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Forbes’ annual list of the 400 richest Americans debuted in 1982 with shipping magnate Daniel Ludwig in the top slot. Ludwig’s wealth, the magazine reported, was $2 billion (about $6.3 billion in today’s dollars). That only 13 billionaires graced the first Forbes 400 now seems almost quaint. Who could have imagined billionaires would quickly subsume the entire thing—or that the list might, in the not-so-distant future, hatch its first trillionaire?
This hasn’t happened yet, but we’re on track. The steep upward trajectory of the Forbes 400 is not a matter of entrepreneurs getting better or smarter—or even savvier, really. Rather, it’s a story of congressional capture and decades of policy failures. Ever since the Reagan “revolution,” the United States has lacked a tax mechanism to stop individual fortunes from growing wildly out of control, from becoming something akin to a black hole—devouring ever-greater portions of the nation’s economic pie.
Read the full article on Mother Jones
The post Who Wants to Be a Trillionaire? appeared first on Institute for Policy Studies.
Source of original article: Institute for Policy Studies (ips-dc.org).
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