Chuck Collins
Chuck Collins is the Director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies, where he co-edits Inequality.org.
His 2021 book is titled, The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Spend Millions to Hide Trillions. His newest book is a novel, Altar to an Erupting Sun, which is a near-future story of one community facing climate disruption in the critical decade ahead. The protagonist, Rae, lays the primary responsibility on the doorstep of a small number of powerful people in the fossil fuel industries that have actively blocked meaningful responses. Another related study to climate change and income inequality shows that private jet travel of the ultra-wealthy adds to the harmful emissions that contribute to global warming and the taxpayers are subsidizing that industry for many wealthy people who do not need financial assistance. A corollary of the jet subsidy study and the novel is that the income inequality gap is growing dramatically. For example, Over the past 50 years, the highest-earning 20% of U.S. households have steadily brought in a larger share of the country’s total income. One percent owns 44% of the world’s wealth. Income inequality in the U.S. is the highest of all the G7 and OECD nations, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Many of the following actions help create greater income inequality: deregulation, decline of labor unions, AI and automation, PACs and dark money donated to politicians, subsidies to industries such as fossil fuels and offshore tax havens.
