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THIS WEEK
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This Valentine’s Day, we’re highlighting a campaign that’s won our hearts. In California, as I noted last week in The Nation, activists are organizing for a statewide vote on a plan that breaks up concentrated wealth by restoring the estate tax and uses the resulting revenue to fund tuition-free college. We have more this week on their effort. Want to share the love? Check out the College For All campaign and learn how to get involved.
This week’s issue also takes a look at some new research, out just in time for Valentine’s Day, on the traits that make for lasting and loving relationships. The ultra wealthy, it turns out, tend to have a harder time finding loves that can last. Our coverage explores the reasons why.
Chuck Collins, for the Institute for Policy Studies Inequality.org team |
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INEQUALITY BY THE NUMBERS
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FACES ON THE FRONTLINES
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| Taxing Wealth to Make Public College Free Again |
| Angad Singh Bhalla is coordinating the newly formed California College for All campaign. The goal: to increase student aid funding at California public colleges and universities by restoring a dedicated tax on estates over $3.5 million. A filmmaker and labor activist, Bhalla has jumped into this campaign with gusto, juggling child care and phone calls at all hours of the day. The campaign is now collecting signatures to put the College for All initiative on this November’s ballot. Chuck Collins has more on what to expect from Bhalla and the campaign in the months to come. |
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WORDS OF WISDOM
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PETULANT PLUTOCRAT
OF THE WEEK
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| Honk If Billionaire Arrogance Irks You! |
Who disgusts New York billionaire Tom Golisano the most: the Canada geese who’ve turned the lawn at his lakeside vacation home into a “minefield of poop” or the local officials who won’t fix his goose-poop problem? Tough call. Golisano is now refusing to pay the $90,000 school tax bill on his lush Canandaigua Lake property until the town of South Bristol shoos away the offending geese. The 76-year-old has had run-ins with local tax officials before. Eight years ago, the Associated Press reports, he spent $200,000 on legal fees to get the annual tax on another of his upstate New York residences sheared from $200,000 to $60,000. Quipped Golisano the next year: “If I hear a politician use the term ‘paying your fair share’ one more time, I’m going to vomit.”
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GREED AT A GLANCE
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TOO MUCH
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| Romance in an Age of Grand Private Fortunes |
| Living paycheck to paycheck can strain even the most loving of relationships. But spectacularly large paychecks, suggests some fascinating new research from a pair of Canadian psychologists, can doom loving relationships right from the start. On Valentine’s Day 2018, former billionaire Tim Blixseth and deep pockets everywhere would do well to take this new research to heart. Inequality.org co-editor Sam Pizzigati has all the details on the reasons. |
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MUST READS
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This week on Inequality.org
Ruwan Subasinghe, Taking Iceland’s Gender Pay Gap Law Global. To be effective, pay equity laws need to be combined with strong protections for union organizing and collective bargaining.
Sarah Anderson, Proposal to Let Bosses Keep Workers’ Tips Provokes Investigation. Trump officials reportedly deep-sixed an internal analysis of the proposed reform that indicated workers would lose billions in income.
Josh Hoxie, No Love for Working Families This Valentine’s Day. A Pennsylvania secretary gets an extra $1.50 a week from the GOP tax legislation. The Koch brothers get an extra $27 million.
Elsewhere on the web
K. Sabeel Rahman, Up Against Big Tech, The American Prospect. The old challenges of concentrated economic and political power now confront us in new forms.
Alissa Quart, If Americans don't like the word 'inequality', would 'fairness' be better? The Guardian. What egalitarians may need most: the other “i” word, imagination.
Gil B. Manzon Jr., How rich are the rich? If only you knew, The Conversation. Have a spare $250 million? If you’re among the 0.1 percent, you probably do.
William Darity Jr. and Darrick Hamilton, A trust fund for every American child, Newsday. A path to confronting America’s outrageously unequal distribution of wealth.
Justin Miller, It’s Time to Ban Stock Buybacks, The American Prospect. The Shareholder First economy benefits Wall Street investors and CEOs at the expense of everyone else.
Michael Roberts, The wealth of nations, Facts For Working People. A study of the different measures analysts are using to track inequality in and among nations. |
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