As many Americans have struggled to make ends meet during the pandemic, the wealth of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and other billionaires has gone up by $1.3 trillion.
And there is an entire professional sector—including tax attorneys, estate planners, accountants, and wealth managers—dedicated to help wealthy individuals and corporations protect, preserve, and accumulate wealth while paying as little in taxes as possible. In other words, they are paid millions to hide trillions.
This is the subject of inequality expert Chuck Collins’ new book, The Wealth Hoarders. He joins us today to talk about the “wealth defense industry,” the way billionaires are affecting every sector from art to farming, the problems with billionaire philanthropy, and what we can do about this new class of wealth hoarders.
Chuck Collins will be in conversation about The Wealth Hoarders with Norm Stockwell at a virtual event hosted by A Room of One’s Own this Thursday, April 15 at 7:00 PM (please note that we mistakenly announced this as 7:30 PM on the show). More information available here.
Chuck Collins is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, where he directs the Program on Inequality and the Common Good and co-edits Inequality.org. He is author of several books, including 99 to 1: How Wealth Inequality is Wrecking the World and What We Can Do About It (Berrett-Koehler, 2012), Born on Third Base: A One Percenter Makes the Case for Tackling Inequality, Bringing Wealth Home, and Committing to the Common Good (Chelsea Green, 2016), Is Inequality in America Irreversible? (Polity, 2018), and The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions (Polity, 2021).