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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.

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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.
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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.
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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.

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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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One comment

  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 ↓

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