CC: Yep, yeah I was fortunate, I was born in the 1%, my great grandfather was the meat packer Oscar Meyer, you may have heard of him. And so, yeah, bringing home the bacon had a different meaning in my family growing up. But yeah I had an opportunity, I could have, you know, I was born on third base you know. At the age of 26, like half my life ago, I made a decision that I didn't want that wealth to shape my life as much as it potentially could and I didn't really felt like I needed it, and I kind of wanted to make my own way and so I gave it to a couple of foundations and life goes on. I have kids now, they're all normal, you know. So the good news is, there's life after enormous wealth and privilege. And I still have a huge amount of privilege. I'm a white middle class guy in the United States who's got a college education and an extended family that would help me if I got into a huge, you know car accident or something. So I have a lot of privilege. But I'm very committed to this idea that we as a society should not have huge intergenerational concentrations of wealth and intergenerational transfers of wealth. I think it's bad for the society, I also think it's bad for the kids. I really believe we're a better society when everybody sort of has relative equity in terms of their opportunities.
Rob: You know I've written a lot about this, I've said that we need to create a very strong aggressive dynasty tax. I think that that's what we're talking about with these huge intergenerational transfers of wealth. This creation of permanent powerful dynasties.
CC: I think you're totally on track, I think that's absolutely the way I would characterize it. These are anti-dynasty taxes. We're trying to prevent the creation of wealth dynasties. Where the sons of daughters of today's Forbes 400 are still running the show. You know people are all excited because Mark Zuckerberg has decided to give away 99% of the wealth that he has, his 45 billion dollar Facebook fortune over his lifetime. I actually think that's, I mean there's a number of questions there, like the fact that he's actually not really giving it away, he's creating an LLC corporation that he controls and he's going to avoid a bunch of taxation in the process, but, that said. That impulse is something we want to encourage. We want people to, particularly the 20 people, the richest 20 people in the United States, to take bold steps to redistribute their wealth and bring it back home and acknowledge that the society helped create their wealth and that they have an obligation to pay back the society.
Rob: That was a conversation we had in the last interview, this idea that individuals create great wealth is pure bull.
CC: Yeah I mean, that's sort of like one of the reigning myths of our culture, I call it the great man theory of wealth creation. It's like saying I did it all alone. And it's not to take away, you know individual effort matters and individual moxie matters and there are people who work harder and hustle and we want to encourage that and have a society that rewards that and an economy that rewards that. But these levels of extreme inequality have nothing to do with differences in effort, you know. I mean it has more to do with luck and timing and the reality is no, if somebody has substation wealth, 5 million 10 million dollars, they didn't do it alone. They live in a society that we together have made investments that have created a fertile ground for wealth creation. And if you're fortunate to have a high level of wealth, you kind of have an obligation to pay back the society so somebody else who's not born wealthy, can have the same opportunities you had. That's my argument to Mark Zuckerberg, is where would you have been without, you know, 50-70 years of public investments creating the internet? Creating the public infrastructure and technological infrastructure that makes his business possible. He is just putting a cherry on top of an ice cream sundae that somebody else made. He doesn't get to keep the whole sundae, he has to share.
Rob: That's it. Now you've done some work to try to get these very wealth to give back. You worked with Bill Gates' father on that. Can you talk about that project?
CC: Sure and actually right now, I've helped cofound a network
called The Patriotic Millionaires that has working all over the country,
there's like 250 members of the Patriotic Millionaires who are actively out
there pressing for fair tax policy, advocating for raising the minimum wage,
campaign finance reforms that reduce the influence of big money in politics.
Those are all things that the Patriotic Millionaires support and so I'm not
saying that all the wealthy people out there are doing this. There's a segment
of the 1% that are kind of like, the Koch brothers. They use their wealth and
power to rig the rules to get more wealth and power, and that's what a lot of
wealthy people do and a lot of people just kind of go along with that. But
there's an organized opposition there, if you will. There's a lot of people who
see these inequalities are really taking us down the wrong road you know.
That's the good news. That not all rich people are greedy and just want more.
I'm inspired to say there's a huge segment of people who want the society, want
the economy to work for everybody, not just the rich.
Rob: Your report actually lists those 20 individuals. And some of them are ones
of have committed to giving away their money, right?
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