Marble Falls Chuck Collins has a fixation about wealth. He’s written a bunch of books about the devastating impact of the gap between the rich and the rest to us. He makes following the money trail his full-time job at the Institute of Policy Studies where he tracks everything from the big business of people serving the rich and abetting their worst instincts and helping them hide their money. I had talked to Chuck before about a book he wrote pulling the curtains open on how all of that worked. Most recently, I talked to Chuck about his newest book on Wade’s World. It’s called Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power Are Ruining Our Lives and Planet. Chuck marshals a lot of information and data to point the fingers at these more than 1000 US-billionaires to hold them accountable for almost every big-ticket crisis we have on the stove now: climate, higher taxes, racial divide, health, longevity, and crooked elections.
As the brickbats are flying hot and heavy from page to page, you are almost thinking, oh, my, Chuck, are you sure we can blame that for all of that? Then you read the news of the day and see that one of these legacy billionaires from the Mellon banking fortune, dating over a century ago, is willing to pick up the tab to help pay the military during the shutdown to the tune of $130 million or so. Just writing the check and sending it over to help his billionaire buddy, Donald Trump, so that Trump will not have to suffer the consequences of the manufactured shutdown crisis he and the Congressional Republicans have concocted. On reading more, you see Trump pardoned a crypto fraudster – likely also a billionaire-lite – who had done him another favor and backed the Trump family’s crypto play. Of course, there is Elon Must all over the papers complaining that NASA isn’t under his thumb and might have the gall to rebid a moonshot, because SpaceX is late on the deliverables. Then you think, hey, maybe Chuck didn’t go far enough. Every time you look around, they are messing stuff up.
Is there any way to stop this billionaire infection? Well, Chuck has a long list of what he believes would close the gap between us and them, which includes:
- Raise the minimum wage to a living wage
- Provide true universal health care
- Strengthen the right to organize and basic labor standards and protections
- Provide access to lifelong learning and job retraining
- Provide guaranteed minimum income
- Provide government employment as a last resort
- Furnish adequate welfare support
Chuck argues that we just need to follow the rainbow to the gold, and it’s in the hands of the billionaires now. If we want to change it, then…
- Reduce money in politics
- Implement fair trade rules
- Shutdown global tax loopholes
- Restore progressive income taxes
- Eliminate tax preferences for income from wealth
- Protect and expand inheritance taxes
- Levy a wealth tax on billionaires
- Create a tax on global wealth
- Strengthen antitrust laws
- Rein in CEO pay and corporate incentive systems
Well, yeah, that’s the dream, right? Make a wish list and then work to make it happen. It’s not one big gulp, but a bunch of big bites and swallows. It’s good to have the goal in sight. Wouldn’t it be wonderful?