Rob: Okay, and the report is available, what's the best link to go to that?
CC: People should go to the Institute for Policy Studies or just google Billionaire Bonanza, which is the name of the report, but it's at IPS-DC.org and Billionaire Bonanza. It's a short report but it sort of looks at the concentration of the wealth and sort of how it relates to everybody else and why it matters.
Rob: And it gives some powerful stats, you've given us a flavor of it. I mean it's horrible. That just 20 people have as much as, what did you say? 152 million people--
CC: Half, yeah 152 million people. Exactly. And you know the entire Forbes 400 has about the same amount of wealth as about 61% of the whole population at this point.
Rob: And that's, it's just amazing. I want to kind of get to a lot of stuff so I want to cut to some of the issues here. You talk about--
CC: Go for it.
Rob: What are some of the problems that this extreme wealth inequality produces?
CC: Well, one of the things it does is it definitely undermines our democracy. We know that as wealth concentrates, so there's power, the power to shape the culture and give to candidates and essentially undermine our democratic institutions. You know recent studies show that half the donations in the 2016 presidential cycle to all the candidates, have come, half the donations have come from 158 families, about half of whom are on this Forbes 400 list. So that's a huge, you know, thumb on our democratic system. But there are other reasons why we should care. I mean I think that as wealth concentrates it undermines economic stability. Working people don't have, wages have been stagnate for almost 30 years so working people have less buying power. That hurts the economy. At the very very top, the rich have so much wealth that it's sort of unreal to them and they start investing in sort of highly speculative and potentially dangerous to the rest of the economy, kind of financial investments. So you have economic instability that comes from there being too much unequal wealth. And then you know there's a lot of research showing that too much inequality is bad for your health. It breaks down social cohesion, community connection. There's a number of reasons why, it's pretty much bad for everybody including the very wealthy. At a certain point, too much concentrated wealth starts to back fire and lead to a society that nobody wants to live in.
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