Welcome to the world of the Super-Rich — and to the other world, where the rest of us live

Valerie Strauss has an interesting piece today, written by a middle-class parent who had the opportunity to go to a meeting of some hyper-rich people in New York City having to do with setting up yet another extremely expensive private school in Manhattan for their own privileged children.

The writer draws a number of contrasts with the education of the vast majority of NYC schoolchildren, who attend the public schools.

Here is the URL:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/guest-bloggers/why-arent-public-school-parent.html#more

No wonder Bill Gates can afford to meddle with US education:

His company (Microsoft) which as you know puts out buggy, expensive software, get so many tax breaks that during many years, they don’t pay any income taxes at all.

This excerpt from the book Radical Possibilities by Jean Anyon gives a little history of what’s been happening to taxes in the US over the past 150 years. I recommend it. Here are a couple of pages. The part listing companies that don’t pay any taxes at all (including Microsoft, GE, Colgate-Palmolive) is near the end.

If you want to look up the sources cited in this article, go ahead and click on the Amazon link I provided above (or else here), and then click on “search inside” the book image that will appear. The first source cited comes from the following book, which I haven’t read, but looks interesting: