Get the 'Wealth Hoarders' To Pay For the Biden Infrastructure Bill

Claudia Cragg @claudiacragg speaks here for @KGNU (Denver, Boulder, Fort Collins, www.kgnu.org) for #ItsTheEconomy with Chuck Collins, senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies. There, he directs the Program on Inequality and the Common Good. Collins latest book is The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions. He has written a number of other books including '99 to 1: How Wealth Inequality is Wrecking the World and What We Can Do About It', and 'Born on Third Base: A One Percenter Makes the Case for Tackling Inequality', 'Bringing Wealth Home', and 'Committing to the Common Good'. He has also written numerous reports about billionaire wealth during the pandemic. Discussion in this latest interview for @KGNU focuses on getting the Biden Infrastructure Bill paid for in a way that is also combined with tackling the egregious crisis of inequality in the United States. This is is so serious now, says Collins, that President Joe Biden is declaiming that, "It's time to build our economy from the bottom up and from the middle out, not the top down." In recent speeches promoting his Infrastructure Bill and his American Jobs Plan, President Biden said, "I'm proposing a plan for the nation that rewards work, not just rewards wealth." In admitting that our current system rewards wealth, President Biden revealed what American financial and political elites have known for decades: that we do NOT live in a meritocracy. Instead, we live in a nation where you have to be rich to get richer.