"Words that make actions speak louder."
Progressives in the U.S. Senate have introduced a potent package of estate tax reforms that would, if enacted, start seriously trimming America’s most super-sized hoards of private wealth. Back a hundred summers ago in 1910, former President Theodore Roosevelt — a Republican — called for “a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes,” a new tax […]
Our economy would become the world’s most innovative, our elites have assured us over the past 30 years, if we gave our rich enough incentives to innovate. We kept to our end of the bargain. So where’s the innovation? The pollsters at Gallup have never asked Americans to name the world’s most technologically advanced nation. […]
An emergency 1 percent ‘wealth tax’ on the nation’s richest 1 percent could raise enough revenue to keep all our teachers on the job and libraries open. But our dysfunctional political system can’t even raise that possibility. Last year may have been the worst year, economically, that most Americans alive today have ever experienced. By […]
Britain’s new Conservative Party prime minister has an idea for ending pay excess in the public sector. Should overpaid execs in the private sector — in the United States — now be starting to shudder? Conservatives politicians have always enjoyed bashing public employees and their paychecks. So no one should be particularly surprised that David […]
With millions of Americans out of work and hurting, lawmakers who claim they worry about budget deficits spent last week forcing ‘compromises’ that will save hedge fund kingpins billions in taxes. You want to lead a charmed existence? Just start up your own private investment fund — a hedge fund perhaps or a private equity […]
Friends of the financially fortunate are trying to turn reality upside-down — and save our undertaxed rich mega billions in the process. But two new sets of data can help us set the record straight. Taxes on the wealthy in the United States run low. Many wealthy Americans want these taxes to run even lower. […]
In 2010 America, schools, students, and teachers share the budget-cutting pain. The heirs to our mega rich, meanwhile, don’t have to share anything. For the first time in nearly a century, we have no federal estate tax. A moment of silence, please, for Dan Duncan. The 77-year-old Duncan, a Houston resident, passed away the end […]
What happens to societies that don’t share the wealth? They spend — and waste — a fortune guarding it. The latest over-the-top example: Oracle has spent $4.6 million on “residential security” for billionaire CEO Larry Ellison. The Great Recession seems to have America’s CEOs spooked. Corporate spending on executive security, already high before hard times […]
The Great Recession, new research shows, has left wealth in the United States even more concentrated at America’s economic summit. Average American households have been riding an economic roller coaster over the last quarter century. The stock market has boomed and collapsed. Housing has boomed and collapsed. The entire economy has boomed and collapsed. Where […]
Some Americans get all bent out of shape when they hear someone label the United States a ‘plutocracy.’ But if we have an honest-to-goodness democracy, where the people really rule, then how can we explain Goldman Sachs? The outsized political role of Goldman Sachs, America’s most powerful bank, has been attracting widespread attention — and […]