![]() There were a few human beings who gradually, through the process of invention and experiment, built and operated, first, local river and bay, next, along-shore, then off-shore rafts, dugouts, grass broats, and outrigger sailing canoes.Warren Buffet speaking to the US Senate Finance Committee (14 November 2007).A progressive and meaningful estate tax is needed to curb the movement of a democracy toward plutocracy. Equality of opportunity has been on the decline. Dynastic wealth, the enemy of a meritocracy, is on the rise.It’s an inflation-adjusted measure of the cost of a basket of food in 1955 relative to household income, adjusted for family size-and it’s still the way we measure poverty today. government counts who is poor and who is not, frankly, is a sixty-year-old mess that doesn’t tell us what we need to know. This myth has been reinforced by our deeply flawed official measurements of poverty and economic hardship. It’s also in their interest to perpetuate the myth that the poverty problem has largely been solved and so we needn’t worry about the rich getting richer-even while our real social safety net is full of gaping holes. It is in the interest of the greedy and the powerful to perpetuate myths of deservedness-that they deserve their wealth and power because they are smarter and work harder, while the poor deserve to be poor because they are lazy and intellectually inferior. ![]() Key to these rollbacks: controlling the narrative about who is poor in America and the world. And the ultra-rich and big corporations have also managed to dominate our campaign finance system, making it easier for them to buy off politicians who commit to rigging the rules against the poor and the environment, and to suppress voting rights, making it harder for the poor to fight back.
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