 very much. Thank you, Professor Mehta. Our next speaker is going to speak to an important issue that interacts with this conversation about tax policy. We've been talking a lot about inequality as one of the reasons why there's both a growing interest in taxing the rich. But we've also, and in a way, we've lived through four decades of this recent chapter of compounding or extreme inequality. But there's a much longer history of the racial legacy of white supremacy in wealth building. The median white wealth is 41 times median black wealth. That cannot be explained through any mythology or narrative of deservedness. And we want to begin, as part of this conversation, to understand the interaction Craig Kaplan asked earlier. Tell us, Professor Krugman, how do issues of race interact with all the dimensions we're talking about? Our next speaker, Valerie Wilson, is the perfect person to help us have this conversation. She is the program. She was at the Economic Policy Institute where she directs the program on race, ethnicity, and economic policy. Please welcome Valerie Wilson. Do you have slides? Thank you, Chuck. And good afternoon. Thank you all for still hanging around at this point in the afternoon. The racial wealth divide is just one of many persistent racial disparities in American economic and social life. By virtually every measure of economic well-being, people of color collectively, and African Americans in particular, are at a disadvantage relative to whites. And in the interest of time today, I'm going to focus specifically on those black-white disparities. But the racial wealth gap is unique among this broader group of economic inequalities because its causes and consequences stretch beyond this single measure as well as a single point in time. Wealth is a source of economic security. Wealth is a safety net. Wealth provides access and opportunity, or to state it more directly, wealth provides privilege. And this privilege begets power and influence that actually increase with wealth. As Paul Krugman stated earlier today, a tiny group of super wealthy people, we've called it the top 0.1 or top 0.01%, have an oversized influence on the political system, and they use this influence to set a policy agenda that serves their interests. Now, this is a problem for any number of reasons that have already been discussed today. But among the most important of these reasons is because the excessively wealthy are not representative of the broader population. And in fact, they are extremely out of touch with the experiences and concerns of the average person in this country, much less the experiences and concerns of the average black American in this country. According to one estimate, black households account for less than 2% of the wealthiest 1% of households. And this is an even broader group than this 0.1 or 0.01%. Mind you, these greatly imbalanced disparities, again, we're talking about for a very already small group of people. A 2017 study by Yale researchers actually found that Americans in general, not just the wealthy, Americans in general, tend to overestimate the progress that we've made on racial equality in this country and underestimate the magnitude of disparities when it comes to wealth. So this tends to hinder our consideration of any kinds of policies to close the gap because people's perception of the problem underestimates its seriousness and its significance beyond our current point in time. So what are the facts? Excited one number, and numbers vary depending on what people are measuring and how we're measuring wealth. But according to the 2016 survey of consumer finances, the median African-American family, and this is among families who actually have wealth, had a net worth of $17,600. That's about 1 tenth of the 171,000 held by the median white family. That's a difference of more than $150,000. Now, while median family wealth has actually grown for black and white families over the last 50 to 60 years, that difference, that $150,000, is actually more than three times larger than the difference was in 1963 before we had civil rights legislation and all of the things that followed that. So as wealth inequality has grown, racial wealth inequality has widened as well. Below the median, nearly one in five black families has zero or negative net worth, compared to just 9% of white families. And if we go to the other end of the spectrum, even among the wealthiest, the 99th percentile black family is worth a little over one and a half million dollars, but 99th percentile white family is worth 12 million. So how did we get here? Like so many other inequalities in our society, these racial disparities can be traced back to specific policy choices. The racial wealth gap is a longstanding vestige of centuries of racially targeted oppression, exploitation, and discrimination that was sanctioned by federal, state, and local policies that explicitly excluded African Americans from opportunities to build wealth while simultaneously serving to enrich whites. This legacy spans across generations, from slavery and Jim Crow, through redlining and unequal administration of the benefits of the GI Bill, just to name a few. More recently, we've heard stories of how subprime predatory lending, which is enabled by a lack of oversight and regulation in the financial industry, another policy choice that disproportionately benefits the wealthy, has allowed financial institutions to extract already limited wealth from black households and black communities. Not to mention, as Dorian referenced earlier, the disproportionate implementation of fines and fees. Now, recently, reparations has become a major subject of political debate. As more people consider the potential of reparations for closing the racial wealth divide and as a long overdue gesture of atonement for centuries of government sanctioned injustices against black Americans. Now, I'm not gonna talk about reparations today. I will say that while I believe some transfer of wealth will be necessary to close the racial wealth divide, writing checks alone will not resolve the problems of racial and economic injustice in this country. Beyond simply addressing the current gap in material or financial wealth, we need to rewrite the rules of our society that allow these inequalities to continue and create additional consequences associated with the lack of wealth. For example, wealth affords any number of mobility enhancing opportunities, including the ability to own property, to pay for higher education, to start a business, and to build a secure retirement. Therefore, the consequences of the racial wealth gap extend beyond a single generation and in fact, inheritance is one of the vehicles by which the racial wealth gap has been perpetuated. And that, of course, is directly tied to our tax structure. Wealth also provides a degree of economic stability against the uncertainties of job loss, major illness, or death of a household breadwinner. Not to mention presents choice in terms of where to work, when to work, how much to work for that tend to not be as readily available when a family or household is economically strapped. A tax system that gets the excessively wealthy to contribute more to the society from which they have greatly benefited will provide resources that can be used to expand access and improve the quality of these opportunities. Already today we've heard examples like strengthening and expanding social security, Medicare and Medicaid, as well as debt-free, or free public college. But let's be clear. Racial discrimination and inequality are pervasive in our society and exist because they provide social and economic benefits to the privileged. Whether this privilege beyond the basis of racial identity or wealth. And until we put the necessary resources into consistent oversight and enforcement against discriminatory practices and policies, even our best attempts to expand access and opportunity will fall short of achieving true equality. Now this conference is about taxing the wealthy for the purpose of creating a more equitable and just society. There is simply no way to get to that society without closing the racial wealth gap. Thank you.