May 7, 2017 by Mary Kuhlman

More than 50 multi-millionaires have signed a letter urging President Donald Trump and Congress to abandon their attempts to abolish the federal estate tax, the only tax on inherited wealth in the U.S. Chuck Collins, heir to the Oscar Mayer fortune and author of the book "Born on Third Base," points out the tax only applies to households with assets of more than $11 million. He adds the tax was put in place 100 years ago to prevent the kind of inherited aristocracy the nation fought a revolutionary war over.

April 7, 2017 by Chuck Collins

With national policy likely to compound the income and wealth gap in the coming years, states and localities are fighting back. Across the country, local jurisdictions aren’t waiting for federal action or corporate governance reforms to close the wage gap. In December, for example, the city of Portland, Oregon, passed an ordinance to raise the business tax on companies with CEOs who earn more than 100 times the median pay of their workers. Portland officials said the ordinance is the first of its kind in the country. And now, more cities and states are poised to follow suit.

March 16, 2017 by Lynnley Browning

Leaked pages of President Donald Trump’s 2005 tax return offer no new details about his foreign income and business dealings but highlight a tax he’s vowed to abolish. The alternative minimum tax, or AMT, was responsible for 80 percent of Trump’s 2005 federal income tax bill of $38.4 million, on income of $152.7 million. Chuck Collins, a scholar at the left-leaning Institute for Policy Studies, said he assumed that a reported loss of $103 million on Trump’s 2005 return, combined with depreciation for real estate, “probably” triggered the alternative levy. “The AMT tends to catch people who have paper losses,” he said.

February 22, 2017

Chuck Collins, author of the recently published “Born on Third Base,” will share his conviction that we can “change the story and fix the future” during a program co-sponsored by the Kennebunk Free Library and First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church at 7 p.m. Friday, March 3, at the church, which is next door to the library.

January 5, 2017 by Janet Lorin

The super-rich often slim their tax bills by swelling the coffers of their alma maters through donations for pet projects. Now, under a tax overhaul in Washington, the tax benefits of such gifts could be curtailed. That prospect is alarming the ranks of the .01 percent and their favorite charities. Chuck Collins, a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington think tank, said it was time for a public debate on such gifts. “We treat all these donations the same from a tax point of view,” said Collins, co-author of a November report on the concentration of wealth, "whether you are feeding a hungry child in Baltimore or adding a state-of-the art video editing suite at your kids’ private elite school.’’