“ Despite its kitchen table status today, the Monopoly board game can trace its roots to Lizzie Magie, who created the game in 1903 as an educational tool to help people understand that free market economies, absent rules to ensure otherwise, naturally move toward monopoly control as wealth is increasingly concentrated into the hands of the few. It takes public policies, from anti-monopoly rules to progressive tax systems, to protect free markets from this self-destructive tendency. The fact is: any economic system is effective only to the extent that its more extreme aspects are reined in. Our progressive tax system, including the estate tax, helped guide our economy and fuel the broadly shared prosperity our nation experienced during the post-war period. However, that progressive tax system came under a 30-year assault which began in the early 1980s. We’ve seen the consequences of this backsliding and the misguided tax cuts for the wealthy. Instead of the promised trickle-down, we got stagnant wages for most Americans and the widest disparity of income our nation has seen since 1928, just before the Great Depression. It’s time to recapture the core values that made our economy work, beginning with the preservation of a strong estate tax.
Pseudolectual
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I helped build Vimeo.com
as their first Community Director.
email: dalasv @ gmail
Assume this is a work of fiction.
July 23, 2010
