The Big Mac has a big problem. According to the CEO of McDonald’s, fast food chains saw a double-digit dip in visits from lower- and middle-income customers in the first quarter of 2025.
The reason? He says we’re becoming a two-tiered economy, and lower- and middle-income customers can no longer afford fast food.
While the stock market is riding high and the Trump administration is slashing taxes for corporations and the rich, nothing is “trickling down” to everyday Americans.
Frankly, it’s a little galling to hear the CEO of McDonald’s complaining about income inequality, because corporations like McDonald’s are making the problem worse.
They pay their workers so little that many have to rely on food stamps and Medicaid to make ends meet — for which the rest of us pay in our taxes.
Meanwhile, their CEOs are paid roughly 1,000 times more than their typical employee.
Big corporations have a history of union busting, further reducing the power of their workers to negotiate a living wage.
Finally, they make the entire economy fragile. As wealth concentrates in the richest 10 percent, the rest of America can’t afford to buy enough to keep the economy running.
So what can we do about this? End the trickle-down hoax once and for all: Tax cuts for the wealthy make the rest of us worse off, not better.
Fight for unions. In the 1950s, when America had the biggest middle class the world had ever seen, a third of all private-sector workers were unionized. Now, it’s 6 percent.
Raise the minimum wage to $20 an hour (and higher for big corporations with billions in profits that pay their CEOs more than $20 million a year).
Bust up big monopolies with the power to keep prices high.
Demand corporations share their profits with workers, so that when corporations do better, their workers do, too.
In sum: Build an economy that works for everyone, not just those at the top. Because if we don’t, we’re all cooked.
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- Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
- Robert Reich’s new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org.
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