To the New President

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Dear Mr. President


You are rich.  We don't know if you are Super-Rich, but you are rich for sure.  Unlike almost any other political leader, you are not beholden to the Super-Rich as a class.  That gives you an important degree of freedom, if you have the nerve to use it, to serve the good of all Americans, rich and poor and everywhere between.


In a capitalist democracy, economic and political power are basically the same thing.  An extraordinarily skilled political leader can achieve enough political power that enormous wealth seems to come along automatically.  Maybe Bill Clinton is an example of that phenomenon.  More often, on the other hand, those with enormous fortunes invest some of their millions or billions in political campaigns, insuring their long-term political as well as economic dominance.  The Koch brothers may be the most obvious example of this phenomenon in our time.

But you are different from either group.

For America to be Great again, we need our economy to work vigorously, efficiently, and stably.  We need our democracy to work smoothly and fairly too.  The greatest obstacle between our current position and the greatness we can achieve is the vast, and still growing gap between the Super-Rich and all the rest of us.

You, Mr. President, free of obligations to the other Fat Cats and unburdened by the dogmatic platitudes of the Fat Cats' political stooges, you have a unique ability to put America on the path toward ridding ourselves of this huge obstacle.  Start today to lay the groundwork to restore a sufficient degree of equal opportunity to American life.

A very logical place to begin would be to set up a generous but steeply graduated estate tax system, to start immediately.  Nothing promotes and sustains inequality like large, or rather "Yuge" inheritances.  Let's put a stop to that now.

It would work something like this: a Super-Rich person could leave a vast estate of - for example - $250 million with no tax required at the time it is inherited by her spouse or his children (or whoever is named an heir).  But the next $500 thousand above that initial $250 million would be taxed at 10%, the next $500 thousand after that would be taxed at 20%, next at 35%, next at 55%, and so on, until taxes on some gigantic amount would reach 85% or even 90% (for instance).

The concept would be that the untaxed amount would be relatively large, but then the slope of graduation in taxes on estates would be relatively steep.  That would be a good start toward addressing the greatest political and economic problem facing America today.

Neither the economy nor the democracy will work efficiently and stably without at least a relative equality of opportunity among all our citizens.  A capitalist economy operates efficiently only if the wealth it produces ends up being distributed widely enough to produce prosperity among both producers and consumers, owners and workers, sellers and buyers, investors and small business women and men, in short among all of us.  Extreme concentration of wealth at any point on just about any spectrum running through an economy creates instability and declining ability to work, to spend, to invest, or to innovate. 

Mr. President, you are in a unique position where you can say boldly and clearly to the Super-Rich that "Trickle-Down" economics is simply b.s.  The wealth of the nation moving disproportionately to those who are already rich does not significantly benefit anyone but the rich themselves, while all aspects of the rest of our culture declines.  Infrastructure, health care, education: all suffer as more and more of our wealth goes to the top.  And you, rich Mr. President, can lead us back toward the kind of balance our economy requires to help everyone prosper proportionately.

Please take advantage of your freedom.  Lead us back toward the Great America where the opportunity to thrive is spread more or less equally throughout all of society!

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