July 20, 2026  ·  Reboot 2028 PAC

The Year Everything Diverged: What This Chart Says About Citizens United

We recently charted billionaire wealth against wages, GDP, and the stock market back to 2000. Adding one more line — the federal minimum wage — turns it from an interesting chart into something closer to a timestamp.

Index, 2000 = 100. Billionaire wealth: Forbes 400 totals through 2025 (Forbes/Wikipedia/CBS/CNN), all ~977 US billionaires for 2026 (Americans for Tax Fairness). GDP: nominal, BEA via Multpl. Wages: BLS average hourly earnings (production/nonsupervisory, total private); 2025–26 lightly estimated. S&P 500: year-end close, Multpl. Federal minimum wage: U.S. Department of Labor.

Look at the shape of the billionaire-wealth line before that point: 100 in 2000, 108 by 2010. A full decade, including the dot-com crash and the 2008 financial crisis, and billionaire wealth gained essentially no ground on the broader economy. Then, starting almost exactly at 2010, it breaks away and never comes back: 213 by 2017, 354 by 2021, 728 by 2026. The purple minimum-wage line does the opposite — it was still being raised right up through 2009, then goes perfectly flat for the rest of the chart, the only line on this graph that never moves again.

We want to be precise about what this does and doesn't show. A chart is not a controlled experiment, and 2010 was also the year the Federal Reserve's near-zero interest rates and quantitative easing kicked into full effect after the financial crisis — that alone inflated stock and asset prices broadly, and would have widened the gap between wealth and wages even without Citizens United. So the honest claim isn't "Citizens United caused this graph." It's narrower and, we think, still important: Citizens United removed a check on money in politics at the exact moment conditions were forming for wealth to concentrate at the top, and the political system had measurably less ability to counteract it afterward than before.

Two concrete policy channels connect the two:

The 2017 tax law and stock buybacks. The Trump-GOP tax law cut the corporate rate from 35% to 21%, following years of expanded outside political spending after Citizens United. In the eight years since, just 100 major corporations have spent $4.8 trillion buying back their own stock — including a record $1 trillion in 2025 alone. Buybacks concentrate gains among existing shareholders, who are disproportionately the same people on the billionaire-wealth line. That's a direct mechanism by which a law shaped by post-Citizens-United donor money pushed billionaire wealth to grow even faster than the stock market it rides on.

Minimum wage gridlock. Raising the federal minimum wage has failed in Congress repeatedly since 2009, including votes in years when one party controlled both chambers and the presidency. Unlimited outside spending gives members of both parties a concrete reason to avoid crossing donors who oppose an increase — you don't need a majority of voters against a raise if a handful of individual megadonors can fund a primary challenge against anyone who supports one. That's a plausible reason the purple line on this chart is flatter than every other line, including inflation itself.

None of this means billionaires got rich by breaking the law, or that every dollar of the gap traces back to one Supreme Court decision. It means the timing lines up in a way that's hard to write off as coincidence, and that the specific policies driving the divergence — tax cuts skewed toward shareholders, a frozen minimum wage — are exactly the kind of outcomes unlimited political spending is built to produce. Read more about what Citizens United actually did and what we're doing about it in 2026.