This is the Tom Hartman program.

Welcome back Tom Hartman here with you.

In the last hour we were talking about the corrosive influence or impact on our society

of great wealth and how great wealth was to a some extent anyway kept in check through

the period of the 1950s 60s 70s by a 91% top income tax rate which Reagan blew all the

hell and we never got back we haven't been about 50% since then like most developed countries

are on very very wealthy people.

But let's do a little deeper dive in all of this.

How do we best deal with billionaires and how do we best deal with the damage they do

to our economy and our politics with Professor Richard Wolf the economist the co-founder of

democracy at work.info his latest book the system is the sickness when capitalism fails

to save us from pandemics or itself our D. Wolf with 2Fs.com is also his one of his

websites Prof. Wolf is his Twitter handle with 2Fs Professor Wolf welcome back.

How do we best deal with billionaires and the damage that they do to our economy and

to our politics?

Well I think we can dip into our own history we have been a society that has always had

right from the beginning part of our revolutionary tradition a notion that equality in economic

terms is part of what we ought to have poll after poll including in the most recent months

indicates that Americans want less inequality overwhelmingly than we have and when asked

what they think we have they underestimate how unequal it is and that's partly because

they don't want to believe that it is even possible to have the kinds of inequality that

we now have.

...