By now we know that charity, generosity and compassion are virtues that the US president doesn’t seem to have even in trace amounts

Many years ago, in the crowded corridor of a Manhattan hotel, I was surprised to find myself standing face-to-face with Imelda Marcos, then the first lady of the Philippines. At that time, she was said to possess 3,000 pairs of shoes.

I desperately longed to ask the wife of the dictatorial president, Ferdinand Marcos, why anyone could need all those shoes. And more importantly, why would someone spend so much of her country’s wealth on stiletto heels when so many citizens were so desperately poor? But natural reticence, good manners or simply fear prevailed, and I walked away.

US tax policy deprives the government of revenue and overwhelmingly serves the interests of the rich

After the House passed its version of Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) last year – the one that paired a $5tn-plus tax cut with $1tn-plus of cuts from food stamps and Medicaid – the House speaker, Mike Johnson, explained that “this is not giving tax cuts to the millionaires”. The beneficiaries, he said, were “small business owners” that “provide the jobs in every community in America”.

Johnson was playing to the myth of the modest, sturdy Main Street job creator. It is an appealing story. It’s also the most consequential piece of BS distorting American policy that deprives the government of tax revenue, stunts American capitalism, twists regulations, thwarts competition and overwhelmingly serves millionaires’ interests.

Tech billionaire’s $158.3bn deal an outlier in report showing widening gap of CEO to worker pay at top companies

Elon Musk received over 2.5m times as much compensation at Tesla as the company’s average worker, according to a new report on the growing gap between top corporate executives and their workers.

Musk’s $158.3bn pay deal was an outlier but came as the gap between CEO and worker pay continued to grow. Excluding Musk, last year the average ratio of CEO to worker pay for the top S&P 500 companies was 312 to 1, up from a 285:1 ratio in 2024. With Musk, the average pay ratio was 5,387:1, according to the executive pay watch report released this week by the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of labor unions in the US.