spacer image
spacer image

Welcome! You're looking at an archived Snarkmarket entry. We've got a fresh look—and more new ideas every day—on the front page.

March 28, 2006

| Red Badge of Verbiage >>

American Stakeholders

Three years ago, in a spectacular issue of The Atlantic Monthly (“The Real State of the Union,” done in partnership with the New America Foundation), Ray Boshara wrote a fascinating proposal. What if we gave $6,000 to every American citizen at birth, and invested that money in a safe portfolio until the citizen grew old enough to use it?

Wealth inequality in the US, Boshara pointed out, is much greater even than income inequality:

By the close of the 1990s the United States had become more unequal than at any other time since the dawn of the New Deal