Rob: Childhood opportunities, what kind of childhood opportunities?
CC: Well access to healthcare very early on. Preschool education. Identifying and addressing learning disabilities early on. Those are all the kinds of things that good societies do, you know. Working with families that are, that have economic challenges to help create stability in their lives. Those are like the things that you know totally change the trajectory for young people. Right now we have a society where there's like compounding disadvantages for low and middle income people, and accelerating advantages for people at the top.
Rob: Okay, so basically what you just said is, first thing is we've got to deal with the offshore tax havens and the billionaire loopholes.
CC: That's right.
Rob: Then, sorry I've got a cold. In the report, you listed a couple of different, other approaches in addition to those raise the poor, level the playing field and reduce concentrations of wealth and power. What are those about?
CC: Well, again a society like Canada or Denmark, the reason they have much less inequality than the United Sates is they have a high floor. Meaning there's a level at which people cannot fall. They cannot fall deep into poverty. There's minimum, high minimum wages. There's basic health care. There's early childhood education. All those kind of things we can do to raise the floor. There are things that level the playing field. There's things that, like campaign finance reform. Or making sure that the same tax rules apply to US domestic businesses as, to international businesses. So the things we can do to you know make the system fair, but right now we have this problem. We have the 900 billion ton gorilla here which is this huge concentration of wealth and power. And if we don't do anything about that, then we're just going to keep seeing these inequalities continue to grow. So we have to tax wealth. We have to have a robust inheritance tax, those are the two kind of things that you know. And we could link that revenue. We could do something link the revenue to debt-free education, just like after World War Two.
Rob: So link the revenues from taxing the wealthy to get free education, you're saying.
CC: That's just an example, I think of the kind of campaign that would do well. We have all these young people with 1.2 trillion dollars of college debt, average debt $33,000, we know it's terrible for them. Economically it delays their household formation, it delays home ownership. If we taxed wealth and created a debt-free college education fund and it could be means tested you know so Donald Trump's kids don't get a free education, he can pay. But if it's targeted to people who really need, low and middle income households, that's a great investment. That's what we did after World War Two, that enabled 13 million people to get on the wealth building train. You know. So those are the kinds of things I would, you know you could tax carbon and tax big polluters among the wealthy. People who use private jets, who use, have incredibly huge carbon footprint. Let's tax those luxury items and invest that in green jobs creation. Retrofitting buildings and you know fixing our infrastructure.
Rob: So I want to throw in one more credential you have, which is kind of unusual. I found out about it watching a documentary, you're a trust fund baby. You were, you had an opportunity to cruise through life with all the money you needed, right?
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