COMMONS MAGAZINE

Posted
November 12, 2016

Solutions for Inequality from a One-Percenter

"I don’t hate wealthy people. They are my family. But I hate what inequality has done."

Chuck Collins, a former OTC board member, has devoted most of his life to the cause of making the American economy more fair.  As co-founder of Wealth for the Common Good and co-author (with Bill Gates Sr.) of Wealth and Common Wealth: Why America Should Tax Accumulated Fortunes, he’s a leading advocate that people who have benefited so handsomely from America’s economic system owe the nation something in return.

Collins’ views were shaped by his own experiences of growing up as the great grandson of meat packing pioneer Oscar Mayer. He was a classmate of Mitt Romney at an elite private school in Detroit. “I’ve had a front row seat in my life about these problems of inequality,” Collins explains.

“I don’t hate wealthy people,” he says in this powerful TEDx Talk…. “These people are my family, my mentors. But I hate what inequality has done, deepening our racial divide, tearing our communities apart.”

“The wealthiest one percent have taken off on a rocket launcher, capturing most of the gains of wealth and income in the last decade.” Indeed, the wealthiest one-tenth of one percent now have more wealth than the bottom 90 percent of the American population.

Here is Collins’ Wealthiest One Percent, Come Home!  TEDx Talk given last fall in Jamaica Plain, his neighborhood of Boston.