A Blueprint to Fix America’s Broken Democracy

FEATURING LINDSAY KOSHGARIAN - With Donald Trump’s second presidency eroding so many more safeguards on democracy than ever before, and with the minting of the world’s first trillionaire in the US, Elon Musk, the future of American democracy looks bleak. A new report by the Institute for Policy Studies offers clarity and a path forward. The report, Forging a Democracy that Works For All, hones in on billionaire power as a central focus.

Lindsay Koshgarian is the Program Director of the National Priorities Project (NPP), at the Institute for Policy Studies. Her work on federal budget priorities highlights the militarization of the federal budget and the corresponding lack of investment in people and the planet. She spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about IPS's new report.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: Let's first talk about this combination of things that I mentioned, that we see democratic safeguards eroding, with things like the attack on voting rights, the attack on immigrants and their due process, and combining that with the fact that you see this rise in power of a handful of people who are just getting so wealthy that the size of their wealth challenges the imagination. It's hard to even picture what a trillion dollars is. Those two you see as symptoms of a broken democracy? 

Lindsay Koshgarian: Yes, absolutely. The problem with having billionaire power is not just that a billion dollars is a lot of money or too much money for one person to have. The problem is that when you have a society with so many billionaires, and where billionaire wealth has increased so quickly in such a short time, and where it's connected to corporate power and military power, is that it takes the power away from the rest of us. 

And we are on the brink now of a society where the decisions are really being made by a small number of billionaires who have a small number of corporate backers, and it really absolutely is a detractor to our functioning democracy, and that's a vicious cycle because when people see democracy not working, they participate less. And so it becomes an even bigger problem.