Information on Selected Issues
II will occasionally post information on selected issues, in case you find the information useful.
On this page I will offer a combination of snippets of information and links to such. Some of the links are to other websites; some are to things I’ve posted on this website.
Inequalities in Income and Wealth
From the news source Lever:
At least 88 major corporations paid $0 in U.S. federal income taxes for 2025, despite racking up billions of dollars in collective U.S. income. That includes billionaire Elon Musk’s electric vehicle maker Tesla, which made $5.7 billion in U.S. income in 2025; confirmed ticketing monopoly Live Nation Entertainment, which took in almost $98 million; materials manufacturer 3M, which brought in $1.8 billion; and the Trump-allied surveillance juggernaut Palantir, which made roughly $1.6 billion (including from some particularly lucrative taxpayer-funded U.S. government contracts).
Economist Gabriel Zucman, in a Substack post in January 2026, calculated that as of November 2025, the top one hundred thousandth of Americans possessed about 12 percent of all national wealth:
Is there a problem with Non-Citizens Voting?
Here is a link to a summary of some research.
Corruption in the Trump Administration
Experts on autocracies observe that often it is the widespread perception of corruption that can finally bring down authoritarian leaders.
Mona Charen, a conservative columnist who is very much opposed to Trump, has written at least two excellent articles about the massive corruption of Trump and his friends and family in The Atlantic. She argues that it may finally be catching up with him among the U.S. electorate.
Here is a link to her most recent piece, titled “How Corrupt is Trump? Here Are the Numbers” (you don’t need a subscription for this).
As of this writing (end of May 2026), many observers believe that the most brazen corruption occurred recently:
- The Trump team’s effort to set up a slush fund that would pay out money to people convicted of crimes committed during the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Here is an article describing that action.