Joe Biden is Right About Taxing the Ultra-Wealthy

The wealth gap between the top 0.01% and the rest of us is incomprehensible.

“WEALTH IN THE USA”. Each of the 5 slices represents one quintile (20%) of the U.S. population grouped by net worth. That means that in 2005 the top quintile (yellow) owned 84% of the country’s wealth. The upper middle quintile (red) owned 11%. The middle quintile (blue) owned 4%. The lower middle quintile (pink) owned 0.2%. And the bottom quintile (orange) owned 0.1%. (photo: er00mb0b)

If you were educated in the U.S. public school system anytime prior to the last decade, and probably anywhere else on Earth for that matter, you were likely shown a physical model of our solar system at some point.

Who can forget it?

The sun in the middle, Earth in the third orbit, it’s orbiting moon- all very orderly; the planets, rendered in carefully painted paper mache, their orbits, humble wire or string.

Only scientists had gotten it all wrong. For one thing, they were wrong about just how vast space really is. And it isn’t just that they were wrong. They were way off.

They thought space was the size of a football field, say; and it was really the size of Mount Everest.

Our grade-school solar system model suffered from other limitations as well. It gave us an inferior mental picture of what space really looks like. The orbits of the planets aren’t all nice circles, for instance.

When computer models were introduced, the visuals were slightly better- but even then only slightly. The true scale of the distance between planets in our solar system- just our tiny little backwater solar system- can scarcely be understood. Our brains…