A Vaccine to Prevent Poverty

Vaccines work. They protect us—individually and collectively. They stop disease and slow its spread. But when it comes to protecting our economy and democracy, we often ignore the most effective vaccine we have: a fair system of progressive taxation.

Taxation—particularly graduated income tax, where the wealthy pay a higher share—isn’t just about fairness or funding public services. It’s a kind of social immunization. A well-designed tax system can prevent our democracy from being infected by oligarchy, stop pollution from festering unchecked, and keep poverty from becoming endemic.

Like any good vaccine, it doesn’t just treat symptoms. It attacks root causes. And perhaps the most profound disease it can help cure is the one so many Americans have been taught to see as inevitable: poverty.

Poverty Is Not Inevitable, it’s a Bug in the System

In his book Poverty, by America, sociologist Matthew Desmond makes a stunning observation: if wealthy individuals and corporations simply paid the taxes they already owe, the U.S. could raise an additional $1 trillion a year. That’s not a hypothetical number—it’s based on IRS data and confirmed by other economic studies.

With that $1 trillion, Desmond writes, we could eliminate poverty in America.

Let that sink in.

Every child going hungry. Every parent choosing between rent and medicine. Every student crushed by debt. Every unhoused person on a sidewalk. All of it could be prevented—not by some utopian dream, but by enforcing our own tax code.

So why don’t we?

Because over time, a tiny sliver of the ultra-wealthy and corporations have opted out of the social contract with lobbying, loopholes, offshore accounts, and relentless pressure on lawmakers.

What Taxes Really Do

Progressive taxation is based on a simple idea: those who have more should contribute more. It’s not punitive. It’s proportional.

Wealth doesn’t arise in a vacuum. It is built on the labor, consumption, and infrastructure sustained by everyone else. The billionaire’s fortune depends on workers to produce goods, customers to buy them, truckers to move them, engineers to maintain the systems, and teachers to educate the next generation. Their empires are scaffolded by public investments—roads, patents, courts, clean water, electrical grids—all paid for by collective effort.

Yet when it comes time to give back, the wealthiest often disappear into a maze of loopholes and offshore shelters. They extract from the system but resist replenishing it.

A healthy democracy requires the opposite: those who have gained the most must also contribute the most, because their wealth is a product of public scaffolding—not just private genius.

Unchecked wealth is like a virus in a democracy. It spreads quickly, evades defenses, and mutates into more dangerous forms—plutocracy, authoritarianism, and corruption. Progressive taxes act as a check on concentrated power.

Taxation, then, is not just revenue collection. It builds resilience in a society by preventing a few people or corporations from hoarding so much power that they can bend laws, escape consequences, and remake the world in their image.

Without the Vaccine

We are now living with the consequence of a failed immunization campaign.

Letting billionaires opt out of taxation is like letting a few people skip their shots during an outbreak. It weakens the whole system.

And it's about to get worse.

The tax cuts now being crafted in Congress—what Trump proudly called the "big, beautiful tax cut" on the campaign trail—will further erode our collective immunity against poverty and oligarchy. These cuts disproportionately benefit the ultra-wealthy and large corporations, and if extended, they would drain trillions from public resources while accelerating inequality.

When the rich hoard unchecked wealth, justice falters, regulations collapse and democracy begins to rot.

Take Donald Trump. For decades, he dodged taxes, stiffed contractors and buried allegations of sexual misconduct. His wealth didn’t just buy him gold-plated toilets—it bought impunity. Same with Harvey Weinstein, who used money and lawyers to silence victims and delay justice.

These aren’t outliers. They’re warnings. When money shields wrongdoing long enough, it becomes a system.

Now we’re watching billionaires buy media platforms, sway elections, and rewrite legislation. Fossil fuel moguls bankroll climate denial. Libertarian tycoons chip away at civil rights. This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s the logical outcome of a tax system that lets wealth go unchecked.

And it’s not just about individuals. Corporate wealth, too, has grown immune to accountability.

Big Oil lobbies against climate action. Big Pharma sets few can afford. The chemical industry delays regulation that could protect children’s brains.

This is what happens when regulation is no longer written by governments—but by the industries they are supposed to regulate.

A stronger tax system won’t fix everything. But it can rebalance the immune system of democracy. It can restore public oversight and slow the spread of corporate dominance.

Why We Stopped Vaccinating

The U.S. once had a robust tax “immune system.” From the 1940s to the early 1980s, the top marginal income tax rate hovered around 70%—sometimes higher.

During that time, we saw the birth of the middle class, massive investment in public education, the building of highways, and the creation of program that cut elderly poverty.

Then came the Reagan era. Taxes on the wealthy were slashed, sold as “trickle-down economics.” We were told that if the rich paid less, we’d all benefit.

What happened instead?

Wages stagnated. Inequality exploded. Billionaires multiplied. The immune system collapsed.

Today, the top income tax rate is less than half what it was mid-century. Capital gains—the primary source of income for the ultra-wealthy—was taxed even less. Corporations now pay a smaller share of federal revenue than at any time in the past century.

Meanwhile, lobbyists have gutted the IRS, making it harder to audit the wealthy than the working poor. Attempts to fix the system is met with cries of “class warfare.”

But the real war being waged is not the poor against the rich. It’s the rich against democracy.

A Vaccine Against Oligarchy

We can think of progressive taxation as a three-dose vaccine.

1. Taxation gives us the funds to meet basic human needs—housing, food, healthcare, education, and a dignified life.

2. By redistributing wealth, it levels the playing field and allows everyone—not just those born rich—to participate fully in society.

3. It stops the mutation of democracy into oligarchy by weakening the concentration of wealth that breeds corruption, monopolies, and authoritarianism.

Economist Thomas Piketty argues not just for progressive income tax, but also wealth taxes and inheritance taxes. Without them, wealth calcifies into dynasties. Dynasties build class barriers. And those barriers erode democracy.

Franklin D. Roosevelt saw this clearly. “The liberty of a democracy,” he said in 1935, “is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself.”

That point is no longer on the horizon. It’s here.

Policy as Prevention

The good news? Poverty isn’t inevitable. It is not a character flaw. It is not the natural order. Poverty is the result of bad policy. And policy can change.

Desmond calls it straight: “Poverty persists in America because we allow it to.”

We tolerate tax evasion. We underfund schools and housing. We shrink public services. And call it freedom.

But what if we thought of freedom differently?

What if freedom meant freedom from hunger, not just taxes? What if it meant freedom to live with dignity, not just to accumulate billions?

Progressive taxation doesn’t inhibit success. It makes widespread success possible for more people. It gives every child—not just the privileged few—a shot at a healthy, fulfilling life.

That’s what a vaccine does. It protects the vulnerable. It strengthens the whole. It is herd immunity against poverty and oligarchy.