From riches to responsibility: Defending the estate tax

UU World: The Magazine of the Unitarian Universalist Association, Mar/Apr 2003 by French, Kimberly

The year Chuck Collins turned 16, his father took him aside for a man-to-man talk. Edward Collins told his son that he had set up a substantial trust fund for him.

Chuck remembers feeling utter amazement. The great-- grandson of Oscar Mayer and an heir to the wiener fortune, he had grown up living comfortably, but not lavishly, in suburban Detroit. Now, as his father spelled out, he realized he would not have to work for money unless he wanted to. His dad also stressed his hope that the money would not change his son or his life goals.

It didn't. However, events took a very different course from the one the elder Collins had so carefully planned. Ten years later, in 1985, Chuck Collins gave away every penny of his inheritance, nearly half a million dollars, to foundations and groups that he knew needed funding-- organizations working for the environment, peace, racial equality, and indigenous and gay people's rights.

"Wealth that just creates more wealth seemed wrong," says Collins, whose book in support of preserving the estate tax, Wealth and Our Commonwealth: Why America Should Tax Accumulated Fortunes, written with William H. Gates Sr., has just been published by Beacon Press. "At age 26, with no family responsibilities, I didn't want it. I didn't really need it. I wanted to make my own way. And I knew other things needed it more."

Before cashing in the fund, Collins wrote a letter to his father, a libertarian conservative, explaining his plans. A concerned Edward Collins flew to meet him the next day. In their second man-to-man talk about the money, the elder Collins wanted to make sure Chuck was considering how he would support any children he might have: "What if you have a child who has Down syndrome? Think about the cost of the care," Chuck remembers his father asking.

His father also asked if he considered himself a Marxist who had to renounce his class background. Chuck, a lifelong Unitarian Universalist, tried to reassure his dad, saying that he would feel comfortable with the label Gandhian or Christian, but he was not a Marxist.

After two days together, Chuck remained unswayed. "The decision to give away my wealth felt like the first real decision I'd ever made," he wrote in We Gave Away a Fortune. "Life presents only a few crystal-clear opportunities to take risks for what you believe, and this was one."

His father needn't have worried. Coming into his inheritance changed Chuck Collins not at all.

Now 43, a father himself, and a cofounder of United for a Fair Economy (UFE) in Boston, a nonprofit organization widely praised for its creative ways of illuminating the growing wealth gap, Collins has always been a social activist. As a first grader, he raised $125 for guide dogs for the blind by organizing a backyard fair for his class. In fifth grade, he wrote and circulated in his neighborhood an environmental leaflet that began, "Don't throw this paper away-it will cause pollution."

After college, he worked for the Institute for Community Economics in Springfield, Massachusetts, which was building a nationwide movement of land trusts, cooperatives, loan funds, and credit unions in poor communities. As he traveled to places like Appalachia and Maine, where most land is owned by absentee corporations, he formed a critique of a system that kept rich people rich and poor people poor. He began to see that inherited wealth-including his own trust fund-was a piece of the problem he was working to solve.

"Giving away the money was a necessary step for me to move along in the work I do," he says. "Two decades later, I'm doing this work because that was part of my journey. It gave me insight into the way concentrations of wealth undermine equality and democracy."

Collins has been coauthor of three previous books about economic inequality: Robin Hood Was Right:A Guide to Giving Your Money for Social Change (2000), Economic Apartheid in America (2000), and Shifting Fortunes (1999). But when he finished the new manuscript defending the estate tax, he knew he wanted his father to read it.

"Because of my relationship with my dad," he says, "I know how thoughtful conservatives think, and I respect them. I knew my dad supported the repeal of the estate tax, and I knew he would find the holes and weaknesses."

Edward Collins did a line-by-line edit that, for both men, recalled the way he used to go over his son's term papers, flagging "Syntax!" and other corrections in the margins. This time, though, at the end of the text, he wrote large: "You changed my mind."

For Chuck, it was the best review he'd ever gotten.

"My former view had been that the estate tax was a confiscatory tax that should be done away with," the elder Collins says. "But Chuck's book definitely brought me right on board. My realization that came from the book is that the estate tax is critical to maintaining our democratic society."

In December 2000, Chuck Collins got an e-mail from Bill Gates Sr. Collins works with plenty of rich and famous people through a UFE project called Responsible Wealth, which signs on people in the top 5 percent of wealth to work toward economic equality. Names like Paul Newman, Annie Dillard, Ben Cohen, Ted Turner, George Soros, various Rockefellers, Roosevelts, and other successful artists, executives, and heirs are apt to show up in Collins's in box.