Sugary soft drinks, as Michael Bloomberg reminds us, do our nation no good. But if we really want to narrow our waistbands, we’re going to have to narrow the income gaps that divide us.
From Manhattan to Monaco, the world’s super rich are fashioning themselves into a new global tribe of footloose and stateless. The rest of us get to gawk — and foot the ultimate bill.
Bits and bytes would be doing a lot more to help make our lives less nasty, brutish, and short if we shared wealth as routinely as bandwidth. From San Francisco, a new lesson in that reality.
Even rich people sooner or later have to drive over bridges. So why aren’t the wealthy screaming about America’s inadequate — and increasingly unsafe — basic infrastructure?
We obsess over health care in the United States, because we all want to be healthy. In the process, new evidence suggests, we’re ignoring the social dynamics that actually determine our health.
Any resemblance between democracy and U.S. Presidential politics has become, in our new super PAC era, purely coincidental. The only mystery: Why aren’t billionaires making even bigger bets?
Today’s swaggering rich are increasingly stuffing their dollars into investments that do America’s 99 percent not one whit of good.
Just 40 years ago, most Americans rubbed elbows with neighbors from a fairly wide cross-section of income levels. But today’s rich, Census data show, are keeping everyone else at arm’s length — and more.
Not all plutocrats scheme in the shadows like the rabidly right-wing Koch brothers. We need to learn how to recognize plutocracy’s more subtle putches. The best primer? The battle over education’s future.