s largest utilities (because TINA) but David Sirota has.

I’ve even covered former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his approach of doing all the same shit but insisting this time it’s different, because, of course, TINA.

I also pointed out that Rahm’s billionaire brother Ari is a key advisor to David Ellison at Paramount and is a favored Trump insider.

One thing I haven’t posted on yet is Trump’s announcement that Ari Emanuel’s Ultimate Fighting Championship will help the POTUS celebrate his birthday with a fighting event on the White House lawn next June 14.

I also haven’t posted about Ari Emanuel’s most recent “The Weekend” confab in Aspen, Colorado last week which saw Rahm join Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro — another Democratic presidential hopeful — and Trump Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff “along with Republican Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, and business and entertainment moguls like Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell and Robert Kraft.”

Something tells me the economic populism wasn’t under discussion in Aspen which is famous TINA country.

I also haven’t covered the Democratic flavor of the month, Texas State Rep. James Talarico who is running for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate.

If Talarico wins, he may face MAGA Attorney General Ken “Often Indicted, Never Convicted” Paxton who is in good shape to knock off RINO TINA empty haircut John Cornyn.

Big TINA believers The New York Times noticed Talarico’s successful appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience and more importantly they have noticed his grassroots fundraising prowess:

In the first three weeks of Talarico’s primary run, a campaign spokesman said, he raised over $6 million from more than 125,000 individual donors. By comparison, when the Texas Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke raised $2.2 million over 45 days in 2018, The Texas Tribune described it as a “massive haul.”

And while Talarico has vowed to take no AIPAC money for his Senate race (despite taking $59,000 from Miriam Adelson for his last State Rep. campaign) and bashes unnammed billionaires in his campaign statements, the Times focused on his outspoken religiosity which they seem to view as his secret sauce:

Talarico is an underdog in the Texas Senate Democratic primary, where polls show him running behind Colin Allred, who challenged Senator Ted Cruz in 2024. That gap might close as more people get to know Talarico; a September Public Policy Polling survey found that among those who had a favorable opinion of both him and Allred, Talarico led by a significant 50 percentage points.

Talarico, a 36-year-old former middle-school teacher and a member of the Texas House of Representatives, is generating excitement far out of proportion to his political prospects. On social media, his videos challenging Republican politicians and conservative dogma, often from a Christian perspective, regularly go viral. In July they earned him an invitation to Joe Rogan’s podcast, perhaps the most coveted platform in American politics, where Rogan encouraged him to run for president. Politico recently reported that Barack Obama was “holding calls with the party’s rising stars”; the article mentioned two names: Zohran Mamdani and Talarico, who’d impressed the former president with his leadership during Texas’ recent redistricting fight.

Writing on X after Talarico announced his Senate run, Rob Flaherty, Kamala Harris’s former deputy campaign manager, called him “the future of the party.” When I asked him to elaborate, he told me, “Democrats are losing ground because we’ve lost our ability to talk to people who have checked out of the system. He represents the kind of hopeful populism that I think is our pathway back — and he does it while having a natural sense of how to get and keep attention.”

All this enthusiasm may be in part a sign of desperation: Democrats are in the wilderness, eager to latch on to any inspirational figure who can guide them out. But it’s also a testament to the unexpected power of Talarico’s plain-spoken message, which combines Bernie Sanders’s anger at oligarchy with a diagnosis of the spiritual sickness that almost everyone in this country feels.

Talarico’s campaign announcement did include some decent rhetoric albeit no economic specifics:

There’s something broken in America.

Our economy is broken. Our politics are broken. Even our relationships with each other feel broken.

That’s because the most powerful people in the world want it that way.

The biggest divide in this country is not left vs. right. It’s top vs. bottom. Billionaires want us looking left and right at each other instead of looking up at them.

The people at the top work so hard to keep us angry and divided because our unity is a threat to their wealth and power. So their cable news networks and their social media algorithms tear us apart.

They divide us by party, by race, by gender, by religion so we don’t notice they’re defunding our schools, gutting our healthcare, and cutting taxes for themselves and their rich friends. It’s the oldest strategy in the world: divide and conquer.

We’ll see if Talarico amounts to anything. I expect him to thrash the insipid Allred whose only political skill is talking large donors out of large checks. Allred is 100% a TINA politician, the jury is out on Talarico.

FWIW TINA repeater Josh Barro thinks Talarico is disqualified based on some of his comments on the trans issue. Barro is wrong about virtually everything else, so YMMV.

I also haven’t mentioned the Democratic congressional leadership Senate and House Minority Leaders Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries who’ve been on a heater of abysmal media appearances and social media misfires that have at least one major Democratic Substack electoral analyst calling for their immediate resignations.

Seriously, these clowns have to be seen to be believed, and no, never does a word of economic populism cross either man’s lips, because TINA:

Let’s hear the Ettingermentum diagnosis of the Dems’ TINA problem going into the 2026 midterms:

For Democrats this year, their obvious problem is the simple fact that they have done absolutely nothing to break from Biden since the end of his failed presidency. And as far as the midterms are concerned, this failure is at its most salient in the continued reign of the party’s two congressional leaders: Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries, both of New York.

The most damning thing about all of this is that it’s hard to even say that voters are exactly wrong here. While it is true that Trump is in power now as (inflation) is intensifying, it is also true that Schumer was in charge for the first four years of the decade, when the cost-of-living crisis began. During that time, the line from him and his party was that the inflation issue was either being solved or had already been solved. They didn’t have a response when voters disagreed, and they still don’t. It isn’t a messaging problem. It’s not that it just looks like Schumer lacks any new ideas, even though it does. He literally just doesn’t have any. There isn’t a plan, and people can tell.

On paper, there’s no reason why Jeffries should be a liability for his party. Unlike Schumer, he’s not elderly, and he wasn’t one of Biden’s top governing partners during his failed presidency. But while he isn’t as deeply disliked as Schumer, this young and allegedly inspiring new leader is still solidly underwater among voters who know about him. Once again, the problem isn’t style, but substance. Even when it’s sold in a less problematic package, a message centered around a bitter defense of Biden-era policies is only going to make those who deliver it unpopular and hold the opposition back from benefitting as much as it should from Trump’s unpopularity.

As such, simply quietly rotating out Schumer and Jeffries with a new cast of establishment politicians won’t be sufficient to solve the credibility problem at play here. We have passed the point where wrapping the same message in a new package will work. In order for the public to stop viewing Democrats as an extension of a Biden administration they hated, the party will need to make a real, meaningful, hard break from the status quo.

On a more hopeful note, The New York Times opened its mini-series on “on the thinkers, upstarts and ideologues battling for control of the Democratic Party” with a piece by historian Timothy Shenk and it’s got some breaks free of TINA:

an air of denial — and, more recently, panic — has pervaded the discussion about what comes next. It’s easy to say drastic reform is needed, but there’s no agreement on what this should look like. In practice, the party establishment is doing what party establishments always do: counting on the other side to self-destruct so it can squeak back into power while changing as little as possible.

The strategy would be a lot more defensible if Democrats could write off Trumpism as a fever that was bound to break with time. But the evidence of the past few years points in the opposite direction — shrinking populations in blue states, an alarming drop in Democratic voter registration, dire math for retaking the Senate and crushing majorities who say the party is out of touch.

A few campaigns have bucked those trends. The problem for Democrats is that the best examples come from candidates running against the Democratic Party.

Consider Dan Osborn, a 50-year-old industrial mechanic and Navy veteran who is making his second bid for the Senate in Nebraska as an independent. In 2024, while Donald Trump demolished Kamala Harris by 20 points, Mr. Osborn lost by just seven. According to the analytics website Split Ticket, this was the strongest performance relative to the partisan fundamentals of any Senate candidate.

What was Mr. Osborn’s secret? He’s a sometimes fumbling speaker, and he didn’t put together a world-beating ground game or dominate social media. But he was a credible spokesman for a message that resonated with voters in Nebraska — a blistering assault on economic elites, a moderate stance on cultural issues and the rejection of politics as usual.

It’s a simple recipe, really: a scorching economic message delivered by political outsiders standing up to the powerful. The villains in this narrative — and it’s essential to have villains — are the elites at the top of a broken system. Neither Mr. Mamdani nor Mr. Osborn dwelled on cultural issues; instead, they concentrated on subjects like increasing wages and affording a home. Although their signature positions have strong public backing, their platforms are more than just a grab bag of whatever does best in the polls. They tell a story that reframes the debate, enlisting voters in a battle between the many and the few, with stakes that reach into everyday life.

This isn’t a progressive version of Trumpism, but it speaks to some of the frustrations that have made the president the dominant force in American life. The paradox is that stealing a page from MAGA is the best way to break its stranglehold on politics. Democrats must replace their reflexive opposition to President Trump with a positive vision for improving the lives of working people.

I’ll close with a tweet from Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, who seems to be working to raise his profile and possibly break with TINA, have the last tweet in which he points out that Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are the most popular political figures with Democratic 2020 voters who sat out 2024:

Bonus closer, Basel Musharbash’s epic demolition of the all-time TINA record of President William Jefferson Clinton in response to some TINA repeater’s claim that what the Dems need is a new Slick Willy.

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25 comments

  1. Acacia

    I just want to say… “Brat Summer Daddy” Lol

    Thanks, Nat !

    P.S. UFC on the White House lawn… more like JFC.

    Reply
    1. James W Fiala

      The question itself is preposterous. Nothing at all can be done in the USA except that which further benefits the rich and powerful. It will take nothing less than a revolution, the overthrow of the present economic and political system, for any real change to occur.

      This will not happen here anytime soon, However, European capitalism is quickly unravelling, It may be in a country there where the Western capitalism falls and the construction of the socialist order commences.

      Reply
  2. lyman alpha blob

    The Shenk quote mentions shrinking populations in blue states as a problem for Democrats. Maybe, maybe not. I don’t have the exact demographics at my fingertips, but we have heard about trends like a California exodus to states like Texas and Idaho for years now. Unless all those people are butthurt conservatives fleeing en masse, the trend makes red states less conservative and opens a door for people like Talarico to win in TX. I’m pretty sure my atheist Seattle transplant friends in Houston who are blue no matter who types would hold their nose and vote for Talarico over the alternative.

    Not that that’s necessarily a good thing either. As you alluded to, Nat, these “progressive” types are often huge disappointments after election, so your skepticsm regarding Talarico is well founded.

    Reply
      1. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

        That’s a good point, I was referring strictly to his announcement speech. I have some hope for Talarico. He’s certainly better than Paxton or Cornyn and him winning a statewide election will single-handedly make Texas a two-party state again.

        Reply
  3. Mikel

    “The far right are settling now. They know what their plan is: anti-immigration is the big idea, Muslims are the bad guys, tariffs.”

    It’s a shame that tariffs get lumped into some category associated with extremism. And kind of funny since it seemed like it was ok for so many other countries to use tariffs.
    The main problems:
    1) The tariffs are being wielded like political weapons or sanctions.
    2) Overall industrial policy that should accompany such a move is not being handled well. Some say it barely exists. And actual hostility from influential financial and other PMC elements against industrial policy for the USA would make getting even a well-planned industrial policy a fair shake.

    Reply
  4. Jesper

    I believe that once money is seen as ‘earned’ then there will be huge resistance to taxing it, better would be stopping the ‘earnings’ for the wealthy from growing too much.
    Bargaining power for workers has to increase and the only way to do so is by having credible threats of withholding labour. But to do so then an increase in vacation days, a lowering of retirement age, longer paid parental leave and better sick leave would be required. Unfortunately all those policies are deeply unpopular so a politician proposing such policies would never have any backing – at least not by the ones currently in charge.
    But I suppose ‘taxing the rich’ is another ones of those TINAs, no other option like the ones above are viable options….

    Reply
    1. Adam Eran

      As someone who had a relative in the philanthropy game, and met a lot of wealthy people, I can tell you he said “90% of these guys were born on third base, but they all want to act like they hit a triple.”

      Reply
  5. TiPi

    Reeves as Chancellor has followed exactly the same macroeconomic policies as the Tories. This Labour government are nowhere near the centre left.

    Reply
  6. Tim N

    Just ask any of these up and coming Dems, and the established ones, like Schumer, where they stand on the US/Israeli genocide, and that’s all you need to do to get a very good read on where the Party is headed. The Dem Party, like the Republican Party, cannot be reformed, or changed even at the edges into something worth supporting. After asking the Genocide question, ask them where they stand on Universal Single Payer, or Med4All. That’s another moral catastrophe they are responsible for, and it’s revolting to see their main media outlet, the NY Times, actually declaring that this phony bugget ceiling fight is about “affordable” “health care.” This is all they have: posturing, and keeping their fingers crossed that the Genocide will fade away and millions of people losing Medicare or health insurance beause the costs double can somehow get by without it.

    Reply
    1. motorslug

      The truth is the mainstream dems are (as Basel points out) since Clinton lock, stock and smoking barrels ‘in on it’. And since, as Chomsky says, the reps are ‘the most dangerous organization in human history’ it is really just a game of bad cop/psycho cop.
      I also fear Labour has gone that way after smearing/eliminating Corbyn.

      Reply
  7. Tedder

    MMT, a theory describing modern fiat money (Michael Hudson, Stephanie Kelton, et al) claims that the State creates money to provision itself (which includes social spending to prevent society from collapsing). That money then circulates through the economy doing work. Finally, in a circular fashion, money is disposed of by taxation. The State, of course, doesn’t tax away all of it so as to keep the economy running. This maxim implies that if the state does not tax sufficiently, money will build up in the economy and according to the laws of Chaos, will accumulate in concentrated hands, and this is precisely what we see with our vast income inequality (and asset inequality).
    The current economic system was begun with the Neoclassical Economics to the late 19th century, which were theories very much opposed to Marxists and other socialists and in favor of the owners. One of the Neoclassical Economic tenets that has done much harm to the tax system was “All income is unearned income.” This notion destroyed efforts of the socialists to tax rental income, including financial rent, which they wanted to tax away. In short, NeoClassical Economics gave birth to Neoliberalism, and this continues to be a false economic philosophy dedicated to preserving wealth and privilege of the owning class.

    Reply
  8. David in Friday Harbor

    Basel Musharbash’s takedown of Clinton is on point but leaves out the most sinister aspect of Clintonism: their takeover of the DNC after Obama’s OFA literally bankrupted it.

    The Democratic National Committee is no longer a political party in any generally understood sense of the word but is now simply a private grifting machine controlled by half a dozen Clinton adjacent political operatives who are able to limit Democratic ballot access to TINA candidates.

    This is what destroyed democracy in America.

    Reply
    1. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

      I’m just me and my ignorance is vast; the rest of the NC team knows mountains and oceans of things that I don’t.

      Reply
  9. Lefty Godot

    So how hard is it to say that no one should be worth more than $99,999,999.99, and if your assets inflate in value to over that (or your other income pushes you over) then you have to sell some off and hand Uncle Sam the proceeds to get back below that? I have a hard time thinking anyone would be sympathetic to a wealthy jerk complaining about having to do that. You can’t be happy with 99 million, it has to be 100 million or more? Find another country to live in and by the way we’ll take a 50% exit tax on your way out the door. We have no trouble insisting that Medicaid recipients can’t have more than some pitifully low amount of money in their bank accounts or we’ll cut off their benefits. Why is it so hard (ignoring bribery of our legislators and judges) to insist that the wealthy can’t go over a certain upper limit? I think that was one of the planks in Huey Long’s populist platform way back when. Should be a no-brainer for an aspiring Left candidate.

    Reply
  10. NotThePilot

    I didn’t get around to replying earlier today, but I think TINA is actually a much deeper issue than just the mainstream parties or the issue of inequality. It’s the same thread running through most of the West’s current decay: the non-response to global warning, the current big war and extreme gaslighting as propaganda (in all of its theaters), mass shootings, COVID, etc.

    And to let my weird mystic side out, I think it’s ultimately a spiritual sickness that will only end with a somewhat spiritual cure. It’s hard not to slip into theological terms. TINA is the final and ultimate Freudian denial of a dying order that insists on its own immortality; it doesn’t deny only one or even many specific facts, but claims for itself absolute and timeless truth. Notice that not everyone that lives under this system, nor everyone that profits by it, preaches TINA. It is precisely those that have put their faith in it, as the basis of all their hopes, and the ultimate justification for their choices.

    From this POV though, I think it’s suddenly possible to diagnose why so much opposition to this system fails. It’s not enough to say that TINA is untrue, or this system is bad, but one must truly let go of its very definitions of things, its values and its episteme. It’s very ironic, but both Jesus and Nietzsche can lead you to the same conclusion on this one. As the Nazarene may put it, the world to come belongs to those who are dead to this one, or as the Bavarian would, he who would create new values must become a destroyer of old ones. More practically & to the point, one must free even one’s emotions and moods from the old representations.

    One more point, as I’ve said in a very different context on this site before: the kids today are definitely not alright, but they “too have weapons” as Kafka put it, and they are trying. It still may not be quite normal, but take the degree that Existentialist / Absurdist ideas have become mainstream, especially among young people even outside of formal education, as a sign. The elites and the current parties, even if they rage against the system, still care what it thinks of them in its daily manifestations (status, creature comforts, relationships, etc.) 90% of the populace may be disgusted with the current system now, but TINA only really starts crumbling once a critical mass become disgusted on their own terms.

    Reply
    1. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

      I think you’re onto several things here. I also think critical mass is just a few black swans away.

      Reply
  11. Victor Sciamarelli

    Bear in mind, Americans admire rich people. This doesn’t mean you can’t tax the rich but that you need to be clear what you’re talking about.
    Americans admire, rather than begrudge, those individuals who are associated with innovation, hard work, and creating new companies; the late Steve Jobs is one example.
    Americans do not admire those individuals associated with inherited wealth and/or have done little besides walking into and taking over the family business.
    Moreover, they do not admire those people associated with what they view a useless or parasitic financial activity like private equity and hedge funds and unfair activity like the carried interest trade and stock buybacks.
    As long as you stay on the side of hard work, creating jobs, and supporting innovation, coming up with a popular plan to tax the largely unearned wealth should be easy.

    Reply
    1. Donaldo

      Americans admire salesmen pretending to be something else, the late Steve Jobs is one example. They do not admire the other Steve.

      Reply

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