Wealth And Our Commonwealth -Why America Should Tax Accumulated Fortunes excerpt on Thinking Peace

by William H. Gates and Chuck Collins

The essence of the American experiment is our collective rejection of European hereditary aristocracy and grotesque inequalities of wealth. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, he noted that equality of condition permeated the American spirit: "The American experiment presupposes a rejection of inherited privilege." In the words of novelist John Dos Passos, "rejection of Europe is what America is all about."

The nation's founders and populace viewed excessive concentrations of wealth as incompatible with the ideals of the new nation. Revolutionary era visitors to Europe, including Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Ben Franklin, were aghast at the wide disparities of wealth and poverty they observed. They surmised that these great European inequalities were the result of an aristocratic system of land transfers, hereditary political power, and monopoly.

Monarchies and hereditary aristocracies mocked the republican principle of self-government. Writing in Common Sense, Thomas Paine attacked the notion of hereditary government: "To the evil of monarchy we have added that of hereditary succession; and as the first is a degradation and lessening of ourselves, so the second, claimed as a matter of right, is an insult and imposition on posterity."

In two other articles, "Rights of Man" and "Agrarian justice," Paine extended his contempt of inherited political power to a critique of inherited economic power. Paine proposed an inheritance tax that would fund an early version of Social Security.

The distrust of concentrated wealth was so great that, in an extreme sentiment, Ben Franklin argued "that no man ought to own more property than needed for his livelihood; the rest, by right, belonged to the state." One could not accumulate vast wealth, in the republican worldview, simply through one's own labors. In small-scale agrarian freeholder society, where laud ownership was more widely distributed among men of European ancestry, there was a "natural distribution of wealth." Farmers, artisans, and other workers reaped the "fruits of their own labor."

In 1776, artisans from Philadelphia put forward a provision for inclusion in the original state constitution of Pennsylvania. They advocated for a limit on the concentration of wealth. "An enormous Proportion of Property vested in a few Individuals is dangerous to the Rights, and destructive of the Common Happiness of Mankind; and therefore any free State hath a Right by its Laws to discourage the Possession of such Property."

The provision was narrowly rejected. But the concern about inequality and accumulated wealth was present at the formation of our nation.

Indeed, central to American republicanism was the principle of a broad and fair distribution of wealth and property. Noah Webster, writing in favor of adopting the U.S. Constitution in 1787, expressed that "a general and tolerably equal distribution of landed property is the whole basis of national freedom" and wide spread distribution of property was "the very soul of a republic." Too much inequality was a threat to a self-governing society. Without an equitable land distribution, the founders believed, the republic would not survive.

John Adams also viewed broad land ownership as a key ingredient in maintaining a balance of political power. He was greatly influenced by seventeenth-century philosopher James Harrington, who argued that the widespread distribution of property dispersed power. Adams believed that when "economic power be came concentrated in a few hands, then political power flowed to those possessors and away from the citizens, ultimately resulting in an oligarchy or tyranny." In a 1776 letter to James Sullivan, Adams articulated his perspective that a balance in property owner ship was essential to liberty.

The balance of power in a society, accompanies the balance of property in land. The only possible way, then, of preserving the balance of power on the side of equal liberty and public virtue, is to make the acquisition of land easy to every member of society; to make a division of land into small quantities, so that the multitude may he possessed of landed estates. If the multitude is possessed of the balance of real estate, the multitude will take care of the liberty, virtue, and interest of the multitude, in all acts of government.

Thomas Jefferson, writing to James Madison in 1785 made the now famous statement that "the small land holders are the most precious part of a state." He argued that legislators could not invent too many devices for subdividing property, "only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind."

In the republican worldview, European aristocrats created unbalanced distributions of wealth by controlling the land through inheritance laws of primogeniture and entail. These land tenure systems allowed land transfers only to oldest male children, maintaining hereditary concentrations of land rather than broadly distributing it. In a conscious rejection of primogeniture, Jefferson wrote:

The descent of property of every kind therefore to all children, or to all the brothers and sisters, or other relations in equal degree, is a politic measure and a practicable one. Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise.

The revolutionaries believed in equitability, a notion of relative equality and fairness, rather than rigid equality. Revolutionary writers and orators underscored that American society would have modest inequalities. "The utopian schemes of leveling, and a community of goods," wrote Sam Adams, "are as visionary and impracticable, as those which vest all property in the Crown." Rigid equality, according to Sam Adams, would be "arbitrary, despotic, and in our government unconstitutional." Minor in equalities would exist as the result of differences in individual talent, effort, and modest variations in property ownership.

This equitability translated into a culture that was antiaristocratic in sentiment. To be labeled an aristocrat or to be accused of advocating for "aristocratic policies" was the ultimate political slander in revolutionary America. For instance, John Adams through much of his later years had to fight the whispers that he had "monarchist sympathies," having spent so many years consorting with royalty in France and England.

The founders celebrated the exceptionalism of the American experiment and heartily rejected aristocratic politics and economic policy. "The economic agenda for a republic became clear," writes James Huston. "Enact the opposite of aristocratic legislation."

What made the new nation unique was its relative equality. Noah Webster exuded confidence in the justness of the American system: "Here the equalizing genius of the laws distributes property to every citizen." In other words, no rent to an absentee landlord or land ownership monopolies.

In their enthusiasm, the revolutionaries glossed over some of the enormous inequalities that existed in colonial society, the most obvious of which was the existence of slavery. "American society was not egalitarian and some individuals possessed impressive amounts of wealth," writes Huston. "An elite did exist, and much of its property had come from political favoritism, inheritance, or family connections." At the same time, their prescrip tions for addressing this inequality were overly simplistic. For in stance, the founders thought that eliminating the aristocratic land laws of entails and primogeniture would institutionalize relative equality. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson wrote confidently that America's land tenure system encouraged subdivision and a broader distribution of land ownership, preventing aristocratic concentrations of ownership. Our nation's founders were blind to some of the inequalities in their midst. But our national creed -- with its aspiration to greater equality and suspicion of accumulated wealth and power -- was forged at the time of our nation's independence.

Economic historians have caricatured American economic thought as a conflict between Jeffersonian democratic egalitarians and Hamiltonian free market capitalists. But as historian Joseph J. Ellis observed, "the projection of their debate as the archetypal dialogue in American political culture has become a historical cartoon." In reality, both of these "founding brothers" shared a concern for balancing an unjust concentration of political power with liberty and free enterprise. Hamilton was more enamored With concentrations of economic power because they capital, or the "synergy of aggregated investment." Yet both Hamilton and Jefferson shared a rejection of the aristocratic economic system that allowed a few people to appropriate the fruits of labor of others, resulting in an unjust accumulation of property and wealth. The revolution never resolved this tension between economic freedom and democracy; rather it "contained the explosive energies of that debate within an ongoing argument that was eventually institutionalized in political parties and built into the fabric of our national identity." This balancing act lived within the republican consensus, a worldview that was to last almost 125 years.

Democracy, Charity, and the Economy: Minnesota's Stake in Estate Tax Reform
A Dialogue with Bill Gates, Sr. and Chuck Collins

On Minnesota's Council of Non-Profit website, October 22, 2003

On October 22, Bill Gates, Sr. and Chuck Collins joined MCN to discuss the important role that the estate tax plays for our democracy, our economy, and our society. Their conversation highlighted the devastating impact that repeal of the estate tax would have on charitable giving, and two recent reports by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and OMB Watch, which further document this research.
Their new book: Wealth and Our Commonwealth: Why America Should Tax Accumulated Fortunes is available at United for a Fair Economy

Democracy's Trust Fund
On TomPaine.common sense

Within weeks of passing a fiscally reckless $350 billion tax break primarily benefiting millionaires, Congress is at it again. The next stop on the ongoing "tax break offensive": permanent elimination of the estate tax.

The estate tax is a wealth inheritance tax, which exempts more than 98 percent of Americans. Only estates over $1 million for individuals and $2 million for couples are taxed today. The threshold rises incrementally to $3.5 million for individuals and $7 million for couples in 2009 -- exempting all but the most massive one-half of one percent of estates.

On June 18 the House of Representatives voted 264 to 163 to sink the estate tax, with 41 Democrats joining all but four of the Republican majority to sink the estate tax. The vote was virtually the same as a year ago.

The fate of the estate tax hangs on the Senate, where pro-repeal forces have been unable to muster the 60 votes they need to pass permanent repeal. There is more receptiveness to a reform proposal there, as complete repeal efforts will remain stalled for the foreseeable future.

If passed, estate tax repeal would enable the heirs of multi-millionaires and billionaires to keep an extra $161 billion in inherited fortunes by 2013 while adding to the deficit. Between 2014 and 2023, it would cost $820 billion in lost revenue.

Juxtapose the House's vote for another tax cut for multimillionaires with its refusal to address the expansion of the child credit for 12 million low-income working families, and you begin to appreciate the real drive behind these tax cuts.

The radical right's budget agenda is to shrink, shift and shaft. Shrink government to a "watchtower state," with military, police and property-rights protection. Shift the tax burden off wealth and onto wages, off of federal progressive taxation and onto regressive forms of state and local taxation. And shaft people who depend on government safety nets or investment in equality of opportunity.

Estate tax repeal has a hallowed spot in their program. And they keep repeating discredited myths to justify its elimination, such as the canard that the estate tax forces farmers out of business.

At a June 17 press conference, Tom Bius from the National Farmers Union, which represents over 300,000 small farmers, called on Congress to "stop using farmers to front for complete estate tax repeal." The Farmers Union supports reforming the estate tax, but not repeal. The pro-repeal American Farm Bureau has not produced a single example of a farm lost because of the estate tax.

Opponents of the estate tax claim the estate tax is "double taxation." But the bulk of assets in taxable estates -- appreciated stocks and real estate -- is wealth that has never been taxed.

On June 18, the House voted down a Democratic alternative that would have raised the wealth exempted by the estate tax from the current $1 million to $3 million immediately. The all-or-nothing repeal forces, backed by wealthy families, such as Mars candy and the Connells (Hallmark greeting cards), oppose compromise. Their hired hands in Congress have blocked reform efforts knowing they will undercut the "populist" image they have tried to cast. But such reforms will not help the Mars family (net worth $30 billion), who spent a $1 million last year to hire lobbying powerhouse Patton Boggs to lobby on the estate tax.

Our country is facing federal budget deficits of more than $400 billion a year, states are in their worst budget crisis since the 1930s and everything from schools to health care to fire departments are being slashed. Repealing the estate tax would be unconscionable.

Killing the estate tax would increase the deficit, deepen the cutbacks, shift the tax burden onto those less able to pay and jeopardize the Medicare and Social Security on which millions of Americans depend. To make matters worse, repeal would remove a healthy incentive for charitable giving, the lifeblood of our civic institutions.

At the heart of the case for preserving the estate tax is recognition that none of us gets to where we are alone. This is not to minimize individual hard work or creativity. But the United States has remarkably fertile soil for the creation of wealth thanks to public investments made over generations, funded in part by estate taxes. We have an extensive transportation infrastructure. We have a skilled workforce because of substantial investment in public schools and colleges.

Without taxpayer-funded research, there would be no Internet, no human genome mapping and few vaccines and medical wonder drugs. The estate tax is a reasonable repayment of a debt to our society by those who benefited most financially.

The real question is not how much money we are leaving our children and grandchildren, but what kind of country we are leaving them.

Do we want them to grow up in a polarized country with ever-greater extremes of wealth and poverty?

Do we want them to grow up in a country where equal opportunity has become a cruel joke? Where some children expect to inherit billions of dollars tax-free while millions of others suffer preventable illness and attend crumbling schools without libraries, art, music, science labs or even enough teachers?

Do we want to undermine democracy by turbocharging an increasingly powerful hereditary aristocracy? The top 1 percent of households already has almost 40 percent of the nation's wealth, twice the level of the 1970s.

Originally passed in 1916, the estate tax was a response to the wide inequalities of the Gilded Age and a recognition that too much concentrated wealth and power was putting democracy at risk. Societies with great hereditary concentrations of economic and political power are not friendly to strong stepping-stones of opportunity, including public education, small business assistance, and science and technology research. They are more focused on nurturing old wealth and power than creating avenues for new wealth and opportunity.

An estate tax on the very wealthiest Americans is not a threat to prosperity, but a pillar of a dynamic economy and democracy.

Published: Jun 20 2003

A Fair Payment for War
By William H. Gates Sr. and Chuck Collins

Tuesday, March 25, 2003; Page A09 Washingtonpost.com

Last week we saw something unprecedented in American history: a push for tax cuts targeted to the wealthy in a time of war. As U.S. jets prepared to bomb Baghdad, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) offered an amendment to the federal budget legislation accelerating the repeal of the estate tax. It is a provision that would benefit less than 2 percent of the wealthiest taxpayers. It passed by a narrow vote of 51 to 48.

There is something unseemly about Congress's obsession with repealing the estate tax, the nation's most equitable tax on accumulated wealth, at a time when life and death are at stake. The American history of estate and inheritance taxes is wound together with mobilizations for war. The first federal tax on wealth was levied in 1797, as our country was faced with the escalating costs of responding to French attacks on American shipping.

During the 19th century, federal revenue came primarily from excise taxes and tariffs. Income and estate taxes were imposed only in revenue emergencies, during the Civil War and the Spanish-American War. Wartime taxation, or the "conscription of wealth," was perceived as equitable at a time when many citizens were sacrificing their lives, sometimes as soldier proxies for wealthier citizens.

The 1916 estate tax was a fundamentally American response to the excessive inequalities of the Gilded Age and reflected the country's need to move beyond reliance on the regressive tariff and excise taxes as primary sources of government revenue. Yet it was given a tremendous push by the U.S. entry into World War I and the need for wartime funds. Even after the war, businessman Harlan E. Read argued in his book "The Abolition of Inheritance" that war debts should be paid off with heavy taxes on inherited wealth.

In order to pay for World War II, the income tax was broadened to many lower-income households. In 1942 Irving Berlin wrote a patriotic song called "I Paid My Income Tax Today" to mark the unprecedented tax collections. One verse went: "You see those bombers in the sky, Rockefeller helped to build them, so did I." President Franklin D. Roosevelt understood that national unity against Hitler depended on a sense of shared sacrifice, by both Rockefeller and Rosie the Riveter.

Top income rates were boosted, and the estate tax was increased so that fortunes exceeding $50 million would be taxed at 70 percent. FDR spoke out boldly against war profiteering, saying, "I don't want to see a single war millionaire created in the United States as a result of this world disaster."

Today the lives of some of our citizens are at risk. Others are feeling the pain of the recession, losing their jobs, savings and security. State and local governments, facing the worst budget cuts since World War II, are laying off workers and cutting education spending, children's health care and basic human services.

Rather than facing these problems and appropriating the money to resolve them, congressional leaders are using the diversion of war to pass a tax cut for the wealthy that would exacerbate budget shortfalls at all levels. While the public's attention is riveted on Iraq, the Senate acts to accelerate the repeal of the progressive estate tax.

At a time when states need $70 billion in federal aid to close their deficits, federal priorities seem to be very different. Will the costs of war be paid by reductions in spending, mostly affecting our most vulnerable citizens? Will there be clear domestic economic winners and losers in the conduct of this war?

Political scientist Michael Lipsky observed a year ago that this war "will evidently exacerbate the divide between rich and poor." Wars have had this effect on the United States before, but absolutely without precedent is a push for a windfall tax cut for the wealthy as wartime expenses mount.

William H. Gates Sr. is co-chairman of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Chuck Collins is co-founder of Responsible Wealth. They are the authors of "Wealth and Our Commonwealth: Why America Should Tax Accumulated Fortunes."

From Riches to Responsibility - Defending the Estate Tax

by Kimberly French
March/April 2003
UU World

The year Chuck Collins turned 16, his father took him aside for a man-to-man talk. Edward Collins told his son that he had set up a substantial trust fund for him.

Chuck remembers feeling utter amazement. The great-grandson of Oscar Mayer and an heir to the wiener fortune, he had grown up living comfortably, but not lavishly, in suburban Detroit. Now, as his father spelled out, he realized he would not have to work for money unless he wanted to. His dad also stressed his hope that the money would not change his son or his life goals.

It didn't. However, events took a very different course from the one the elder Collins had so carefully planned. Ten years later, in 1985, Chuck Collins gave away every penny of his inheritance, nearly half a million dollars, to foundations and groups that he knew needed funding — organizations working for the environment, peace, racial equality, and indigenous and gay people's rights.

"Wealth that just creates more wealth seemed wrong," says Collins, whose book in support of preserving the estate tax, Wealth and Our Commonwealth: Why America Should Tax Accumulated Fortunes, written with William H. Gates Sr., has just been published by Beacon Press. "At age 26, with no family responsibilities, I didn't want it. I didn't really need it. I wanted to make my own way. And I knew other things needed it more."

Before cashing in the fund, Collins wrote a letter to his father, a libertarian conservative, explaining his plans. A concerned Edward Collins flew to meet him the next day. In their second man-to-man talk about the money, the elder Collins wanted to make sure Chuck was considering how he would support any children he might have: "What if you have a child who has Down syndrome? Think about the cost of the care," Chuck remembers his father asking.

His father also asked if he considered himself a Marxist who had to renounce his class background. Chuck, a lifelong Unitarian Universalist, tried to reassure his dad, saying that he would feel comfortable with the label Gandhian or Christian, but he was not a Marxist.

After two days together, Chuck remained unswayed. "The decision to give away my wealth felt like the first real decision I'd ever made," he wrote in We Gave Away a Fortune. "Life presents only a few crystal-clear opportunities to take risks for what you believe, and this was one."

His father needn't have worried. Coming into his inheritance changed Chuck Collins not at all.

Now 43, a father himself, and a cofounder of United for a Fair Economy (UFE) in Boston, a nonprofit organization widely praised for its creative ways of illuminating the growing wealth gap, Collins has always been a social activist. As a first grader, he raised $125 for guide dogs for the blind by organizing a backyard fair for his class. In fifth grade, he wrote and circulated in his neighborhood an environmental leaflet that began, "Don't throw this paper away-it will cause pollution."

After college, he worked for the Institute for Community Economics in Springfield, Massachusetts, which was building a nationwide movement of land trusts, cooperatives, loan funds, and credit unions in poor communities. As he traveled to places like Appalachia and Maine, where most land is owned by absentee corporations, he formed a critique of a system that kept rich people rich and poor people poor. He began to see that inherited wealth — including his own trust fund — was a piece of the problem he was working to solve.

"Giving away the money was a necessary step for me to move along in the work I do," he says. "Two decades later, I'm doing this work because that was part of my journey. It gave me insight into the way concentrations of wealth undermine equality and democracy."

Collins has been coauthor of three previous books about economic inequality: Robin Hood Was Right: A Guide to Giving Your Money for Social Change (2000), Economic Apartheid in America (2000), and Shifting Fortunes (1999). But when he finished the new manuscript defending the estate tax, he knew he wanted his father to read it.

"Because of my relationship with my dad," he says, "I know how thoughtful conservatives think, and I respect them. I knew my dad supported the repeal of the estate tax, and I knew he would find the holes and weaknesses."

Edward Collins did a line-by-line edit that, for both men, recalled the way he used to go over his son's term papers, flagging "Syntax!" and other corrections in the margins. This time, though, at the end of the text, he wrote large: "You changed my mind."

For Chuck, it was the best review he'd ever gotten.

"My former view had been that the estate tax was a confiscatory tax that should be done away with," the elder Collins says. "But Chuck's book definitely brought me right on board. My realization that came from the book is that the estate tax is critical to maintaining our democratic society."

In December 2000, Chuck Collins got an e-mail from Bill Gates Sr. Collins works with plenty of rich and famous people through a UFE project called Responsible Wealth, which signs on people in the top 5 percent of wealth to work toward economic equality. Names like Paul Newman, Annie Dillard, Ben Cohen, Ted Turner, George Soros, various Rockefellers, Roosevelts, and other successful artists, executives, and heirs are apt to show up in Collins's in box.

But this e-mail out of the blue seemed a bit suspicious. He suspected a prankster at the UFE office — where a good sense of humor is a job requirement — was joshing him. As the story has evolved through many public retellings, Collins fired back: "Yeah, and I'm Minnie Mouse." Turns out, it really was Bill Gates's dad, who is a founding partner of a Seattle business-law firm and now director of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which funds projects to improve health in the developing world. And he couldn't have been more serious.

Like Collins, Gates considered the estate tax a moral issue and was deeply disturbed by the movement to repeal the tax — which President George W. Bush had made a top domestic priority when he took office. Especially troubling to both men was that, while repeal of the tax was not popular in polls, no one was arguing why it should be preserved. "We are now living in a second Gilded Age," Collins says. "There is as great a disparity of wealth now as there was then. And we're about to eliminate the estate tax? It's totally the wrong way. It's the one check we have."

Once Gates got Collins on the phone, he asked, "What can we do?"

Collins, the organizer, didn't skip a beat: "Draft a public statement, get media coverage, testify before Congress, write letters, op-ed pieces."

Gates replied, "I'm game. Let's do it all."

From both coasts, they got to work. First on the agenda was the kind of event Collins has become known for: creating a news story that steals the limelight from the mainstream newsmakers, with a sound bite too good for editors to resist: Tax Our Estates, Wealthy Say — It's Only Fair.

On Valentine's Day 2001, UFE's Responsible Wealth released its Call to Preserve the Estate Tax, a petition that has been signed by more than 1,000 of the wealthiest people in the country and is still taking signatures. Newsweek called it the "billionaire backlash."

Unfortunately, most members of Congress had already pledged their votes. In June 2001, President Bush signed a bizarre compromise bill crafted to comply with congressional budget mandates.

As the law stands, the estate-tax percentage will be gradually reduced over the next ten years. Complete repeal will occur in one year only — 2010. After that, the 2001 estate-tax rate will go back into effect. The tax's opponents have continued to introduce bills to make the repeal permanent, but none have passed.

Stimulating a lively debate over the estate tax is no easy task, Collins is the first to admit. Most people will never pay it nor receive any perceptible benefit from its repeal. Currently, the first $2 million of a couple's estate is exempt, so only the wealthiest 1.5 percent of the population will pay any estate tax.

Even more significantly, in the two years since the temporary repeal was passed, terrorism and threats of war have eclipsed coverage of the estate tax issue. Yet the repeal stands, and efforts to make it permanent continue. Permanent repeal, Collins argues, would threaten the very fabric of our democracy and of a society that holds equal opportunity as its ideal.

Contrary to what its opponents argue, the estate tax is a fundamentally American institution, Collins and Gates assert in Wealth and Our Commonwealth. Revolutionary era patriots — Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Noah Webster, Samuel Adams, James Madison — rejected anything that smacked of the stratified aristocracies of Europe. Visiting Europe, Jefferson and Adams wrote of being appalled by concentrations of vast wealth passed down for centuries. Absolutely central to the success of the new republic, they argued, was fair, broad, and equitable distribution of wealth and property.

President Theodore Roosevelt first proposed the current estate tax in 1904 in response to the corruption and excesses of the Gilded Age. Progressive Era reformers feared that if wealth concentration continued unchecked, most of the U.S. population would end up subjects of the robber barons, as Europeans were to their aristocracies. The tax was signed into law in 1916.

Today's estate-tax opponents have portrayed it as an affront to individualism and personal initiative. A big myth put forth in support of repeal, Collins says, is the notion that "I made this money myself, so I don't owe anything."

"But there's a whole other piece of the story," Collins says. "Let's do an accounting here. What about how other people's efforts — employees, teachers, parents — and a stable government and economy, privilege, God's grace, and luck all helped you?"

In the book, Collins and Gates propose this scenario: Imagine that God is sitting in his (or her) office. He summons the next two beings to be born. One will be born in the United States, and the other in a poor country in the Southern Hemisphere. God's treasury has suffered some losses in technology stocks, so he has come up with a scheme to auction off the privilege of being born in the United States, where he knows there's a wonderful infrastructure of public health, education, and market mechanisms that enhance opportunity. Each spirit is to write down the percentage of its net worth that it is willing to pledge to God's treasury on the day it dies.

"What is it worth to operate within this marvelous system?" Collins and Gates write. "What's wrong with people who accumulate $20 million or $100 million or $500 million putting a third of that back into the place that made possible the enormous accumulation of wealth for them? What is it worth to be an American?"

So why aren't the huge gaps in income and wealth more of an issue in America? That was the question that Chuck Collins and some of his fellow organizers at the Tax Equity Alliance of Massachusetts were puzzling over back in the early 1990s.

The question was at the root of so many trends they were seeing then — and still see. Real wages are falling for many working people, as UFE points out. Funding for public education is declining, eroding its quality. Higher education, health care, and decent housing are being priced out of reach of working people. The United States has more illiteracy, more and deeper poverty, more violent crime, larger prison and homeless populations, higher infant mortality, and lower life expectancy than any other advanced nation. Meanwhile, a tiny, fabulously rich minority is amassing huge fortunes at an accelerating rate. Why aren't people talking about it?

Economics has been called the dismal science — dismally boring, that is. Collins, who has a master's degree in community economic development, has taken that as a personal challenge. If there is to be any debate or change, he figures, ordinary people have to understand the wealth gap and what is wrong with it, just as the early patriots and Progressive Era reformers did.

In 1995 Collins and Felice Yeskel, now director of the Stonewall Center for gay and lesbian students at the University of Massachusetts, put together a nuts-and-bolts workshop called The Growing Divide, combining user-friendly economic charts and concrete suggestions on how to take action. That workshop has taken on a life of its own. Hundreds of people in religious groups, unions, and on campuses have been trained as workshop leaders, and tens of thousands have taken it and still do.

Building on the success of The Growing Divide, Collins, Yeskel, and Boston College sociology professor Mike Miller got seed money from the Little Sisters of the Assumption to cofound United for a Fair Economy. From the beginning, UFE has had close kinship with religious groups working on economic and social justice.

"UFE does the best work in the country on the gap between rich and poor, which is, for many of us in the religious community, a fundamentally moral and biblical issue," says Jim Wallis, the leader of Call to Renewal, a nationwide federation of faith-based organizations working to overcome poverty.

Collins became UFE's first employee, initially as a part-time second job. UFE now has eighteen employees and runs campaigns across the nation. Two years ago Collins hired an executive director to free him to do what he loves most — programs that inspire people and make them laugh.

"Our forte is street theater-it's the most accessible, funny, engaging way we've found to connect with people," he says. "It's so spiritually uplifting and fun to get a message across with humor, rather than grimness. And it cracks open minds."

When another attempt at permanent estate-tax repeal came up for a vote in Congress last summer, Collins and ten other UFE activists posed as Millionaires for Unlimited Inheritance. Dressed in top hats and tuxes or fur stoles and gowns, they took a stretch limousine to U.S. Senator Susan Collins's office in Bangor, Maine, to "celebrate her courageous step" supporting the bill. "We called out, 'She really understands us. We love Susan Collins.' It was very embarrassing for her," says Chuck Collins, who is not related to the senator. "Only twenty-four people in Maine each year would benefit from the tax cut. It's so out of synch with Maine sensibilities." This spring UFE "millionaires" are continuing to stage actions in a handful of swing districts on estate-tax repeal across the country.

Collins's favorite kind of theater action is what he calls media hijacking. In 1998, Collins noticed a Wall Street Journal item announcing that U.S. Representatives Dick Armey and Billy Tauzin were planning to dump a copy of the multivolume federal tax code off the Boston Tea Party Ship as an April 15 publicity stunt.

So two UFE activists with a baby doll rowed alongside the ship in a small plastic "Working Family Life Raft," yelling, "Don't throw it. You'll drown us." Other UFE staffers had gotten aboard the ship and were chanting, "Sink 'em with the flat tax. Drown 'em with the sales tax." Collins was passing out press releases on a nearby bridge. With their media advisers running amok, the flustered congressmen heaved the trunk of papers overboard — and the lifeboat capsized. The event got plenty of publicity all right, but not the kind the congressmen had planned. "All it took," Collins says, "was a $7 raft, good timing, discipline, and creativity."

United for a Fair Economy urges individuals and groups to create their own actions and has published The Activist Cookbook, loaded with "recipes" and encouragement for the timid. "Art isn't something that rich people do with their leisure time-it's something working people do with their lives," the cookbook exhorts.

One tactic UFE recommends is to introduce stockholder initiatives, which anyone who owns $1,000 of stock in a company can do. Collins holds a small amount of General Electric stock, and every year he introduces an initiative to reduce the top five executives' pay. The first time Collins went to GE's stockholder meeting, he happened to follow a nun demanding that GE clean up its toxic waste in the Hudson River. Angered, Jack Welch, who recently retired as one of the ten highest-paid CEOs in the country, sarcastically asked where she wanted him to put it — in Yankee Stadium?

When his turn came, the quick-witted Collins began, "As a Red Sox fan, I kind of like the idea of putting toxic sludge in Yankee Stadium." That got everyone laughing. Then he held up a dinky replica of another national icon to drive his own point home: "If the Washington Monument was the average CEO's pay, then this 21-inch replica would be the average worker's pay. But at GE, this Life Saver would be the average worker's pay." Again, everyone laughed at the absurdity, then listened as he explained how large disparities between executives' and workers' pay undermine the health of "our company" and the beneficial spirit of team building.

As an executive in his own organization, Chuck Collins rides his bike or takes the subway to work from his half of a two-family house in Boston's Jamaica Plain neighborhood, which draws young political activists and immigrants alike. With lightly salted dark hair, he dresses for the office in comfortable cotton shirts and denim and carries a reusable coffee mug. His six-year-old daughter attends Boston public schools.

His wife, the Rev. Patricia Brennan, now serves as assistant minister of the King's Chapel in Boston. The son of early members of the Emerson Church Unitarian Universalist in Troy, Michigan, Collins teaches church school and started the social-justice committee at the First Church Unitarian Universalist in Jamaica Plain, and is a trainer for workshops sponsored by Unitarian Universalists for a Just Economic Community. At the 2001 General Assembly in Cleveland, Collins introduced the resolution that resulted in economic globalization being chosen as the denomination's Study/Action Issue — and was taken by surprise at the floor fight he had to lead to win approval.

Collins moves easily among people of all classes — from his close friendship with an immigrant single parent; to his parents and their friends; to the members of Responsible Wealth; to the intense, smart political activists he works with and trains; to high-level politicians and power brokers across the country. On the sidewalk outside his downtown office he greets the first black woman Episcopal bishop and a doctor who has been treating the homeless on Boston Common for decades.

"Chuck is a phenomenon, a lovely, decent human being," says UFE cofounder Mike Miller. "He has a rare combination of amiability and talent, which you don't often find, unfortunately. It's a magnetic quality, so soft spoken and quiet, that attracts people. I consider him a real treasure."

Over time, Collins has become increasingly closer to his father. Both say their relationship now focuses on their many similarities, especially their get-mad-and-do-something-about-it view of the world. And both relish a good political argument, which often forces them outside to spare other family members. "His influence on me has been as significant as perhaps mine on him," Edward Collins says. "I'm quite proud of Chuck. He has changed many views within our family."

Collins rarely thinks about the fact that he gave away his birthright. Many of his friends and colleagues don't even know about it. When interviewed for this article, Bill Gates Sr. said he knew Collins came from money but had no idea that he'd given it away. "I'm sorry I don't have a comparable story to tell," Gates adds.

If Collins had to pick the label that best describes himself today, it wouldn't be Gandhian, Christian, or Marxist, but rather "radical meritocratist," a term coined by Andrew Carnegie in his book The Gospel of Wealth. The term describes someone who believes that each generation should "have to start anew with equal opportunities . . . [that would] bring the best and the brightest to the top."

Yet, for those who might follow Collins's example, there remains this stumbling block, the same one his father raised two decades ago: What if his children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren had a costly need? What if he needed expensive care in the future? Wouldn't it be hard to justify burdening his own heirs when he was the one who gave the money away?

"I still think about these kinds of questions all the time," he admits. "My yardstick has always been: Am I going to have special privilege in relation to this problem? Those choices continue — do we set up a college fund, or do we work to build a society where it is not an overwhelming privilege to have a college education, and you don't have to be in debt for the next twenty years. Every day I make at least five little choices — do I take the subway or car? Do I go to the library or bookstore? Do I send my daughter to public or private school? Do you build a wall of money around your life to protect yourself, or do you invest in the commonweal? You can't be too rigid or ideological. So you put money in a college fund and give to the United Students Association so they can work toward making tuitions lower.

"I want to cast my lot with everyone else I know," Collins avows. "I would rather work for a society where people take care of each other and not one based on whether you can amass a small fortune to provide basic care. I'm working toward a time when the idea that I can drive as big a car as I want, use up as many resources as I want, just think about my kid and nobody else, will be unimaginable. I believe you shouldn't have to be rich to have a decent life in this society."

Essayist and journalist Kimberly French is a frequent contributor to the UU World.

Bill Moyers Interviews Bill Gates, Sr. and Chuck Collins Transcript on PBS.org: 1.17.03

BILL MOYERS: Conservatives call it the death tax. Lawyers call it the estate tax. I grew up hearing it called the inheritance tax. And therein lies a story of wealth and power.

After a 10-year campaign hatched by a small group of wealthy families, Congress repealed the tax in the year 2000. Their crusade climaxed with a PR campaign that made it seem the estate tax was about to kill off the family farm.

The law repealing the tax was delivered to the White House on a bright red tractor but President Bill Clinton wasn't buying. He vetoed the bill and the estate tax continued. No sooner had George W. Bush reached the White House, however, than he made repeal of the tax a big priority and Congress of course was happy to oblige. The day after he signed its repeal the President was out in Iowa talking about it.

[CLIP OF PRESIDENT BUSH SPEAKING IN IOWA]

But the story doesn't end there. There's a campaign to restore the inheritance tax. And it's being led, believe it or not, by some of the country's richest people including Bill Gates, Sr., the patriarch of the Gates family who heads the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Chuck Collins, an heir to the Oscar Meyer fortune who founded the organization called Responsible Wealth.

They've written this new book arguing for the inheritance tax. It's called WEALTH AND OUR COMMONWEALTH. And they're here to talk about it with me now. Thank you very much.

True or false: many family farms must be sold off to pay for the Federal taxes due on them when the owner dies.

COLLINS: That's false. A number of investigative reporters have gone out to the midwest, they even went to Iowa, and they asked the American Farm Bureau, one of the proponents of repeal, to produce a single example of a farm that had been lost to the estate tax and they could not find one.

And they...the president of the Farm Bureau even sent out an urgent e-mail across the country saying, please, send us examples -- but produced none.

MOYERS: What about that rancher or farmer on that red tractor that delivered the bill to the White House in 2000?

COLLINS: That's an interesting case, because that rancher from Montana, we looked up his name and we found that over the last five years he's received $450,000 in farm subsidies from us the taxpayers. We the taxpayers have been an enormous investor in the Cornwall Ranch in Montana.

MOYERS: That's his ranch.

COLLINS: We are...we're sort of joint partners if you will.

And when he passes that farm on upon his death, we think that the taxpayer should have a claim back on that. It's just, this notion that we did it all ourselves, that is the great big myth here. And that's not to dismiss individual efforts; it's more that we just don't look enough at the role that society plays in helping people create wealth.

MOYERS: True or false, Bill Gates, Sr.: the estate tax is a form of double taxation because you pay when the money is earned and again when you die.

GATES: Well, we do that all the time. You know, double taxation, or the elimination of double taxation, is not an axiom of tax law.

The cardinal example of course is the home I live in in Seattle. I've been paying taxes on that home for 40-some years, year in and year out. And that's not double taxation. We tax property, we tax it regularly. We tax transactions.

The passage of an estate from one generation is a transaction. And that's the proper way to look at it. It's in effect an excise tax. And we tax gifts, we tax sales, we tax transactions ...but that's not double taxation; that's just the way it works.

MOYERS: Why are you doing this? I mean, haven't you declared class war on yourselves in a sense?

GATES: Well, you know, it just...to my eye, it's just a question of fairness. It disturbs us, for example, that here we have a significant ingredient of the Federal revenue stream which people are taking away at the very time that our government is going to need revenue at a level that is unprecedented. We're talking about $200, $300 billion deficits now.

And the notion of repealing a tax in the midst of that situation leads inevitably to the proposition that some other tax is going to have to take its place.

MOYERS: And your case in the book is that if the wealthy don't pay their share, then working people have to pay a larger share.

GATES: That's it exactly.

MOYERS: But isn't it the problem you're up against, that is, that wealth is increasingly concentrated in the top one percent of this population and they're the ones making the largest and most consistent contributions to the political class, so you've got a system that is being...against what you're trying to do.

GATES: Bill, that's precisely true.

COLLINS: We should be concerned about the estate tax repeal precisely for the reason we have an estate tax, which is to prevent the wealthy and powerful from writing the rules and changing the rules of our culture and society.

MOYERS: Was there a moment of "a-ha!"? A moment when you said, I mean, you're a private man, a taciturn man. Was there a moment, though, when something happened that caused you to say, I've got to go public on this?

GATES: Well, actually there was. I was on an elevator in an office building in Seattle and I had a friend who was...I was not aware of, but a friend who had been working on this for some years in the Congress who made the statement to me, he said, Bill, I'm about to bring to fruit of many years of effort. I think the Congress is about to repeal the Federal estate tax.

And I felt as if I had been hit in the chest with a baseball bat. I just thought, oh, no! That is just ridiculous. So...

MOYERS: Why did you think it was ridiculous?

GATES: It's just such a fair tax. I mean, it's just such an opportune, appropriate time to have repaid from the people who have benefitted more than anyone else from the circumstances that this country makes available, from the conditions that make it possible to become....

There's nowhere else in the world, nowhere else in the world, that people can accrue the kind of fortunes that happen here. And that's because of the kind of country we have.

And the kind of country we have is a function of the taxes that we pay to provide security, we have a stable market, you can predict next week will be pretty much like the week before.

We have the most immense investment being made by our government in advancing businesses by supporting the enormous research industry that's going on in this country. And it's that piece of government expenditure that which has everything to do with the health and robustness of our economy.

COLLINS: We believe that people who accumulate great wealth also have been lucky, have had the benefit of growing up and living in the United States, and have benefitted from this enormous public investment.

One of our leaders in Responsible Wealth was standing next to President Clinton when he vetoed the repeal of the estate tax and he said, look, I grew up in New York City, I went to public schools and public libraries and museums. Someone else paid for those.

I went to a college; someone else paid for that. I went into the technology field, a whole infrastructure that had been built with public investment that someone else had paid for. I started a company and I hired professional people who had been trained through a subsidized education system. And I made $40 million. And you're telling me society doesn't have a claim on my wealth? You know...

MOYERS: You gave away much of your fortune, didn't you, when you were a young man?

COLLINS: I did when I was 26, and I...it partly was just out of this sense that I needed to make my own way, and that too much inherited wealth was actually maybe an impediment to my own...making my own way in life.

And I think we're a country that's better off when there's less great concentrations of inherited wealth and more real equality of opportunity where everybody can have a shot at the starting gate of life to make a difference.

MOYERS: Why shouldn't you be able to direct your money to where you want it to go in your will or however you want to do it? I mean, you earned it.

GATES: "You earned it" is really a matter of "you earned it with the indispensable help of your government."

You earned it in this wonderful place. If you'd been born in West Africa, you would not have earned it. It would not have occurred. Your wealth is a function of being an American.

GATES: The huge disparity in wealth that's happening, is something that is, I think, really dangerous.

MOYERS: Why?

GATES: Wealth is power, Bill. And it just is not a good situation. And the examples of the aristocracies of Europe are so clear. We don't want to have a country like that. Who was it that said, it was Louis Brandeis who said...

MOYERS: Justice of the Supreme Court...

GATES: Yes, indeed. And he said, you know, we can either have a situation where we have a small number of people with a huge amount of wealth or we can have a democracy. But we can't have both. That's clear wisdom.

MOYERS: Are we living in a new gilded age...do you fear that we're living in that kind of time again?

GATES: I do. I do. You know, the data is very clear. We have this enormous accretion of wealth in the top levels, and it's hugely out of balance. The disparity is very disturbing.

COLLINS: The establishment of the estate tax in 1916 was in a sense a response to the excesses of the first Gilded Age a century ago, that there was a social movement of farmers and workers, people like Andrew Carnegie and Teddy Roosevelt who said, we should have an estate tax because too much concentrated wealth is going to backfire and create an American aristocracy.

So both that and the circumstances of World War I led to the push for an estate tax. And here we are entering the second Gilded Age, a period of incredible dizzying inequality and also new obligations in terms of defense and security spending.

It's unprecedented to think about repealing a tax on the very wealthy in such a circumstance, and yet that's what is being talked about.

MOYERS: And do I understand correctly that you're not advocating that the government take everything that somebody passes on to children?

GATES: On the contrary. No, we're not. We're saying, for example, that if the exemption were three and a half million dollars or $7 million for a family, that.... And the rate was say, 50 percent just as a for instance, then whatever dad and mom leave in excess of $7 million, and half of the rest, still there for the children.

COLLINS: This has been kind of framed as an all or nothing debate, and I think that's been part of the challenge. It's either keep the estate tax as it is or get rid of it. And for the last few years people have put forward reform proposals.

President Clinton said he would have signed a proposal that would have raised the exemptions immediately to about $3 or $4 million. The problem is that the forces of all or nothing repeal have blocked those proposals. They voted against them because they understand that if those exemptions are raised they're not going to be able to find telegenic farmers and small business owners who are going to be able to stand up, they're going to be...they're hard enough to find now, and they're going to have a very hard time making the case that this is a tax that really does reach down and injure small entepreneurs.

MOYERS: What do you think is the social harm that comes from a large concentration of wealth?

GATES: I just don't think that my son's children or any other wealthy person's children are benefitted by being handed a quantity of money that's so great that they and their offspring will be really rich for that generation and for generations to come. That's not a good thing for a human being, to be in that situation.

And then more to the point, it's not a good thing for society.

COLLINS: I have a six year old daughter, I don't want her to grow up in a society where we have essentially an aristocracy of power and privilege. That would undermine the quality of life for everybody.

So we're not trying to sound like selfless people here; it's what kind of country do you want to live in? What kind of world do we want to live in?

MOYERS: What do your two daughters think about this? I mean, in effect, you're going to cost them something when you're gone!

GATES: Well, I think I can fairly describe them as being understanding of what's happening here.

MOYERS: So you are in effect penalizing them because of your principles.

GATES: That is correct, but I'm doing the right thing.

MOYERS: But isn't it true that wealth helps create wealth? I mean, some rich people do very good things with their money. Andrew Carnegie built all of those libraries. I served on the board of the Rockefeller Foundation, they're helping to nurture the Green revolution. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation crusading for public health around the world. I mean, would you be able to do that if your money were confiscated by the government?

GATES: Well, as you know, Bill, that choice is available to everyone. We're not arguing about something that would change that whatsoever. The charitable gifts will be still be a deduction in computing estate taxes. So a wealthy person has an absolute choice as to whether they pay the tax or whether they give their wealth to their university or their church or their foundation.

COLLINS: Actually, on the other side, if you...if we eliminate the estate tax, we think that there will be...we know from the research there will be a tremendous decline in charitable bequests and giving. And that's not to say that people give simply because of the tax code, but for a wealthy household with $20 million or more, the estate tax is a major incentive. Some $8 to $9 billion a year will be lost from the charitable sector if the estate tax is repealed.

MOYERS: So what's the strategy? What happens now?

COLLINS: Well, in the coming months the proponents of eliminating the tax will try to once again bring up legislation to make repeal permanent.

And they need 60 votes to do that. And we estimate they have about 57. So we're going to be out there basically making the case that we've made here, during a time of tremendous budget deficits, we should not eliminate the most progressive tax we have.

And we're going to try to pull back and win over new allies, people who maybe under different circumstances voted for repeal but under the new current fiscal situation will vote against it.

MOYERS: Who are the swing votes?

COLLINS: There's some key people, the Senators from Maine, Senator Snow and Senator Collins, voted for repeal. Senator Arlin Spector voted for repeal.

MOYERS: Three Republicans.

COLLINS: Senator Ron Wyden from Oregon...

MOYERS: Democrat.

COLLINS: ...a Democrat, voted for repeal. We've identified about a dozen Senators. Senator Voinovich from Ohio, voted for repeal but he's somebody who's been a governor, he's been a mayor, and he knows how hard it is to deal with fiscal issues. He's making noises that he's rethinking this issue.

MOYERS: If someone was to get in touch with the organization, Responsible Wealth, how do they do it?

COLLINS: They can visit us on the Web at responsiblewealth.org.

We have an online petition that people can sign supporting reform but not repeal of the estate tax. And ..we have over 1,000 people who would have to pay the estate tax who have signed it saying it should be preserved. And I think that's an interesting story.

MOYERS: Thank you very much, Chuck Collins and Bill Gates, Sr., authors of WEALTH AND OUR COMMONWEALTH.

COLLINS: Thank you, Bill.