Clueless Young Billion-Heirs Get Royal Treatment at White House [View all]

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http://www.alternet.org/economy/clueless-young-billionheirs-get-royal-treatment-white-house



Are you young? Largely ignorant of what goes on in the real world? Is your name Rockeller or Marriott? Could you pass for Justin Bieber?

The President wants to see you, baby! Come on up in here.

As economist Thomas Piketty, author of a new blockbuster book on inequality, tours the East Coast warning that America will soon become a place in which inherited wealth means as much — or more — as it did in Downton Abbey Britain, the White House is wasting no time pandering to young people who have grown up in breathtaking privilege. The New York Times reported that the Prez recently invited a passel of fat kittens to an invitation-only summit to "find common ground between the public sector and the so-called next-generation philanthropists, many of whom stand to inherit billions in private wealth."

Like royal courts in time of yore, when the scions of the wealthy would preen and socialize with others of their ilk, todays oligarchs-in-training are coming to DC to see and be seen, to pay and accept tribute. In order to make things appear less crass than a simple handover of cash, these young folks are invited to indulge their ruminations about improving society — which, as you might imagine, does not involve things like a global wealth tax. Or larger inheritance taxes.