America's Second Estate

Should we fix why you pay more in taxes than a millionaire?

by Alvin Blackshear | Historian & Researcher

Before the French Revolution, the “Second Estate” was the nobility, a class defined by inherited privilege. Whether modern America has built something similar is a serious question, and it begins with how we tax each citizen to pay for common goods and needs.

Heather Cox Richardson frames American history as a contest between democracy and oligarchy, in which concentrated economic power repeatedly seeks to entrench itself politically. Her framework is historical, not a tax proposal, but it points to a practical issue: the tax system treats income and wealth very differently. Income, mostly wages, is taxed as earned. Wealth, mostly appreciating assets, can grow for decades untaxed, may be borrowed against, and at death generally passes to heirs with a reset cost basis, so that unrealized gains are never taxed.

Law professor Ray Madoff makes a version of this argument in The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy (University of Chicago Press, 2025). She contends that tax rules, including those governing trusts and charitable vehicles such as donor-advised funds, consolidate wealth across generations and create two tracks, one for earners and one for owners. Defenders of current tax rules respond that capital formation, charitable giving and family businesses are worth protecting and that tax avoidance can be addressed more narrowly. But this type of tax policy is not progressive or equitable. Lower-income individuals end up paying a larger share of their total income in taxes than wealthy individuals (such as through sales taxes, flat excise taxes, or capped payroll taxes). Currently, the rules favor the accumulation of wealth and inevitably it is taxed well below other forms of earned income.

Robert Putnam links the outcome to the destruction of our social cohesion. The Upswing ties rising inequality to weakening trust, shrinking mobility and declining shared institutions. If advantage compounds across generations, the promise of opportunity evaporates.

Three suggested reforms deserve a deeper examination.

An annual wealth tax would attempt to address the imbalance by taxing the ownership of substantial net wealth, rather than relying exclusively on taxes imposed when income is earned, investments are sold, or estates are transferred. An annual wealth tax could tax unrealized holdings directly but faces hard valuation problems for private businesses and art, evasion through relocation or restructuring, and constitutional questions.

Taxing gains at death (ending basis step-up or treating death as a realization event) targets the largest untaxed gains using existing income-tax concepts. Concerns include liquidity for heirs and farms or family firms, which design features such as deferral or payment plans can soften.

Inheritance or estate-tax reform changes who pays and how much: lowering exemptions, closing trust loopholes, or taxing recipients rather than estates. The federal exemption was raised sharply for 2026, so far fewer estates owe tax. Avoidance through trusts and valuation discounts is the central enforcement challenge.

Each option involves tradeoffs among revenue, administrability, economic effects and fairness, and each risks expanding government’s reach into private finances, a tension this series will keep in view.

The conclusion extends beyond budgets. Tax fairness affects democratic legitimacy: citizens who believe the rules favor an insulated class may stop believing in the rules. The wealthiest 1% of American households control approximately 32% of the nation's household wealth, according to Federal Reserve data. Within this extraordinarily privileged group, an even smaller concentration of ultra-wealthy individuals possesses enormous economic resources and political influence.

The fundamental question is whether America's tax system can effectively reach these vast concentrations of private wealth, or whether the nation's wealthiest citizens will continue to enjoy advantages that place much of their accumulated fortunes beyond meaningful taxation. Should American tax policy prevent the calcification of a permanent, hereditary economic aristocracy, a Second Estate?

Sources:

Robert D. Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett, The Upswing (Simon & Schuster, 2020).
Heather Cox Richardson, How the South Won the Civil War (Oxford, 2020).
Ray Madoff, The Second Estate (University of Chicago Press, 2025).

Reimagining the American Republic

by Alvin Blackshear | Historian & Researcher

On July 4, 2026, the United States turned 250. The anniversary invites celebration, but it also invites an audit: how far is the republic from its founding promises, and why does repair seem so hard?

In We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution (2025), author Jill Lepore, argues that the framers never meant the Constitution to sit preserved under glass. They expected it to be amended, and Article V was the door they left open. Her Amendments Project catalogs more than 11,000 amendments proposed in Congress between 1789 and 2022, nearly all of which failed, and the Constitution has not been meaningfully amended since 1971. Lepore also reminds readers that the original “We the People” excluded women, enslaved people, Indigenous nations and many men without property.

Professor Henry Louis Gates’ The Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (2019) traces Reconstruction’s brief promise of citizenship and equality and the organized backlash that dismantled it. Professor Eddie Glaude’s Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own (2020) argues that national renewal requires abandoning comforting myths of innocence and facing what the country has actually done. Neither tells a story of inevitable decline, both show that rights won on paper must be defended in practice.

In How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America (2020), Heather Cox Richardson contends that an oligarchic impulse, concentrated wealth claiming liberty for itself while limiting others’, survived military defeat and kept reshaping American politics. Current data are at least consistent with her concern. The Federal Reserve’s Distributional Financial Accounts show the top 1% holding about 31.7% of household net worth, and roughly half of all corporate equities and mutual fund shares in the third quarter of 2025 (Fed via FRED). Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett’s The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again (2020) documents a long rise in cooperation and shared purpose in the early twentieth century and a decline since the 1960s across the economy, politics, society and culture. Civic erosion matters because laws are only as strong as the citizens willing to insist on them.

The Fifth Risk (2018) by Michael Lewis argued that the federal government performs quiet, essential work whose failure goes unnoticed until it is catastrophic. His new book, Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State (2026), follows civil servants who resisted DOGE mandates in 2025. However many of those bureaucrats have been removed and replaced with loyalists, whose only agenda is to gut the very mandates that protect Americans from corporate abuse and exploitation.

In a series of seven articles, I hope to move from diagnosis to proposals by examining: oligarchy and taxation, public office and private wealth, political influence, equality of opportunity, environmental stewardship, and finally a possible new compact. One question organizes it. Do America’s central problems reflect constitutional design, or failures of political will and enforcement? The honest answer may be both. The sorting matters, because design flaws call for amendment, while failures of will demand something harder: citizens who insist that laws mean what they say and hold elected officials accountable under the rule of law.

Sources:

Jill Lepore, These Truths (W.W. Norton, 2018) and We the People (Liveright,2025).
Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again (Crown, 2020) and America: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries (Crown, 2026).
Henry Louis Gates Jr., Stony the Road (Penguin, 2019).
Robert D. Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett, The Upswing (Simon & Schuster, 2020).
Heather Cox Richardson, How the South Won the Civil War (Oxford, 2020).
Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk (W.W. Norton, 2018) and Blockers (W.W. Norton, 2026).
Ray Madoff, The Second Estate (University of Chicago Press, 2025).

 

The Ballad of the Fugitive William Parker: A True Tale of Love, Murder, Treason, and Ordinary Folks Who Saved America - REVIEW

by Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz

The year, 1851. The place, a Quaker farming community turned Underground Railroad stronghold, where a Maryland enslaver had journeyed in pursuit of four men who’d fled his plantation years before. In a few hours, he’d be dead…and twenty-seven men from the village of Christiana would be rounded up and put on trial. Not for his murder, but for treason—for waging war against the United States, at a time when it was a crime against the government to obstruct an enslaver looking to reclaim his “property.”

This is story of what happened in Christiana that September morning—and in the ensuing “trial of the century,” which saw the president himself advise the prosecution on strategy and a sitting congressman serve as lead attorney for the defense. But The Ballad of the Fugitive William Parker is also a much larger tale, one spanning decades, following a whole startlingly diverse community of abolitionists in their fight to convince their fellow Americans of the subversive idea that now found itself on trial: that the nation ought to live up the ideals it was founded on, and respect all men as equals.

It’s a story that whisks readers from the quiet farmlands of Lancaster County—where a self-emancipated man named William Parker, whom legend had it bullets could not kill, rallied his neighbors to ride out each night to battle the slavecatchers who stalked their countryside—to Philadelphia’s genteel Society Hill, where socialite Harriet Forten Purvis had the ear of the mayor (and a cellar filled with fugitives). It’s stylish, propulsive, intimately human tale of bravery, ingenuity, and hope—and of ordinary people with little in common who came together to stand against injustice…and won.

Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz is the New York Times bestselling author of Dr. Mütter’s Marvels, as well as eight collections of poetry. A seventh generation Pennsylvanian, she lives in Philadelphia with her husband, the novelist Ernest Cline, and their children.

Simon & Schuster
ISBN-13:‎ 978-1668035931

Nothing to My Name: A Novel - REVIEW

by Kangkang Li Kovacs

Nothing to My Name chronicles the intertwined fates of three generations of Chinese women: Ah Xue, Mimosa, and Fei. The Grandmother, Ah Xue, witnesses the rise of the Communist Revolution while earning a meager living combing the hair of the few wealthy ladies in her small fishing village. Mimosa, the Mother, grows up in the shadow of her parents’ struggles as the growing tension of the Cultural Revolution threatens to pull their family apart. And Fei Fei, the Daughter, brought up as a “boy” by her activist father, grapples with gender identity in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Awash in the tides of societal upheaval, Ah Xue, Mimosa, and Fei Fei are all driven by the instinct to survive, weathering hardship that splinters the boundary between the personal and the political. For readers of sweeping upmarket book club fiction like Pachinko and Homegoing, Nothing to My Name is a braided history of suffering and dignity, of loss and reckoning, and of the unexpected joy that sustains family bonds.

Kangkang Li Kovacs grew up in Nanchang, China, and came to the United States for her graduate studies. After earning a PhD in nuclear physics at the University of Virginia and teaching math and physics at UC Santa Barbara, Kangkang decided to pursue her passion for writing. Kangkang received her MFA at the College of Charleston. Her writing has been published in Jellyfish Review and swamp pink literary magazine, among other outlets. Nothing to My Name is her first novel.

Viking
ISBN-13:‎ 978-0593835364

The Legacy of Lynching - REVIEW

by Rasul A. Mowatt

The Legacy of Lynching provides a critical social theory of the history of lynching as a pedagogy of social and political violence, power, and control (to identify-find-kill-display the body of the racial Other). The theory emphasizes the final stage of display as what truly constitutes a lynching and differentiates it from other forms of violence (race riots, recreational murder, racial hunting, bombings, and disappearances) and challenges other definitions of lynching (hanging, mob violence, extra-judicial, and racial terror). The book examines the socio-historical record of lynching in the United States, with additional attention to lynching activity and imagery of Australia, Britain, France, Germany, and India, to surface the nature of lynching as a public spectacle with important critical social and political dimensions that enact power in visible ways across racialized bodies, peoples, and spaces.

Lynching, in this book, is presented not just as a historical phenomenon or as a set of artifacts (picture postcards, shreds of clothing, pieces of rope, and other ephemeral), but also as a cultural production of State power and control that shapes social and political institutions, public spaces, and social memory. This socio-historical record of lynching, as such, reveals not only the mechanisms of previous instantiations of racialized power schemas (pogroms, ethnic cleansing, and genocide) but also the ongoing encoding of control and colonization of public life. Through a thorough re-reading and reworking of the history of lynching and its ongoing, contemporary afterlife, the book reconceptualizes the nature and ramifications of the phenomenon in various forms of media like film, television, social media platforms, gaming, graphic novels, fictional novellas, and even fashion. As such, it will be an important resource for podcasters, journalists, students, instructors, researchers, and readers in sociology, social theory, political sociology, historical sociology, American history and American studies, cultural studies, Race and ethnicity studies, and geography.

Rasul A. Mowatt is Professor and Researcher who studies State violence and the geographies of Race for the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at North Carolina State’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences, USA. Before joining NC State, Rasul served on Indiana University’s faculty in the Departments of American Studies and Geography for 17 years and previously taught at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of The Geographies of Threat and the Production of Violence (2021), co-author of Laundering Black Rage: The Washing of Black Death, People, Property, and Profits (2024) and The City of Hip-Hop: New York, the Bronx, and a Peace Meeting (2025).

Routledge
ISBN-13:‎ 978-1041267577

The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times - REVIEW

by Michelle Obama

There may be no tidy solutions or pithy answers to life’s big challenges, but Michelle Obama believes that we can all locate and lean on a set of tools to help us better navigate change and remain steady within flux. In The Light We Carry, she opens a frank and honest dialogue with readers, considering the questions many of us wrestle with: How do we build enduring and honest relationships? How can we discover strength and community inside our differences? What tools do we use to address feelings of self-doubt or helplessness? What do we do when it all starts to feel like too much?

Michelle Obama offers readers a series of fresh stories and insightful reflections on change, challenge, and power, including her belief that when we light up for others, we can illuminate the richness and potential of the world around us, discovering deeper truths and new pathways for progress. Drawing from her experiences as a mother, daughter, spouse, friend, and First Lady, she shares the habits and principles she has developed to successfully adapt to change and overcome various obstacles—the earned wisdom that helps her continue to “become.” She details her most valuable practices, like “starting kind,” “going high,” and assembling a “kitchen table” of trusted friends and mentors. With trademark humor, candor, and compassion, she also explores issues connected to race, gender, and visibility, encouraging readers to work through fear, find strength in community, and live with boldness.

“When we are able to recognize our own light, we become empowered to use it,” writes Michelle Obama. A rewarding blend of powerful stories and profound advice that will ignite conversation, The Light We Carry inspires readers to examine their own lives, identify their sources of gladness, and connect meaningfully in a turbulent world.

Michelle Obama served as First Lady of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School, Mrs. Obama started her career as an attorney at the Chicago law firm Sidley & Austin, where she met her future husband, Barack Obama. She later worked in the Chicago mayor’s office, at the University of Chicago, and at the University of Chicago Medical Center. Mrs. Obama also founded the Chicago chapter of Public Allies, an organization that prepares young people for careers in public service. She is the author of the #1 global bestseller Becoming and the #1 national bestseller American Grown. The Obamas currently live in Washington, D.C., and have two daughters, Malia and Sasha.

Crown
ISBN-13: 978-0593237489

The Staircase Shuffle - REVIEW

by Jon Woodson

Melvin Tolson wanted nothing but a master's degree when he got to Harlem. It turned out that the Harlem Renaissance was nothing more than a mask. Against his will he was drawn into events that promised to determine the course of world history. What choice did he have but to do the will of the Inner Circle?

Jon Woodson is a creative writer and independent scholar living in Providence, RI. He published Summer Games, a novel in 2016 and Endowed, a comic novel in 2012. He is the author of five critical studies: The Esoteric Mission of Zora Neale Hurston (2016), Oragean Modernism: a lost literary movement, 1924-1953 (2013); Anthems, Sonnets, and Chants: Recovering the African American Poetry of the 1930s (2011); To Make a New Race: Gurdjieff, Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance (1999); and A Study of Catch-22: Going Around Twice (2001).

His essays have appeared in Flashpoint, Obsidian II, African American Review, The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry, The Dictionary of Literary Biography, Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, The Harlem Renaissance: a Gale Critical Companion, and The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing. Woodson has taught on the faculties of Howard University, Lincoln University, George Mason University, Towson University, the University of Rhode Island, and as a Fulbright lecturer in American studies at two Hungarian universities, ELTE and the University of Pecs. He is the author of three poetry chapbooks.

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8338419281

What Would It Take to Fix Social Security? Part 3

 

by Alvin Blackshear  |  Historian & Researcher

The first article in this series measured a problem, a 75-year shortfall of 4.42 percent of taxable payroll. The second article laid out ten tools and showed that each one hands the cost to someone different. This final article assembles the tools into packages and lets the arithmetic say what each package asks of whom.

Defining solved

The usual yardstick is a 75-year actuarial balance of zero. The Social Security actuaries draw a finer line. Sustainable solvency requires that trust fund assets stay positive throughout the period and stop falling as a share of annual cost by its end. A package that merely touches zero could still leave reserves sliding toward depletion just beyond the horizon, which would simply hand the problem to the next generation.

A caution about what follows. These packages are illustrative. Each stacks stand-alone scores from the Chief Actuary's 2026 provisions booklet, and the actuaries warn that provisions overlap, so real combined results would differ. None is presented as a verified solution, and each would need formal scoring. All three aim at roughly the same financial target so the comparison stays fair, and each discloses its tax increases, its benefit reductions and its one enhancement, a stronger minimum benefit.

Package	Components and stand-alone score	Sum
A Revenue-heavy	Eliminate taxable maximum (about 50%), raise rate 2.4 points by 2053 (40%), chained CPI-W COLA (15%), minimum benefit (minus 3%)	about 102%
B Benefit-heavy	Retirement age to 69 (25%), price indexing at 40th percentile (33%), COLA cut half point (24%), rate up one point by 2037 (20%), minimum benefit (minus 3%)	about 99%
C Mixed	Taxable maximum to 90% (24%), rate up one point (20%), price indexing at median (27%), retirement age to 68 (13%), chained CPI-W COLA (15%), minimum benefit (minus 3%)	about 96%

What the packages reveal

Package A shows how much revenue the problem demands. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget puts full elimination of the taxable maximum near half the shortfall, so even a package leaning on high earners needs a sustained rate increase on everyone else, plus a small benefit adjustment. Package B makes visible what the phrase entitlement reform tends to hide, which is that later retirement, slower initial benefits and a smaller cost-of-living adjustment must all stack together to reach the same destination. Package C spreads the load across several groups without claiming to be the moderate choice. It lands a few points short, a useful reminder that real packages need fine tuning.

A fourth variant protects everyone already retired or close to it. The CRFB finds that changes aimed only at new beneficiaries would have required a 30 percent cut if enacted today, compared with 25 percent for all beneficiaries, and by 2034 would fall short even if new benefits were eliminated entirely. Sparing the old shifts the burden to the young, in steeper form.

Three people, one reform

Consider a 70-year-old, a 50-year-old and a 25-year-old. The 70-year-old faces only the cost-of-living change, since the retirement-age and formula provisions apply to later cohorts and payroll rates apply to workers. The 50-year-old, who reaches 62 in 2038, pays higher rates for years, meets the new retirement age and formula, and then absorbs the COLA. The 25-year-old experiences every provision for decades. Employers, meanwhile, share every rate increase, since the payroll tax is split evenly. Identical legislation, three different reforms. The same holds across earnings, since high earners bear the tax side while lower earners are shielded by the price-indexing design and the minimum benefit.

The clock is ticking

Timing is arithmetic, not politics. The CRFB estimates that acting today requires a 4.25 point payroll tax increase or a 25 percent benefit cut, while waiting until 2034 raises the required change by about 15 percent. Fewer people left to share an adjustment, and less time to phase it in, mean a larger adjustment for those who remain. Each year of delay shrinks the group that can be asked to contribute and the window in which anyone can plan around the change.

The question that remains

My first article found a financing problem. The second article showed that many tools towards a solution exist. This final article shows that sufficient combinations can be built, yet each allocates costs and protections differently. The unresolved question is how Americans want those costs divided among workers, employers, retirees, higher and lower earners, and generations not yet born.

Where the PROMISE Act fits

That is the question the PROMISE Act, S. 4979, is designed to force. Senator Dick Durbin introduced it on July 14 with bipartisan cosponsors, among them Delaware's Senator Chris Coons. The bill chooses nothing from this series. It would direct the Social Security Advisory Board to develop recommendations and legislative language capable of paying full scheduled benefits for at least 50 years, then move the result through Congress on an expedited track. Supporters, including the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, see a way past years of delay. AARP opposes the bill, citing limited scrutiny, amendment and lack of debate. Notably, its 50-year horizon is shorter than the 75-year window commonly used. Delaware readers might put the series' questions to Senator Coons directly. Who pays, who is protected, and when?

Sources

SSA Office of the Chief Actuary, Summary of Provisions (2026 Trustees basis)
https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/solvency/provisions/summary.html

CRFB, Analysis of the 2026 Trustees Report (June 9)
https://www.crfb.org/papers/analysis-2026-social-security-trustees-report

S. 4979 (govinfo.gov)
https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/CRI-2026/CRI-2026-PROTECTING-RETIREMENT-OPPORTUNIT-CA7282

AARP policy statements
https://www.aarp.org/social-security/aarp-policy
https://www.aarp.org/social-security/trust-fund-report-2026
https://action.aarp.org/node/21685

Can Social Security be fixed? Part 2

 

Ten Ways to Fix Social Security and Who Pays for Each

By Alvin Blackshear  |  Historian & Researcher

The first article in this series established that Social Security has a financing problem. What it left open is the question beneath every proposal, which is who should bear the cost across generations and income groups. No single fix exists. Each option adjusts some mix of revenue, benefits, eligibility and timing. So this article puts ten concrete options through the same test, using estimates from the Social Security Administration's Office of the Chief Actuary built on the 2026 Trustees projection, where the 75-year shortfall equals 4.42 percent of taxable payroll. The test is simple. How much of that shortfall does each option remove, and who feels it?

Option	Share of shortfall removed	Who bears it
Raise taxable maximum to cover 90% of earnings	about 24%	Higher earners
Tax earnings above $400,000	roughly 50%	Highest earners
Raise payroll rate one point by 2037	20%	Workers and employers
New dedicated revenue, such as investment income	varies, up to about 41%	Investors or taxpayers
Full retirement age to 68	11% to 13%	Younger cohorts
Full retirement age to 69	16% to 32%	Younger cohorts
Cut annual COLA half a point	24%	All beneficiaries
Progressive price indexing above the median	27%	Future higher earners
Stronger minimum benefit	adds 1% to 5% to shortfall	Trust fund
Change benefit taxation	from a 13% cost to a 19% gain	Retirees, by income

One caution before reading further. Each estimate stands alone against current law, and the actuaries warn that provisions overlap, so the figures cannot simply be added together.

The revenue side

Payroll tax reaches only the first $184,500 of earnings, which makes that ceiling the most discussed lever. Raising it until 90 percent of earnings are taxed recovers about a quarter of the shortfall. Taxing earnings above $400,000 recovers roughly half, depending on design, and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget puts full elimination of the ceiling near half as well. Those choices concentrate the cost on a small group of high earners. A rate increase spreads it across everyone who works. One extra point by 2037, shared by workers and employers, covers a fifth. Eliminating the entire shortfall through rate alone would take an immediate jump from 12.4 percent to 17.0 percent.

New revenue sources raise a subtler question. Investment income taxes or general revenue could help, yet they would loosen Social Security's identity as a benefit earned through one's own contributions. Whether that matters is a judgment rather than a calculation.

The benefit side

Benefit changes distribute cost across time. Raising the full retirement age can sound administrative, but the Congressional Budget Office found that moving it from 67 to 69 would leave everyone affected with less in lifetime benefits. The actuaries score a move to 68 at 11 to 13 percent of the shortfall and a move to 69 at 16 to 32 percent, depending on pace and design. Trimming the annual cost-of-living adjustment by half a point removes 24 percent, because small yearly reductions compound for as long as a retiree lives. Progressive price indexing, which slows the growth of initial benefits only above the median earner, removes 27 percent while sparing those at or below the median. The retirement-age and indexing changes reach mainly people not yet retired. The cost-of-living cut reaches everyone already collecting.

Options that run the other way

Two entries complicate the story. A stronger minimum benefit for long-career, low-wage workers widens the shortfall by 1 to 5 percent, a reminder that reform need not mean only subtraction. Changes to how benefits are taxed range from a 13 percent cost to a 19 percent gain, depending on direction.

The price of waiting

Delay quietly rewrites the table. The CRFB estimates that acting today would require a 4.25 point payroll tax increase or a 25 percent cut in all benefits. By 2034 the required change grows by about 15 percent. Every year of hesitation hands someone else a larger bill.

What comes next

No option here is free, and only an implausibly large rate increase solves the problem alone. The real work lies in combination. My third article assembles these pieces into complete packages, checks whether they truly restore solvency, and asks what each would mean for a 70-year-old, a 50-year-old and a 25-year-old.

Sources

SSA Office of the Chief Actuary, Summary of Provisions (2026 Trustees basis)
https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/solvency/provisions/summary.html

CRFB, Analysis of the 2026 Trustees Report (June 9)
https://www.crfb.org/papers/analysis-2026-social-security-trustees-report

Congressional Budget Office, Raising the Full Retirement Age for Social Security
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60516

 

Is Social Security Broken? Part 1

Social Security Has a Math Problem. Congress Has a Choice.

by Alvin Blackshear | Historian & Researcher

Few subjects in American politics are described with as much certainty and as little precision as the future of Social Security. One camp says the program is going bankrupt. Another says it is perfectly sound. Each holds a piece of the truth, and their collision has taught many people to tune out. This three-part series replaces slogans with arithmetic and returns throughout to a single question, which is how the burden of restoring Social Security's finances should be shared across generations and income groups. This first article defines the problem.

Begin with the 2026 Trustees report, released June 9. It projects that the retirement and survivors fund, known as OASI, will exhaust its reserves in the fourth quarter of 2032, one quarter sooner than last year's report projected. Continuing payroll taxes would then cover about 78 percent of scheduled benefits. Combining the retirement and disability funds, which would take an act of Congress, would stretch reserves to 2034, with 83 percent payable.

Social Security is not vanishing. Something more ordinary and, in its way, more troubling is approaching, a promise the program's own revenue can no longer fully keep. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates the result would be a 22 percent cut in retirement benefits.

How the machine works

The program runs on a simple loop. Workers and employers each pay 6.2 percent of wages up to $184,500 in 2026, and that money flows almost immediately to current beneficiaries. Surpluses build reserves, and deficits draw them down. The loop has been running in reverse for years, since the Trustees report that total cost has exceeded total income every year since 2021. Depletion is the day a fund's balance reaches zero. It marks the end of the cushion, and the program keeps operating afterward.

Why the gap widened

There is no single villain. The 75-year shortfall now stands at 4.42 percent of taxable payroll, up from 3.82 percent a year earlier and the largest in nearly half a century, according to the CRFB.

The Trustees point to three causes. They lowered their long-run fertility assumption from 1.90 to 1.75 births per woman, tightened their immigration assumptions, and accounted for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which reduces the income tax revenue flowing back to the trust funds. Fewer births and fewer arrivals mean fewer future workers. A Social Security forecast is a disciplined guess about people not yet born, and the guesses get revised as reality arrives.

What doing nothing means

Scheduled benefits are what the law promises. Payable benefits are what incoming revenue can support once reserves are gone, and under current law the second number governs. Consider an illustration rather than a forecast. A retiree scheduled to receive $2,000 a month would see roughly $1,560 at 78 percent, or about $1,660 at 83 percent. Inaction, in other words, is an automatic cut arriving on a schedule nobody voted for.

Why waiting makes it harder

Delay does not eliminate the adjustment. It changes the adjustment's size and decides who bears it. The Trustees themselves warn that if substantial action waits until depletion, significantly larger changes would fall on fewer years and fewer generations. A worker thirty years from retirement can adjust savings and plans. A worker three years out cannot. Timing quietly becomes a question about fairness between generations.

Congress and the shortcut

Lawmakers have lately been more willing to debate how to decide than what to decide. The PROMISE Act of 2026, S. 4979, introduced July 14 by Senator Dick Durbin, changes no benefits and no taxes. It directs the Social Security Advisory Board to gather public input and develop legislation providing at least 50 years of solvency, which Congress would consider under special procedures with restricted amendments and capped debate. The broader Fiscal Commission Act, S. 4012, would create a 16-member commission aimed at stabilizing the debt within 15 years and federal trust funds over 75. Delaware Senator Chris Coons cosponsors both. A mechanism for producing reform, it bears repeating, is not itself a reform.

Supporters argue that years of delay have made the choices harder and that a structured process could force a vote. AARP, an advocacy organization whose view should be read as such, opposes both bills and a third commission proposal, saying they hand significant work to commissions and then use expedited procedures with limited scrutiny, amendment and debate. Neither side claims Congress can ignore the shortfall. The dispute is over method, and over who will be in the room.

The question that remains

Whatever the process, the arithmetic leaves few levers. Congress can raise revenue, reduce scheduled benefits, find money elsewhere, or blend those approaches, and each distributes costs differently. Article 2 examines ten concrete options against identical tests, asking how much each solves, who pays and when. Article 3 combines them into complete packages and asks what fixing the program would take, including whether balancing the books over 75 years is enough. The numbers already establish that a problem exists. What remains is who should bear its cost.

Sources

2026 Social Security Trustees Report and summary (SSA, June 9)
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/TRSUM

Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, Analysis of the 2026 Trustees Report (June 9)
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60516

 S. 4979 and S. 4012 (govinfo.gov)
https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/BILLS-119s4012is/related
https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/CRI-2026/CRI-2026-PROTECTING-RETIREMENT-OPPORTUNIT-CA7282

AARP policy statements
https://www.aarp.org/social-security/aarp-policy
https://www.aarp.org/social-security/trust-fund-report-2026
https://action.aarp.org/node/21685

Lonnie Bunch Is Retiring - Look at What Is Happening to Black Leadership in Washington

The Smithsonian secretary says Trump did not drive him from office. But his departure raises a larger question about the administration's campaign against DEI, Black leadership and representative government.

by Alvin Blackshear  |  Historian & Researcher  <ablackshear@gmail.com>

On September 8, Lonnie G. Bunch III announced he will retire as secretary of the Smithsonian at the end of 2026, closing out nearly 38 years at the institution. Bunch became secretary in 2019, the first African American and first historian to hold the Smithsonian's highest office. Before that, he built the National Museum of African American History and Culture from almost nothing, guiding it to its 2016 opening on the National Mall.

His retirement lands at a remarkable moment. Since early 2025, the Trump administration has pushed to strip what it calls "improper ideology" from the Smithsonian, challenging exhibits on race, slavery and immigration, pressuring the institution's leadership, and, just days before Bunch's announcement, threatening to withdraw federal-agency support altogether. Bunch insists that pressure isn't why he's leaving. But he also says the moment is one "we're at a time when people are challenging that independence," and he has pledged to keep fighting for the Smithsonian's independence until his last day.

Take him at his word. His departure isn't proof of anything by itself. But it's an occasion to ask a bigger question: what is happening to Black leadership inside the institutions of the federal government?

A pattern, not an anecdote

Start counting names. Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the second Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, fired. Carla Hayden, the first Black person and first woman to serve as Librarian of Congress, fired. Gwynne Wilcox, the first Black woman on the National Labor Relations Board, removed. Alvin Brown, the only Black member of the National Transportation Safety Board, removed. Robert Primus, a Black member of the Surface Transportation Board, removed. Peggy Carr, a 35-year Education Department veteran and Black commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, removed. Lisa Cook, the first Black woman to serve as a Federal Reserve governor, targeted for removal, a move now tied up in litigation.

Rachel Maddow and other reporters have compiled versions of this list since the spring, and in one federal complaint, attorneys for a fired official argued that roughly three-quarters of Black officials serving at independent federal agencies had been removed under this administration. How many names does it take before we stop treating each firing as its own isolated story and start asking whether there's a pattern?

DEI as the operational language of the personnel story

The administration's public rationale is that diversity, equity and inclusion programs themselves constitute discrimination, and that dismantling them restores merit-based, race-neutral government. That's the stated case, and it should be reported accurately. But it's worth asking what "DEI" means operationally once that label gets applied to institutions, personnel decisions and historical exhibits alike. The real question isn't whether the acronym is popular or unpopular. It's this: when an administration defines efforts to broaden representation of historically excluded Americans as discrimination, who loses when those efforts disappear?

Beyond the famous names

The prominent firings may end up being less significant than what's happening to ordinary Black federal employees. Black Americans have long been overrepresented in the federal workforce relative to their share of the population, and not by accident: federal jobs offered access to professional careers, stable pay, pensions and advancement at a time when much of the private economy discriminated against them.

Now consider the scale of the current downsizing. According to the Government Accountability Office, the federal workforce across 22 major agencies fell by nearly 256,000 employees (from about 2.27 million to 2.01 million) between December 2024 and January 2026, the product of roughly 378,000 separations against about 127,000 new hires. That reframes the story. It's no longer just "Trump fired Black leaders." It's a question about what's happening to Black participation in the federal government as a whole.

Inside the Pentagon

The military deserves its own look, because the evidence there is distinct. Gen. Brown's removal as Joint Chiefs chairman was followed by other senior Black military departures and a broader anti-DEI restructuring at the Pentagon. Reporting has also described Black and female officers being disproportionately dropped from promotion lists, and a Pentagon purge of DEI-related content that swept up material on the Tuskegee Airmen, Jackie Robinson and other minority military figures, some of it later restored after public criticism. That raises a sharper question than "Is the Pentagon eliminating DEI programs?" It's whether the campaign is reshaping who advances, who leads, and which chapters of American military history the government is willing to commemorate.

An old American question

America has been here before. When Woodrow Wilson took office in 1913, Black Americans had built a real foothold in federal employment. His administration segregated federal workplaces; Black employees were separated, reassigned, demoted and dismissed. The point isn't that Trump is Wilson. The point is that federal employment can be expanded or contracted as an avenue of Black opportunity through administrative power alone, with no new law required.

Representative government, not just a demographic count

Representation isn't only about whether Congress looks like the country. It's also about whether the institutions that exercise government power (the military, the Federal Reserve, regulatory commissions, the federal courts, the civil service, libraries, museums, scientific and education agencies, national cultural institutions) reflect the population they govern. What happens to representative government when the people making decisions inside it increasingly stop resembling the people governed by it? That's a question about legitimacy and institutional access, not just headcounts.

Back to Bunch, and who tells the story

Which brings us back to Bunch, who is more than an opening anecdote. The fight over Smithsonian exhibits dealing with slavery and race isn't separate from the personnel story; it's the other half of it. The administration has accused the institution of presenting an insufficiently celebratory account of the country; Bunch has defended scholarship that presents accomplishments alongside failures. There are two questions running through this moment: who gets to hold positions of federal authority, and who gets to tell America's history once they're there? Bunch, the Smithsonian's first Black secretary and the historian who built its African American history museum, sits at the intersection of both.

What the evidence supports

I don't believe these developments are coincidental, and I don't think "DEI" fully explains what we're witnessing. When Black leaders are repeatedly removed, Black federal workers disproportionately absorb the consequences of downsizing, programs meant to broaden participation get relabeled as discriminatory, Black military advancement is disrupted, and institutions built to tell Black history come under federal pressure, racial motivation has to be considered as a possible explanation for the pattern. That's a different claim than saying any individual official was fired because he or she is Black; it says the cumulative project and its effects are evidence from which that motivation can be debated. The precise extent to which racial animus drove any single decision remains uncertain. That's not the same as saying there's no evidence to examine.

There's a further question worth sitting with: if the administration succeeds in linking Black advancement itself to "DEI," does every Black official become vulnerable to the assumption that they represent diversity rather than merit? That may be one of the most consequential effects of this campaign, and it deserves investigation rather than assumption.

Lonnie Bunch says Donald Trump didn't push him out, and there's no reason to doubt him. But his retirement is a fair moment to look around Washington and take stock. Who occupies the government's senior offices now? Who is leaving the federal workforce? Who advances through the military? Which histories can still be told, and who decides? Every president dismisses officials; that's not the question. The question is whether the federal government is being systematically reshaped in ways that diminish Black representation, Black institutional authority and Black influence over the American story.

The Rule Doesn't Have to Become Law to Change Higher Education

How the threat of federal punishment can dismantle programs for minority students before a court ever decides whether the government has the power to do it.

by Alvin Blackshear  |  Historian & Researcher  <ablackshear@gmail.com>

Here is a fact that should be reassuring: on September 4, 2026, the Treasury Department and the IRS published a proposed regulation, not a final one. Nothing has actually changed. Nothing is yet required.

Now turn that fact upside down. Colleges do not have the luxury of pretending REG-119986-25 doesn't exist. The administration has explicitly warned that private educational institutions maintaining what it regards as racially discriminatory programs could lose their federal tax-exempt status, a penalty severe enough to end most private schools outright. Treasury itself estimates that as many as 18,000 private educational institutions could be affected. The rule does not have to become law to change higher education. The threat may be enough.

What is being proposed

The proposal covers admissions, scholarships and loans, athletics, and other school-supported programs. It would treat any use of race, color, or national or ethnic origin in distributing benefits as disqualifying, even when the purpose is explicitly remedial. Schools could still target assistance using income, geography, first-generation status, individual hardship, and other race-neutral criteria. Crucially, the regulation would apply only to taxable years beginning after May 31, 2027. That gap between now and then is where the real story lives.

Anticipatory compliance

Imagine yourself as a university president, trustee, or general counsel. Do you maintain a scholarship established specifically for Black students and risk an eventual confrontation with the IRS? Or do you quietly rewrite the eligibility requirements now, while no one is forcing you to?

For a risk-averse institution, the rational response is to comply before anyone has required compliance. A Black student scholarship becomes an "economically disadvantaged" scholarship. A minority mentoring program opens to everyone. Targeted recruitment changes. Donors are gently discouraged from establishing race-conscious funds in the first place. No IRS agent has to show up. No exemption has to be revoked. No judge has to rule on anything. The program simply disappears, quietly, as a matter of institutional self-preservation.

How power like this operates

It is a fact that the administration proposes treating race-conscious remedial programs as disqualifying discrimination. Whether that reflects hostile intent is a separate question, one this argument doesn't need to resolve. What matters is how the power functions: government need not command a result directly to produce it. It can identify a category of conduct as risky, attach an extraordinary financial consequence to it, and let institutions, lawyers, and administrators do the rest. American racial policy has often worked this way, through funding conditions, tax treatment, and the threat of losing government benefits, long before any court weighs in. The pressing question isn't only "will this regulation survive review?" It's "what will disappear while we're waiting to find out?"

The strongest counterargument

Supporters can fairly respond that the administration isn't banning help for disadvantaged students. Schools can still aid poor, first-generation, and geographically disadvantaged students; Treasury's own framing insists on this. What's demanded is that aid follow individual disadvantage, not race. That's a coherent principle. But it invites a historical question worth sitting with: can a race-neutral remedy fully repair an inequality that was created through explicitly race-conscious discrimination? Reasonable people disagree, and this piece won't settle it for them.

The question nobody can answer

Congress has noticed. Representatives Lloyd Doggett and Terri Sewell have introduced the PROOF Act, aimed at guaranteeing due process before the IRS can strip an organization's tax-exempt status. It's a meaningful check, but it doesn't touch the underlying rule, and it does nothing to stop an administrator today from asking, "why risk an IRS examination at all? Just change the program now."

Which returns us to the real stakes. Courts may eventually uphold this regulation. They may strike it down. But by then, the more important consequence may have already occurred: scholarships rewritten, programs eliminated, recruitment quietly redirected, donors steered elsewhere. If universities voluntarily dismantle these programs in anticipation of a rule, and courts later strike that rule down, how many of those programs will ever come back?

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For further reading:

Federal Register, REG-119986-25, "Racial Nondiscrimination in Private Schools" (Sept. 4, 2026).
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/09/04/2026-18127/racial-nondiscrimination-in-private-schools

U.S. Department of the Treasury, press release on the proposed rule (Sept. 3, 2026).  https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0621/

H.R. 10258, the PROOF Act, introduced Sept. 3, 2026.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/10258

After Affirmative Action: What the Data Says About Who Really Gets an Edge

by Alvin Blackshear  |  Historian & Researcher  <ablackshear@gmail.com>

A Sad Day, Not a Surprising One

When the Supreme Court struck down race conscious admissions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard on June 29, 2023, the reaction from educators and advocates was less shock than grief. As one campus diversity officer put it in the ruling's immediate aftermath, it was "a sad day in America, but not a surprising day." That framing captures something real. Affirmative action's opponents had been building toward this moment for a decade, and those working in higher education had time to brace for it, even if bracing didn't make the outcome easier to absorb.

The Argument That Won't Go Away. Legacy, Donors, and Athletes

The sharpest counterpunch from critics of the ruling is that it eliminated one narrow preference while leaving much larger ones intact. A 2026 study published in Education Finance and Policy by Vanderbilt researchers Brent Evans and Cody Christensen examined seven institutions and one statewide policy that banned legacy admissions preferences, including Amherst College, Johns Hopkins, the University of California system, and the state of Colorado. Their finding complicates the simple version of this argument. Banning legacy preferences alone did not consistently increase student diversity. Some institutions saw real gains, others saw little to no change, in part because many state policies ban legacy preference but leave donor preference fully intact and rarely include enforcement mechanisms. The takeaway is not that legacy and donor preferences are harmless. It's that removing them is not, by itself, a substitute for the access affirmative action provided. Older data still underscores the scale of the underlying preference. A widely cited, but dated, Harvard admissions analysis found that more than 43 percent of white students admitted between 2009 and 2014 were recruited athletes, legacies, on the dean's interest list, or children of faculty and staff, compared with under 16 percent for Black, Asian American, and Hispanic admits.

The Precedent Nobody Should Ignore. What Happened After California Banned Race Conscious Admissions

Critics point to California as a preview of the nationwide ruling's likely effects, and researchers are still tracking the fallout from the newer, national version of that experiment. In a 2026 Brookings research brief, University of Maryland professor Julie Park (whose book Race, Class, and Affirmative Action was published by Harvard Education Press this year and reviewed in the peer-reviewed journal Education Review) documents what she calls a "cascade effect." Underrepresented students turned away from elite institutions are enrolling instead at state flagships, and students previously headed to flagships are being displaced further down the selectivity ladder. Park's analysis found that Black student enrollment fell at a majority of the 29 elite institutions she tracked, with 16 public flagships reporting a net loss of Black students. At the same time, 83 percent of public flagship institutions saw overall underrepresented minority enrollment rise, driven largely by Latino students rather than Black students. This is not a story of straightforward decline. It's a redistribution, and Park's research draws heavily on earlier causal work by Princeton economist Zachary Bleemer showing that students who lose access to more selective institutions tend to have measurably worse graduation rates, grades, and postgraduate earnings than they would have had otherwise. That earlier research, on California's Proposition 209, found the ban deterred more than 1,000 underrepresented minority applicants a year from even applying to the UC system and cut Black and Latino enrollment at UC Berkeley by roughly 40 percent.

Race Neutral Alternatives Aren't Neutral in Effect

The practical question facing universities now is what to do instead. Park's 2026 analysis notes that class based, income based alternatives to race conscious admissions do not reliably produce the same racial diversity gains, even when they succeed at increasing economic diversity. That gap is the empirical heart of the argument that "colorblind" admissions policies are not simply neutral substitutes. They tend to produce smaller and less consistent results.

Where This Leaves the Debate

None of this settles the constitutional question the Court already resolved. But it sharpens the practical one facing universities today. If the preferences that most favor wealthy, disproportionately white applicants remain harder to dislodge than expected, and if the race neutral alternatives on offer are inconsistent at best, the real fight ahead is over legacy and donor admissions reform, income based alternatives, and pipeline investment, not just compliance with the letter of the ruling.

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Notes

Arcidiacono, P., Kinsler, J., & Ransom, T. (2022). "Legacy and Athlete Preferences at Harvard." Journal of Labor Economics, 40(1), 133–156. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/713744

Evans, B. J., & Christensen, C. L. (2026). "The Evolving Landscape of Legacy Preference Bans in Postsecondary Admissions. Evidence and Policy Implications from Case Studies." Education Finance and Policy, 21(3), 564–585. https://doi.org/10.1162/EDFP.a.433

Park, J. J. (2026). Race, Class, and Affirmative Action. College Admissions in a New Era. Harvard Education Press. Reviewed by Yingyuan Sun (2026), Education Review, 33. https://doi.org/10.14507/er.v33.4653