The world’s wealthy gathered in the Alps again last week to discuss how to ‘solve’ the world’s problems. The world’s biggest problem, suggests one top global anti-poverty outfit, may be their fortunes. Apologists for inequality have a standard retort to anyone who calls for a more equal distribution of the world’s treasure. If you took [...]
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How do unequal societies solve the problems — like traffic congestion — that make us miserable? They come up with solutions that make life easier for rich people. Politicians and bureaucrats “inside the Beltway” that circles Washington, D.C., pundits like to prattle, simply do not understand the challenges of daily life that average Americans face [...]
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Can a democracy survive if the richest of the rich within it can pass on to their heirs, generation after generation, the vast bulk of their fortunes? In the United States, that question first became a top-tier topic of political debate back over a century ago. Fortunes of almost unimaginable size were then towering over [...]
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The Bush years gave America’s rich new and unprecedented preferential treatment at tax time. The fiscal cliff deal enacted in the early moments of 2013 leaves that preferential treatment in place. Who won the New Year’s eve standoff over the “fiscal cliff”? In one sense, everyone “won.” The deal that Congress blessed last week includes [...]
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Some of today’s most greedy are running giant multinationals. Some are just running their mouths. Their stories remind us just how much needs to change, economically and politically, in the year ahead. The essence of greed? Simple. Greed amounts to taking more than you need when you already have enough — and others don’t. Who [...]
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The political friends of America's rich aren't aiming to convince us that higher taxes on the nation's highest incomes make no sense. They're just hoping to keep us distracted.
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How much can a billion dollars buy? The undivided attention of America’s entire political and chattering classes. Case in point: our ongoing national fixation on debt and deficit. Down through the millennia, single individuals have changed the course of history, some through their intellect, some through their courage, and still others through the depth and [...]
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Americans today can take more than inspiration from the struggles against plutocracy that progressives waged years ago. They can take a host of still relevant — and cutting-edge — policy proposals.
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Yes, the poor have struggled mightily while our rich have become phenomenally flush. But middle-income Americans haven’t been able to jump off the treadmill either. We’ve all heard plenty of chatter over recent years about the widening gap “between rich and poor.” But what about the gap between rich and middle? This divide seldom ever [...]
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We’ll never know exactly how much America’s super rich pumped into the 2012 elections. Hundreds of millions in “dark money” — contributions laundered through hyper-politicized nonprofits like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — will forever remain untraceable. Even so, we do know that hundreds of billionaires and mega millionaires spent at incredibly extravagant levels on 2012 [...]
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