We Need a Onetime Wealth Tax to Help Rebuild the Country

The coronavirus has been nothing less than a calamity. But more than a year into the pandemic, it is distressingly clear that although the virus affects everyone, we are not all in this together. Instead, the disease highlights and worsens existing fault lines in American society, especially economic inequality.

The Biden Administration recognizes the problem. The American Rescue Plan (ARP) Act, signed into law in March, is the most economically progressive legislation in a generation. But for all that it does to fight poverty, the ARP will do distressingly little to reduce inequality.

The statute works almost entirely through public spending. But the economic inequality that separates the rich from the rest has become so great that spending alone can’t repair it or even reverse inequality’s increase over the course of the pandemic. The rich have too much money. We simply can’t spend our way back to equality.

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