AUDIO: Chuck Collins Makes a Case for Taxing Billionaires — for a Fairer Economy

“These concentrations of wealth and power are distorting everything we care about,” Chuck Collins tells WHYY — making the case for wealth taxes, a restored inheritance tax, and a fairer economy for the bottom 99%.

In a spirited debate on WHYY’s Studio 2, Chuck Collins, senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and author of Burned by Billionaires, debates with Adam Michel of the Cato Institute about one of the most pressing economic questions of our time: should billionaires pay more in taxes?

Chuck opens by tracing how the United States arrived at this moment of extreme inequality. “Starting in the late ’70s, lawmakers and policymakers started to change the laws, tax policy, trade policy in a way that launched decades of growing inequality,” he explains. “The rules of the economy have been changed to funnel wealth to the top and keep wages low and flat — and that’s been the underlying story of the last four decades.”

Chuck strongly rejects the notion that concentrated wealth is simply a byproduct of innovation and hard work. “These concentrations of wealth and power are distorting everything we care about,” he warns. “We have crossed a line.” Once a fortune crosses the $50 million threshold, he argues, it stops being just personal wealth and starts becoming something else entirely: “It’s a senator. It’s a newspaper. It’s influence and power.”

On the question of tax dodging, Chuck is direct: “When you’re a billionaire, you have a whole armada of financial planners and tax attorneys — I call them the wealth defense industry — who work on your behalf to play these shell games and move money to the shadows.”

That is why the polling data is so clear — ordinary people clearly recognize what’s happening. “They know that the rich have been gaming the system. They see that their own tax bills are going up at the state and local level as we shift taxes off of wealth and onto wages,” Chuck explains.

Chuck lays out a concrete three-part solution: protect and strengthen the income tax, restore the inheritance tax to its historical levels, and institute an annual wealth tax — paired with international treaties to prevent wealth flight. “If we did those three things plus enforcement,” he says, “you could begin to turn the corner and reduce these extreme concentrations of wealth and power in a generation.”

This solution has a solid precedent. “When we taxed high incomes and high wealth in the years after World War II, we moved from a society of 44% home ownership to 70%. We narrowed the racial wealth divide,” Chuck notes.

Chuck emphasizes that this is a proven solution: “Taxing extreme wealth, investing it in things that create opportunity for everybody — that’s a formula that we actually know, and we’ve demonstrated that it created shared prosperity for decades.”

Listen to the full debate on WHYY’s Studio 2 — or watch below: