Chuck Collins talks about his latest book titled, Burned by Billionaires, where he chronicles how the actions of the top .01 percent have severe consequences for the rest of us, exposing how the rich rig the game in their favor, resulting in a concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny class of billionaires—and leading to both intense income and political polarization.
SCOTT HARRIS: Right now I’m very happy to welcome to our program Chuck Collins. He’s a campaigner, researcher, storyteller and he’s based at the Institute for Policy Studies where he directs the Program on Inequality and the Common Good, where he co-edits their newsletter and website called Inequality.org. And I recommend a subscription to that, free. And Chuck Collins is the author of more than 10 books, investigating economic inequality, including the Wealth Hoarders and Born on Third Base.
And I want to thank you, Chuck, for making time to come on our program this evening and congratulations on this brand new book that we’re going to be talking about this evening, which is titled Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power are Ruining Our Lives and the Planet. Thanks for being here.
CHUCK COLLINS: Thanks for having me, Scott.
SCOTT HARRIS: So I first wanted to ask you to place in context the level of income inequality we see in the U.S. today in comparison to other times and eras in our nation’s history, including the Gilded Age, for example, just to have a sense of how far this thing has gone in terms of economic inequality.
CHUCK COLLINS: Yeah. Well if you think of the Gilded Age going back maybe 120 years now, really 1880 to 1910 around World War I, that was a period of extreme inequality. We think of the great robber baron fortunes— the Rockefellers and the Carnegies—400 families owning half the wealth of the country. But then we entered a period of relative equality coming out of the Depression and there were a lot of social movements in response to the Gilded Age, the emergence of a labor movement and rural populist farmers and changed the rules of the economy. So for several decades, we had a much more equal society and we were moving, we were closing the economic divide, not pulling apart really up to the mid-1970s.
And now the last five decades, we’ve gradually been pulling apart and I would say the last 10 years we’ve seen this extraordinary updraft of wealth from the bottom and the middle to the top 1 percent. And really the ultra-wealthy, the billionaire class have been the biggest winners. So now we’re re-entering a new chapter of extreme inequality in the U.S. that none of us have ever lived through.
CHUCK COLLINS: And I think this is really the purpose of this book, is really to sort of say, look, this really touches you. It really matters to you. It affects your tax bill because the billionaires are opting out of paying taxes. So you’re picking up the slack. It affects your sense of voice and power and your vote in a democracy as billionaires kind of usurp and capture our political system.
It drives up the cost of housing, not just old gentrification with wealthy people bidding up the cost of land and housing, but kind of billionaire inequality, supercharging the housing gap.
And on down the list it’s affecting the environment. It’s bad for your health and your mental health. It’s even affecting kind of your food, what’s on the dinner plate. What your news is. So it pretty much touches every corner. People sometimes say to me, “Oh, does this really matter? Who cares how rich the rich are? Isn’t this just resentment and envy?” And I would say it’s not about that. It’s sort of about the power of the wealthy to rig the economy in a certain way and it really does matter to our day-to-day lives.
SCOTT HARRIS: We’re speaking with Chuck Collins, a campaigner, researcher and storyteller at the Institute for Policy Studies where he directs the Program on Inequality and the Common Good and we’re talking about his brand new book titled, Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power are Ruining Our Lives and Planet. This is listener-supported WPKN in Bridgeport 89.5 FM, WPKN.org on the web and we certainly will be archiving this program so you can hear it later and putting it on our CounterpointRadio.org and Between The Lines (BTLonline.org) sites as well. I’ll tell you about that later if you don’t know already.
But Chuck, I did want to get to this question. The wealthiest people in our country are celebrated, sometimes even worshiped for what’s said to be their intelligence and hard work that enabled them to accumulate their wealth. And you challenge the notion that we here in the U.S. live in a meritocracy where hard work and smarts alone can achieve a millionaire and billionaire status. Talk about how this system enables the wealthy to get wealthier, where it doesn’t provide the same access and assistance for the rest of us.
CHUCK COLLINS: Well, I think we can all think of examples where individuals have started a business and they’ve created something useful, a better mousetrap or something that most of us want and they are rewarded as business founders and business leaders. And I think that’s what a healthy capitalism looks like.
What I see is that when people get wealth over a certain level, say $40-$50 million, they start to use that power. They have enough wealth that they can meet all their needs and their children’s needs and they can fly a jet and they can have multiple houses. But then they start to use that wealth and power to block competition, form monopolies, hire tax advisors to help them hide their money. They start to rig the rules and they start to instead of buy houses. They buy senators and media outlets. And that’s when it’s really a problem. That’s when it’s becoming dangerous to the rest of us.
So I think we’re in a different stage at this point. The super-billionaire class is using their wealth and power to almost extract more wealth from the real healthy economy, not for any productive reason, but in a way that harms everyone else. And so that story of the virtuous wealth creator is still true and there’s still some people who pull themselves up and take risks and start businesses. But that’s not why we’ve become as unequal as we have. It’s because some people have figured out how to rig the rules and get more than they should take.
SCOTT HARRIS: When it comes to democracy, in this book you talk about the enormous influence the wealthiest have and certainly there’s some obvious examples just in recent months with Elon Musk donating what is it, three- quarters of a billion dollars—just an enormous amount of money to Donald Trump’s campaign. But we’ve seen that for years, especially since the Supreme Court decided on the case Citizens United allowing unlimited amounts of often concealed identities of who’s providing these gargantuan amounts of money to candidates. But tell us about how the millionaires and billionaires and the system that enables them to accumulate such wealth, how that denigrates and erodes our democratic institutions.
The other though is on legislation. And here’s where billionaires wield their power to block popular legislation. Just as recently as three and a half years ago, Congress passed a bill called Build Back better —wildly popular. It was going to create a modern childcare system. It was going to lift up and increase the number of people with health insurance. It was going to create new affordable housing opportunities for first-time homebuyers. It was going to do all kinds of things that poll very popularly and it was going to be paid for by taxes on multi-millionaires and billionaires. And most people, Republicans, Democrats, independents, all the majority agree wealthy people are not paying their fair share of taxes.
So what the wealthy are able to do is block things that most of us want and that’s one of the ways that power is wielded. And so we’re essentially losing our voice and our votes to these billionaires who are capturing our political system and depriving us from our agency and voice.
SCOTT HARRIS: I wanted to get your brief comment on what we see happening in New York City with the (mayoral) candidacy of Zohran Momani, a South Asian guy who grew up in Uganda and South Africa, a Muslim guy who’s very popular and he’s focused like a laser beam on the issue of affordability. And he doesn’t play favorites with millionaires and billionaires as our former New York state Gov. Andrew Cuomo does. But what do you think of his popularity—and we don’t know if he’s going to win the November election or not in New York City—but what do you think we see happening there?
But in Maine there’s a former lobstermen running and there’s a machinist in Iowa running for Senate. We’re going to see more and more of these populist candidates who are saying, “I’m not supporting the billionaire agenda.” So I think it’s a trend. We see that with Sen. Bernie Sanders, but we’re going to see a lot more of those candidates and they’re going to start winning. And that’s really ultimately what’s going to change the political direction in this country. One of the things that’s going to make a big difference.
SCOTT HARRIS: And we’re hopeful that the U.S. military occupation of various cities around the country is not some kind of dark design to deny us the vote in 2026 and beyond. It’s really, unfortunately, you said that eight months ago, you might’ve thought I was crazy, but I think we’re all worried about the future of our ability to change who is in power in Washington.
But I do have one last question on the book, Chuck, and that is your last chapter. An agenda to reduce billionaire power and improve our lives is certainly one of the most important reads in this book, and we can’t go through it the next few minutes. But what are the basics there in terms of your hope for a blueprint to dethrone the billionaires and restore democracy and more economic equality in our country?
CHUCK COLLINS: Well, I think we’re in a particularly dark moment. It’s hard to imagine alternatives. But actually I think at the state and local level, you start to see campaigns that I think are examples of what we want to do.
I think the way to get a rebalance of our economy, to reduce inequality and make the economy work for everybody is by taxinghigh levels of wealth and high income and investing in things that lift up everybody else. And that’s what made this country great. That’s what got us out of the Depression. We used to tax wealthy at much higher levels and invest in things like first-time home-buyer loan programs and debt-free college education and infrastructure that benefits everybody in a broad education system.
So I think we could start in some cities. We could tax luxury real estate. Tax vacant absentee-owned luxury properties and invest in permanently affordable housing. We can tax private jets and private jet fuel and invest in transportation for everybody else. Those are the kind of campaigns that I think are going to meet immediate needs. They’re going to improve the lives of people, but they’re also going to reduce this concentration of wealth and power. And that’s the key here. If we want to save our democracy, we need to break up these concentrations of wealth and power. Taxes is one of the most important ways we can do that.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, Chuck, thank you. I’m sorry we’re out of time now, but I’d love to have you back because there’s a lot of policy issues I know we’re going to be encountering as a nation coming up, so I’d love to get your take on that. So we’ll stay in touch. Again, congratulations on the new book, Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power are Ruining our Lives and Planet. Best to you, Chuck.
CHUCK COLLINS: Thanks Scott. And thanks for the conversation. It’s great that you have this program.
SCOTT HARRIS: Indeed. Thanks, Chuck. Goodnight. That’s Chuck Collins, a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies where he directs the Program on Inequality and the Common Good.
