As a columnist for The Washington Post, Megan McArdle works for the Post’s owner, a man named Jeff Bezos. Over the past two decades, McArdle has had numerous other prestigious bosses. She boasts a solid career in high-level journalism, having worked for The Atlantic, Newsweek, The Economist and...
This week, ProPublica published a long, detailed article that blew the roof off two burning and intimately related questions currently in the news: wealth inequality and taxation. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Thomas Piketty, Branko Milanovic and numerous pundits in the media have...
In his recently published book, “Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America,” Kurt Andersen examines and deconstructs the past 50 years of economic history in the US. He tells the story of a disastrous but well-orchestrated trend toward rising and aggravated income inequality that has permitted...
Having done the accounting on the wealth of the 12 richest Americans, MarketWatch’s editor, Shawn Langlois, points to what he sees as “a disturbing milestone.” Led by Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, the economic and political clout of what Chuck Collins of the Institute for Policy...
What is the point of having a billion dollars? Most people would say, after observing the behavior of recent billionaires, that the point is to turn the first billion into multiple billions. If you don’t spend it or bury it in the ground, money grows. That’s a law of nature. And when you have...
Andy Serwer, editor-in-chief of Yahoo Finance, has just addressed an open letter to Donald Trump. He begins by congratulating the billionaire president of the United States on the current success of the American economy before segueing into a polite but acerbic critique of Trump’s legacy, in...
The public must decide: Should billionaires be taxed out of existence, banished from the republic or forced to do the bidding of the poor one day in the year in a modern version of the medieval “Feast of Fools”? Put another way, the media have decided that the fisticuffs, in particular between...
