Rob: Okay. You know I kind of see them as steps, little incremental things. Are there any big picture ideas out there?
CC: Well one is to institute a wealth tax. I mean I think that Candidate and Senator Bernie Sanders, we've been in discussions with him about what would an actual, how would a wealth tax work, what are the experiences of other countries. You could have a tax that's primarily targeted at billionaires. I mean we in our report propose taxing wealth over a billion dollars. You could have 100% tax on wealth over a billion dollars. You know if you have 2 billion dollars, you pay a billion dollar tax. It sounds, outlandish but actually in the 1930s Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposed almost 100% tax on fortunes over a certain level. And an inheritance tax on wealth over a certain level. You know once you get to a billion dollars, you have so much money, you've taken care of all your needs and the needs of the next several generations and it's really then about power. You're holding onto concentrated economic and political power. And that is diametrically opposed to the national interest.
Rob: Talk about it being about power.
CC: Well concentrated wealth, as Louis Brandeis Supreme Court Justice said, you can have concentrated wealth in the hands of a few or you can have a democracy but you cannot have both. If we don't want to become like a plutocratic society with, where we all bow before the hereditary aristocrats, if you think that's un-American you actually have to do something about the billionaire problem. You have to start talking about it first, as you have done Rob, talk about it as a billionaire problem.
Rob: I've talked about getting rid of billionaires, and creating laws that make it illegal to be one. Working to create a moral ethic, that it is immoral to be one. Is there any conversation like this going on? I mean Tom Hartman also talks about the billionaire rising or the no billionaires idea. How do we get this idea out there? It seems to me, you know I've written billionaires are dangerous to democracy, they're bad for even capitalism. Where, tell me your thoughts about these things.
CC: I mean it's not a conversation that's broadly being had partly because people are, you know I think they get nervous when you talk about getting rid of billionaires as if you're talking about people themselves. What we're really saying is, no one should have more than a billion dollars, it's not necessary to their well being, and it actually has all, a long list of adverse effects on society. So it's just like saying, nobody should have a personal nuclear bomb in their yard, you know it's like we the society, no you know Rob, you can't have your own nuclear warhead in your yard. That would be a bad thing. And there's no good reason for it. Well it's similar to having a billion dollars. So you know without attacking the person, and just saying that the behavior, we like you Rob but you just can't have a nuclear bomb, and you can't have a billion dollars, more than a billion dollars, you subvert all kinds of things. You subvert our democracy, it's bad for public health, it tears our communities apart, it's bad for social cohesion. It's actually bad for the economy for you to hoard so much wealth. It should be circulating. So I think, you know part of it is getting at the underlying talking points of why extreme wealth inequality is bad for everybody.
Rob: Talk more about the adverse effects of billionaires.
CC: Well I think there's now, it's almost like there's sort of a interdisciplinary body of work now about, okay, when you have a billion dollars your carbon footprint, your ecological footprint is so enormous. Luxury expenditures, larger houses, private jets, multiple houses. This is like one person just burning huge amounts of carbon for their standard of living. So that's, there's an ecology downside. There's a economic downside. For instance, if so much wealth is going to the top, and real wages for everybody else are stagnant or falling, then you don't have a middle class that can participate in the economy and buy goods and services and hire their neighbors to do things, so the economy starts to seize up. And at the very very top, the rich are not content with the low returns in the real economy that they can get investing so they have all these incentives to go and gamble with their wealth. You know the richest 1% probably have 20 trillion dollars of their wealth and maybe a couple trillion of that is invested in the real economy, stocks and securities and real estate and things that you can see. But a huge amount of that is now in the gambling casino, the speculative wall street economy that's just trying to create more paper wealth. It's engaged in derivatives and little hedge bets here and there about the movement of money. And in a way that speculative economy is like a vampire and it begins praying on the real economy and it starts to really matter to the rest of us. So too much wealth and too few hands is bad for the economy in that way.
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