It may sound fanciful to adults, but President Donald Trump and Republican leaders in Congress put together a wish list of tax cuts for the wealthy that are far more extravagant than ponies. It turns out for the cost of just one of these tax cuts—repealing the tax on wealthy estates—we could literally buy every single American a pony.

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A lovely little Shetland pony, specifically. For all 325 million of us. In fact, the benefits Trump’s own adult children could get from his estate tax repeal would fund nearly 1.4 million ponies—that alone is enough to cover giving a pony to everyone in the state of Maine.

Let’s break down the numbers. Shetland ponies range in price from $300 to $1,500. We’re not lavish people, but we also don’t want to buy a cut-rate horse, so we assumed $800 per pony (and, of course, that there are enough ponies to go around). The larger expenses are the continuous costs of keeping our ponies healthy, active, and thriving: Every year our ponies will need lodging ($2,400), food ($1,200), and visits from the vet ($300) and farrier ($500).

These are sizeable expenses; on average, purchasing and caring for a pony will cost about $44,800 over 10 years. But the Senate is already considering a budget that includes a far more sizable expense: $1.5 trillion over 10 years in higher budget deficits for tax cuts that will mostly benefit the wealthy.

If Congress abandoned its tax cuts for millionaires and wealthy corporations, it could use that $1.5 trillion to purchase and care for a pony for roughly every American child ages 8 and below. Given the current dynamics in the United States—where economic inequality is skyrocketing and My Little Pony: The Movie is now playing in theaters—giving ponies to children is probably a more appropriate policy response than giving tax breaks to millionaires.

Alternatively, instead of providing tax cuts for millionaires or ponies for children, lawmakers could also use $1.5 trillion in many other ways to create jobs, reduce child poverty, end homelessness, make college free, or provide paid family leave.

In reality, of course, average Americans will miss out on the pleasures of ponies. A lot of them will even miss out on the tax cuts Trump is promising: 1 in 4 families will actually see their taxes rise under his plan by 2027, while 80 percent of the tax cuts go to households in the top 1 percent. Those tax cuts for the wealthy are enormously expensive, and Congress cannot enact them without severe trade-offs.

Like the continuous costs of pony upkeep, maintaining America’s economy requires ongoing investments—in education, in transportation, in research and scientific innovation. Yet as we’ve seen time and again, when policymakers slash tax revenue by giving handouts to the rich, they turn around and cut these very investments by complaining that we can’t afford them. And policymakers have made no secret that that’s what they plan to do: Trump’s budget gets two-thirds of its draconian spending cuts by slashing programs that serve low- and moderate-income families, to the tune of $2.5 trillion over a decade.

At a time when 44 percent of Americans couldn’t come up with $400 in an emergency—and 9 in 10 prefer economic stability to greater economic mobility—Americans aren’t asking for ponies, presents, or parades. And they’re really not asking for massive tax cuts for millionaires, billionaires, and corporations.

Seventy-five percent of Americans agree that “the wealthiest Americans should pay higher tax rates.” President Trump and Congressional Republican leaders want to give away the horse, the cart, and the country’s future to the rich, leaving little or nothing for the rest of us.

But while Winner-Take-All Politics got a lot of attention, the media missed a crucial part of the book: Rising inequality comes at a high cost to individual workers. In the book, Hacker and Pierson presented calculations showing that if inequality had stayed constant from 1979 to 2006, the bottom 90 percent of Americans would make up to 36 percent more per year than they currently do.

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Half a decade later, inequality is still growing. It also still isn’t getting the media attention it deserves, even though it’s making a massive impact on Americans’ lives. It’s like climate change: There is nothing “new” about growing inequality, so it gets pushed out of the news in favor of White House scandals and presidential tweets. But just like global warming, economic inequality is slowly but surely destroying the livelihoods of many Americans.

You can see this quite clearly when you look at how the distribution of household income has changed over the past 50 years. I extended Hacker and Pierson’s original calculations to include incomes from 1968 to 2015, giving us about two decades’ worth of additional data beyond other recent calculations. The wider timeframe shows an even deeper decline in income than the authors originally reported.

The table below breaks this down by income bracket. The second column shows what each group’s average household income was in 2015; the third column shows what the group’s average income would have been if inequality had stayed the same between 1968 and 2015.

Source: Author’s calculations based on 2016 data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

If it weren’t for the increase in inequality, the bottom 40 percent of households would be making more than 35 percent more today.

The gains, of course, have gone to the very wealthiest Americans—especially those in the top 5 percent. Due to the rise in inequality, higher-income households—those in the top 20 percent of the income distribution but not in the top 5 percent—have seen a 9 percent increase in their annual incomes. But incomes for households in the top 5 percent are 26 percent higher—an increase nearly three times as great. This reveals something important about the nature of rising inequality: The “winners” from increased inequality are really a small group of incredibly rich Americans, who are taking increasingly large shares of the total national income.

The findings are pretty difficult to refute. Conservatives have long argued that household income statistics are unreliable because they fail to account for differences in household size. But the increase in inequality appears just as real even when we look at “equivalence-adjusted income shares,” which control for differences in household size and composition.

In fact, the figure below shows that households in the bottom 40 percent of the income distribution have actually seen their share of national income decline more when we use the equivalence-adjusted household income that addresses conservatives’ concerns.

The poorest fifth of households saw their share of national income decline from 4.2 percent in 1968 to 3.1 percent in 2015, a drop of 1.1 percentage points. However, if we instead look at equivalence-adjusted income, their share of the national income dropped more than twice as much (from 5.8 percent to 3.4 percent, a drop of 2.4 percentage points). Conservatives are right to say that normal household income statistics can be misleading; but that’s because the normal statistics understate the rise in inequality, not because they overstate it.

The rise in inequality is no statistical mirage. It is undoubtedly real—and its effects have been pernicious. Our country’s poorest households lose more than $4,000 every year as a result of the growth in inequality; lower-income families lose more than $11,000; and middle-class families lose around $13,000. That money could pay for real things that families have to do without, whether it’s better food or new shoes, a trip to the doctor or a great summer camp.

If the rise of economic inequality is going to be the great untold story of our time, then reducing inequality should be the greatest progressive objective of the 21st century.

No kidding, Mr. President.

This isn’t news to anyone. For most people, the Internet is key to basic life functions: correspondence; applications for jobs, college, and benefits; Facebook stalking your friends’ friends’ friends, expressing yourself with 90’s TV show gifs; and participating in the oh-so-enlightened conversations occurring on message boards everywhere.

Although I jest, lack of Internet access is a serious barrier for many low-income families, and its consequences are very real: students who have broadband at home achieve higher graduation rates than those who do not; high speed Internet access is strongly associated with greater economic development for communities; and the Internet is a critical prerequisite for accessing a huge proportion of job applications. I spent the past year studying how these folks use public computing resources in Chicago, and I can tell you that having access at home, work, school, or a public center really changes what opportunities are available to you.

But none of this matters because everyone has smartphones now, right? Problem solved. Except that you can’t write essays, craft a resume, do your taxes, or animate, analyze, and code anything worthwhile on your phone. And sure enough, the effects of these limitations show: mobile-only Internet users have lower digital skill levels than people with access to desktops.

And although the proportion of people who do not have Internet in some capacity at home or work has been reduced to an all-time low, the consequences for those who remain excluded have multiplied because the vast majority of institutions provide services in a way that assumes online access. This is very bad news for the quarter of Americans who don’t have decent broadband at home.

All this being said, the ConnectHome initiative, while great for the 275,000 families it serves, won’t even make a dent in the approximately 95 million people who need it. If we’re going to have a national conversation about digital skills and Internet access, then let’s recognize that while ConnectHome and mobile Internet access play important roles in filling the critical gaps in services for our most vulnerable families, the overwhelming need for Internet, devices, support, and training in underserved communities requires a broader strategy.

We’ve been here before: policymakers did attempt to address these digital disparities in the Recovery Act after the 2008 recession. The Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) invested $4.7 billion dollars in broadband access and adoption, including $201 million in Public Computer Center grants to fund 3,500 new and upgraded public computer centers across the country.

For a lot of communities, these types of public computer labs are where low-income individuals who lack Internet go to get the technology and training they need. Labs are located in public housing, senior centers, schools, health clinics, community technology centers, and most importantly, public libraries, who are the real MVPs of Internet access in America, despite the massive cuts many systems have faced.

These public computer centers are heavily relied upon: for example, my research suggests that half of their 80,000 weekly users in Chicago—more than one-third of whom have incomes of under $10,000—use public computer centers every day. And, the most recent available data clocked the average wait time in about two-thirds of Chicago Public Libraries at more than three hours. And that’s a problem for users, especially low-income households, who don’t have that kind of time to wait around to access basic services. And, centers and their support staffs are doing so much more than providing Internet and computers: they’re teachers, curators of learning resources, amateur social service referrers, homework helpers, and job search coaches.

The value of public computer centers goes beyond technology itself. For teenage users in Chicago, 88 percent reported that they performed better in school through center use and one-third reported that the computer centers made them feel safer because they were off the streets. For Chicago adult users, 58 percent were looking for jobs and 37 percent of all respondents said the Chicago centers had helped them find a job, due in part to staff assistance.

These centers were dealt a huge setback when BTOP’s funding ended in 2013. Now, without a dedicated source of funding, every budget year is a battle to prevent cuts or underfunding. And, when we fail to invest in libraries and public computer centers, they are forced to cut staff and training programs or close altogether. Until the next generation of wireless provision produces better, cheaper alternatives, it’s critical that we financially support these libraries and public computer centers on a far broader scale than ConnectHome.

It’s time to think seriously and creatively about how to fund systemic, sustainable changes to get low-income households connected to the resources they need—in every community.