“What’s the number one driver of inequality? It’s not immigrants taking jobs, as some would have you believe. And it’s not bad trade deals or cuts to public programs, although these certainly play a role. According to one important new study, lower taxes on the wealthy have been inequality’s prime driver.

“One hundred years ago this month, Americans raised taxes on the wealthy by enacting the federal estate tax, the first significant levy on grand concentrations of private fortune. I chronicled this history last week in a US News & World Report column on the 100th anniversary of estate taxation.

“Seriously taxing our big estates would raise many billions in new revenue. Where could these billions go? Many ought to flow to the millions of family caregivers and home care workers whose work now goes so deeply undervalued”.  (Chuck Collins, Director, Program on Inequality and the Common Good, Institute for Policy Studies).

My message to the American super-rich and their friends trying to abolish the Estate Tax:

” In 1776 your forebears rebelled against Good  (I’m joking) King George III and his aristocratic government in London.  The issue ostensibly was the  tax on the colonists, designed to pay for the French wars, and waged by rich aristocrats in England who paid little or nothing . Today, you are yourselves , by trying to abolish the Estate Tax,  establishing an aristocracy that can pass money, free of tax, from one generation to another.  In our capitalist society it is fine that people can make fortunes, but they cannot make them without the whole structure of civilised institutions paid for by the whole community.  The Estate Tax is the “thank you”  to fellow citizens for making it possible to thrive and make a fortune.  Sons, daughters and grandchildren should stand on their own feet and make their own fortunes.  An aristocracy of money should have no place in this country’s system”.