Susan Stokes
speaker
98 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 24 Jul
Susan Stokes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Well, the level of income concentration in the United States today is extreme.
I would be surprised if it's not more extreme than even the period that we call the Gilded Age, where, you know, the sort of emerging fortunes around the turn of the 19th to 20th century, in the early 20th century, when you had great fortunes and you didn't have much of a taxation system.
We're at a very extreme level today, really very extreme.
And one of the things that's additionally of concern is that we have deregulated the involvement of money in politics.
So we have very, compared to other advanced democracies, very little control over campaign spending.
and donations.
So the combination of very extreme income inequality with very few weak regulatory controls of money in politics make for a very challenging scene on the ground in the United States today.
Well, it's not a good thing.
It's not a good thing when people lose hope, particularly when they lose hope in the idea, maybe not that they need to become uber wealthy millionaires or billionaires.
Of course, there are people, I know young people who have that as an ambition and more power to them, but that if they lose their confidence in being able to live a decent middle-class life, save for retirement, educate their children,
own a home, be able to cover their costs and have some left over, if all of those things really become untenable for large numbers of people, that is not a good thing.
But I would also, just going back to the question of our tolerance for inequality and for the idea that a kind of rags to riches story is part of what animates our optimism historically,
It's interesting that Americans' openness to higher levels of taxation on wealthy people has increased in recent years.
So the public opinion surveys indicate that Americans are more supportive of the idea of having very wealthy people
pay substantial percentage of their wealth.
In part, I think the extreme wealth gives people the sense that what can somebody do with that much money?
How many Ferraris can you own?
And so it makes sense to have some of that sort of channeled back into programs, policies, and relief for people who really are struggling.
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