This Week:

Headlines and “Quote” of the Week

Websites of the Week

Nygaard Notes Now On-line!

Wealth, and How To Share It

Greetings,

This Nygaard Notes website thing wasn’t my idea; many readers demanded that we have one. Now you’ve got it, so shut up and leave me alone!

Seriously, I am quite excited about having a site, and I explain why elsewhere in this issue. This is not going to be one of those token sites, I promise.We will be keeping it very up-to-date, often adding new and useful stuff, reading and responding to the messages from readers that get posted there....heck, it should be fun! Read more below.

We just keep getting more readers all the time. I am really happy that so many of you tell your friends (at least I think they’re your friends. Hmm...) about Nygaard Notes. Also, a big thanks to so many of you who send me those thoughtful and consciousness- raising letters!

Well, I better go work on the website. Next week I’ll be talking about values, biases, and how to think. I can hardly wait!

Nygaard

Headline Of the Week #1: From the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) of March 27th:

“Health Care Safety Nets Face Cuts; Clinics serving low- income, uninsured may need to cut back.”

“Quote” of the Week: From the same article:

“Senator Sandy Pappas (Democrat of St. Paul) said the clinics made a good case at the legislature this year, but there aren’t enough funds at present to include them in a charity-care support package.”

Headline of the Week #2: Star Trib of December 3rd, 1999:

“State has `a boatload of money'; With a projected budget surplus of $1.6 billion, legislators say they'll consider a cap on license-tab renewal fees, a tax cut, a sales-tax rebate and new spending.”

But not for poor people’s health, apparently...

Website of the Week

In the spirit of all my talk about wealth and how to get a more fair distribution of it, check out the website of United for a Fair Economy, at http://www.stw.org/home.html. They do popular education around economics, with particular emphasis on the wage gap. They don’t say anything about a tax on wealth, but I guess nobody does these days. Check out their “Get Involved” section, and their links to other groups doing related good work.

Nygaard Notes Now On Line!

Thanks to awesome webmaster J.D. Walker, the new Nygaard Notes website is now up and running! Go look, at: www.freespeech.org/nygaard_notes. And let us know what you think. The site has been designed with both researchers and regular readers in mind.

The site has every issue of Nygaard Notes there ever was. The site can be searched by TOPIC, by DATE, or by KEYWORD, so you can easily find whatever you are looking for. Want to know if Nygaard has ever talked about hunger? Search the archives by the keyword “hunger.” What if you want to see everything Nygaard ever said about agriculture? Search by that topic.

Many of you have written me interesting letters over the past year- and-a-half. Now you can post your letters, comments, complaints, and corrections on the Message Board! Anyone can post their own message, and anyone can read what others have to say. I’ve even posted a message already myself! “Interaction is one of the big buzzwords in educational technology right now,” I’m told, so check it out and buzz your own words.

The site’s got a section where visitors can subscribe to the Notes, and a section where readers can learn about all the wonderful donations you can make to help Nygaard Notes grow up to be big and strong. There are lots of ideas for making the site more interactive, including a “Recommended Books” feature and a calendar of activist happenings. Exactly what will happen only time will tell. Your feedback will be important in this process. We are still working out the bugs, too, so let us know if you see errors or things that don’t make sense.

Many readers have told me that the lists of links found on most websites are useless, since they usually just list the addresses or the names of the sites, and you can’t tell anything about a site with only that information. So the Nygaard Notes links page includes a mini- review of each link telling you what you will find there, and also tells you which issue of Nygaard Notes had the original reference to that site so you can easily go back and see what it has to do with.

We hope the site is useful to readers. We also hope that you will direct your friends, teachers, and fellow activists to the site.

An important reason for creating this website is so that reporters and researchers around the world can find some of the information that appears in Nygaard Notes and nowhere else. So many of you have said to me, “Are you going to publish this anywhere else? Everybody should have access to this information!” Well, now the world has access to this information, and we will be working to get the site indexed and referenced and more easy-to-find as time goes on.

For all you readers, what the website means is that every reference to previous issues of the Notes will be a “hot link,” right in the text of your weekly email, so you can just click on it and go directly to that issue (other, non-Nygaard Notes, references are already hot- linked).

Finally, many of you will wish to ignore this site completely. Don’t worry, it’s only there for those who want to use it. For all you regular readers, the basic weekly dose of Nygaard Notes will keep coming as it always has, uncluttered by all this “extra” stuff.

Wealth, and How To Share It

The last two issues of Nygaard Notes gave some numbers about the realities of income and wealth in the United States. This week I will give just a few more numbers - really! just a few! - about the larger world of which the United States is just a part. Then a word on wealth itself and what it means, followed by some thoughts on what we might want to do about these realities.

Wealth in the World

Here are a few basic facts about the distribution of wealth on the global level:

• While global economic output grew 40 percent between 1970 and 1985, suggesting growing prosperity, the number of poor people also grew - by 17 percent.
• The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) reported in 1996 that 100 countries were economically worse off than they were 15 years ago.
• The wealth of the three most well-to-do individual people in the world now exceeds the combined Gross Domestic Product of the 48 least-developed countries.
• The UNDP reported in 1998 that the world's 225 richest people now have a combined wealth of $1 trillion. That's equal to the combined annual income of the world's 2.5 billion poorest people.
• The UNDP calculates that an annual tax of only 4 percent on these people would suffice to provide adequate food, safe water and sanitation, basic education, basic health care, and reproductive health care for everyone on the planet who currently lacks those things.

What Does Wealth Mean?

First and foremost, if you have wealth, you have time. To be “independently wealthy” is to be able to spend your time doing whatever you want to do. The average worker in America now works significantly more than 40 hours per week, leaving precious little time for his or her family, let alone for becoming involved in the community or in the political work that will be required to change some of these economic realities.

Secondly, wealthy people can and do use their wealth to directly influence the political process. They donate to campaigns, they finance their own campaigns, they support think tanks and political groups that increasingly set our national and local political agendas, and they lobby, lobby, lobby. The non-wealthy majority can do all of these things too, of course, but at a much lower level.

Finally, in a Free Market system the people who control the wealth of the world control how that wealth is used. Here are a few of the decisions that, under our current system, wealthy people get to make: What work will be done, and who will do it? What products will be produced, and where? Which countries (states, towns) will get the auto plant, or the textile factory, or the corporate headquarters, or anything else? Which cities will get the professional sports teams? As the public sector becomes smaller and smaller, the philanthropy of the wealthy increasingly shapes our culture by feeding or starving the privately-financed things they like or dislike. And so forth and so on. This is real power.

A Logic Problem

1. Wealth is power.
2. Wealth is highly concentrated in a very few people.
3. Power is concentrated in a very few people.

If you are concerned about democracy, then you might say we’ve got a problem here. I would.

And the problem is not with wealthy people. We can’t really fault them for the fact that they make decisions. We all make decisions when we can; that’s part of being human. The problem is that some people’s decisions have a lot more impact than others, because they have a lot more power. So the proper response, both ethically and practically, is to attempt to change the economic system itself, rather than attack the individual owners of wealth.

What to do?

While we work for the needed revolution of values that Martin Luther King talked about, we can be working on a number of short- term measures to build democracy. For starters, readers can support the work of (or join!) one of many organizations that are currently working for economic justice. Check out the this week’s “Website of the Week” for one idea.

And you might consider the following idea that I think should be put on the agenda of anyone desiring greater economic equality: A Tax on Wealth.

Time for a Wealth Tax?

Many other industrial countries have wealth taxes, including Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. Why don’t we? I don’t know, but I do know that it’s as close to a taboo subject as we have in the United States. As far as I can tell, the only person who has made any serious proposal along these lines in recent years is New York University professor Ed Wolff, whom I mentioned in last week’s Nygaard Notes.

Professor Wolff published a major article in 1996 in the Boston Review entitled “Time for A Wealth Tax?” in which he outlines his proposal. Go look at it if you want: http://www-polisci.mit.edu/bostonreview/BR21.1/wolff.html.

I won’t go into the details here, but Wolff’s proposal seems modest to me. All household effects, pensions, and annuities would be exempt, and 70 percent of households - those with a net worth of less than $100,000 - would pay no tax at all. The highest tax rate he suggests is a modest 3/10 of one percent, which would be levied against only those with a net worth of over one million dollars, maybe 1 or 2% of the population. Wolff estimates that his small tax would add more than $40 billion per year to government revenues. This would be sufficient to more than double the federal budget for public housing, for example, or to initiate any number of other anti- poverty programs.

The super-rich wouldn’t like this tax. “Admittedly,” Wolff says, “this is a powerful group, both financially and politically. However, it is also a group that is so small in number that a populist political movement, concerned with the undemocratic effects of extreme wealth inequality, might overcome its resistance.”

So, as the presidential and other campaigns shift into high gear in the coming months, listen to see if any candidate, anywhere, brings up the idea of a tax on wealth in the United States. Don’t hold your breath, however; most candidates are wealthy enough to themselves be subject to such a tax!

I think we should raise the issue with the candidates when we get the chance. But, campaign or no campaign, you may want to start bringing up the idea of a wealth tax with your friends and in your political organizations. If we do develop the populist political movement of which Professor Wolff speaks, we can transform today’s “radical” ideas into tomorrow’s public policy.