One of my long time obsessions as a policy reporter is the question of wealth.

Most of American politics, most of American economic policy, I would say is about the question of income.

What wages look like, whether they're rising or falling for whom, when we talk about inequality, we're typically talking about income.

But wealth is as important, I think maybe more important. We don't measure it as well, but it says more about what a family, what a person can actually do under duress.

It says more about how they can invest in their future. It says more knowing their wealth can often tell you a lot more than their income can about the long term prospects of that family.

And wealth has his other quality again, different than income, which is it is where the past compounds into the present, where injustices of the past compound into the present, where the benefits of the past privileges of the past compound into the present.

Well, this where the long story of a family or a country makes the reality of the moment. And for that reason, it's uncomfortable. Well, this uncomfortable, because what does it mean to inherit?

What does it mean to ask people to pay up for the sins of those who came before them?

But on the other hand, much more so than income, if you don't do anything about wealth, it just compounds and the inequalities of a society go greater and become more present every single day.

So for all those reasons, I've long been interested in policies that would do something about the wealth gaps we have.

Often what we do is we make policy to make wealth inequality worse. In the time I've covered politics, we've made the estate tax a lot looser. We've made the thresholds beneath which it doesn't apply much higher.

You can pass down millions of dollars before you get tax now.

We also just a ton of tax policy meant to help people build wealth, which is great. We help people by homes and we help people go to college and we help people do all these good things.

The problem is you can only get that policy if you have some wealth to put into these advantage to accounts in the first place.

What we don't have a lot of is policy that helps people who don't have wealth build it.

And so I've been very intrigued by this idea that the economist Eric Hamilton and others have put forward called baby bonds, which would be this proposal to simply give people wealth everybody.

Now not everybody get the same amount you get a lot more if you were poor than if you were rich if you did not have wealth as a family than if you did.

You would not be able to use it for anything it circumscribed it's a wealth building policy not just a policy fell people spend.

But more so than anything else out there it has this potential to all in one swoop really shift the wealth distribution of the country really make sure that everybody has a chance to enjoy the benefits of wealth as opposed to that being something that is reserved for those who got it from generations before them.

But that those who did not have that luck simply are left without their Hamilton is a professor of economics and urban policy at the new school.

He served on the Biden Sanders unity task force and was an advisor to Bernie Sanders. His ideas have been picked up into lots of pieces of federal legislation and baby bonds in particular has been introduced by Cory Booker and I on a press Lee in Congress not in its exact form of his but in a pretty close one.

So this is a policy actively under consideration if something you can imagine passing at some point in the future if it were something Democrats prioritized if it were something that they wanted to make the thing they did if they got power again.

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