Just Politics17 Apr 2023

No good billionaires

As Tax Day approaches, we look at the hazards of extreme wealth disparity. In his State of the Union address this year, President Biden called for the passage of the Billionaire Minimum Income Tax Act, saying that billionaires shouldn't pay less in taxes than teachers and firefighters. But that injustice is only one datapoint in a decades-long trend of ever-widening inequality between the wealthiest people and everyone else. In this episode, Sarah Christopherson, legislative and policy director for Americans for Tax Fairness, discusses the ill effects and ongoing risks to society posed by a small group of individuals having the raw purchasing power to buy elections, social media platforms, and even the Supreme Court. And Kate Ward, an assistant professor of Christian ethics at Marquette University, lays out why Catholic social teaching opposes stratospheric wealth inequality, citing a moral tradition that stretches all the way from the Hebrew Scriptures to Pope Francis. She also offers her view on the kind of just tax code the church's social teaching would support.

You can learn more about tax justice, wealth disparity, and our guests in the links below.

NETWORK's Tax Justice for All resource
https://networklobby.org/taxjusticeforall/

Pew Research data on the growth of wealth disparity in the United States
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-and-wealth-inequality/psdt_01-10-20_economic-inequality_1-4/

More on the Billionaire Minimum Income Tax
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/8558

More on Sarah Christopherson and Americans for Tax Fairness
https://americansfortaxfairness.org/about/

More on Kate Ward
https://www.marquette.edu/theology/directory/kate-ward.php

Just Politics is sponsored by St. Jude League Community Development.
https://stjudeleague.org/

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