The Creation Spirituality Lineage Calling All Social and Environmental Activists, Mystic Explorers, Justice Makers, Cosmic Thinkers, Earth Keepers Daily Meditations with Matthew Fox |
Does America (and the
Earth) Have a Billionaire Problem? By Matthew Fox 11/03/2025 |
Chuck Collins directs the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy studies. I confess I have a bias toward anyone who has the “common good” in their everyday vocabulary—it forms the basis of politics according to Thomas Aquinas, after all. It is another way of talking about fairness and justice and balance and sustainability. It underscores community and solidarity, and ways to nurture it and keep it afloat and even thriving. The opposite of the “common good” is the individual good of the powerful few. |
Collins has written a no-nonsense and to-the-point readable book without frills or detours, called Burned By Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power Are Ruining Our Lives and Planet. I highly recommend it. It helps name the shadow behind so much of the “dark money” and the
inequities in America today—even much of the rage going on in our politics that demagogues are profiting from daily. In that way, it helps explain the success of the MAGA world that has supported its leader against all rational thinking, |
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because this book lays out the stark turn that the American economy took, beginning about 40 years ago. Consider just this one statistic: Between 1980 and 2024, the number of billionaires in the United States has increased 50 times, from 15 to more than 800. A billion dollars is one thousand
million dollars, a billionaire is a millionaire 1,000 times over (and many times that when a billionaire is a billionaire many times over). This book is not about individual billionaires as such—as the author puts it, “the focus here is not on wealthy individuals, there are both scoundrels and generous souls among the lot.” (I think
of Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker among the latter.) The book is about the system, and what it means when a society moves from 15 billionaires to 800 in a generation. |
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| How did this happen? What are the
consequences? How are we all affected? How much does this explain the despair and fear and consequent outrage that so mark the spirit of our times and politics, and that demagogues take advantage of? It is about policy failure. As Collins puts it, an economy that is growing billionaires at all,
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less at their current rate of increase, is not a sign of prosperity but of policy failure resulting in a systemic problem with hugely consequential and negative impacts for society. The Table of Contents of the Book lays out the areas that are seriously affected by this “policy
failure.” Part Two is titled “The Billionaire Burn: How the Wealth of a Few Impoverishes the Many,” and is broken down into the following chapters: |
- Billionaires are Trashing the Planet
- Billionaires are making you pay higher taxes
- Billionaires are wrecking the housing market
- Billionaires are supercharging the racial economic divide
- Billionaires are bad for your health
- Billionaires are stealing your vote and voice
- Four other ways the billionaires are messing with your life
The final two chapters offer ways to protect yourself and |
A composite of pictures from the Occupy protests of 2011, in London, São Paulo, New York City, Montreal, Zürich, and Frankfurt. Various authors. Wikimedia Commons. . |
your community from the billionaire burn, by disrupting the narratives that justify billionaire wealth and proposing ways to reduce billionaire power and improve our lives. Collins says we need “rule changes that rewire capitalism for shared prosperity for all rather than spoils for the
few.” It is time to “unrig the rules that benefit billionaires.” He calls it a “form of modern-day idolatry” to exalt billionaires, and to turn over to them ever more wealth and power and media control and political leverage. It offers recommended actions to bring this about. Thank you, Chuck Collins, for this clear and concise foray
into the causes of our country’s demise today, and for your insights into how to stand up to the challenge. |
Queries for Contemplation Do you also see the exalting of billionaires and turning over ever more wealth
and power, media and political leverage to them, as a modern day idolatry? |
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