Do We Need ‘Student Loans’ for Billionaires?

[marmar]

from Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality:




Do We Need ‘Student Loans’ for Billionaires?
October 15, 2011

Students of modest means must pay a stiff price to build their capacity to contribute to society — and pay interest if they can’t afford that price. A wealth tax could apply this same principle to America’s rich.

By Sam Pizzigati


Polly Toynbee, a commentator for Britain’s Guardian newspaper, plays a role quite similar to Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who doubles as a New York Times columnist. Both regularly advance well-reasoned — and even inspirational — attacks on the concentration of income and wealth that have left the United States and the UK the world’s two most unequal developed nations.

Both also rate as eminently pragmatic. They champion the politically possible. But we live today in tumultuous times, and that may be why Toynbee last week found herself celebrating a proposal for taxing the rich that rather boldly stretches most anybody’s sense of political practicality.

Why not levy, Toynbee asked, a one-time 20 percent tax on the total wealth of Britain’s richest tenth, a tax “graduated” to ensure that the richest 1 percent pay at a higher rate than households at the bottom of this top 10 percent?

This one-time “windfall taking” tax, Toynbee suggested, could help “save services, save jobs, expunge the national debt, kick-start growth, and set the economy on the road to recovery.” .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://toomuchonline.org/wealth-tax-student-loans-for-billionaires/