We had a few stories bouncing off this, one by Tom Murphy noting it isn’t so simple or easy as Trump may think to walk away. Speaking of crazy times … As usual, Paulson and I precede the interview by revisiting some of the top news stories in and around the Humanosphere lately, beginning of course with President Donald Trump’s arguably crazed announcement that he intends to renege on the Paris climate change agreement. Crazy times, yes, but perhaps just crazy enough to get us out of some dangerous, destructive ruts. Our headline “Inequality Rising” is meant to convey this yin-and-yang – the fact that we are at a crisis point but one in which truly transformative change for the common good may finally happen. It’s this silver lining we explore with Collins, who like many is worried about the current state of affairs in our politics and the rising tide of nationalism, isolationism and xenophobia worldwide. The problem today certainly has grown, Collins says, yet this appears to have led to greater public attention and concern. While Collins, Gates and others helped foil the previous attempt to kill the estate tax, wealth concentration and inequality have since gotten worse. Talking about ‘inequality’ back then made folks nervous, even liberals, who thought it sounded a bit, well, like a communist. Bush Administration’s attempt to get rid of the estate tax (which President Trump and Congress are seeking to do again). As editor Tom Paulson notes in his interview with Collins, he and Bill Gates Sr. The point here is that Collins, who inherited substantial wealth as an heir to the Oscar Mayer meat family (if we can call it that), has long been fighting to push back against wealth concentration and its abuses of power in this country.

Wealth and Commonwealth: Why America Should Tax Accumulated Fortunes. That’s a much longer book title than his earlier book co-authored with Bill Gates Sr.

Collins is the author of several books warning against rising wealth concentration and inequality, most recently Born on Third Base: A One Percenter Makes the Case for Tackling Inequality, Bringing Wealth Home and Committing to the Common Good. For today’s Humanosphere podcast, we talk with Chuck Collins at, a project of the Institute for Policy Studies, a left-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C.

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