Sheelah Kolhatkar on the ultra-wealthy who argue that they should be paying higher taxes
Sheelah Kolhatkar's latest in the first print edition of
The New Yorker 2020.
❝ Abigail Disney remembers the moment, two decades ago, when she no longer wanted to fly on her family’s private plane. Disney is the granddaughter of Roy O. Disney, who founded the Disney company with his younger brother, Walt, in 1923, and her father was a longtime senior executive there. Abigail’s parents owned a Boeing 737, one of the largest private-aircraft models on the market, and they let her use it for family trips. For many years, when Abigail was raising her four children, she would take the plane to Ireland, to visit her mother’s castle. The plane “was like a flying playpen,” Abigail told me recently. “I’ve known the pilot since I was a teen-ager.” One day, when her children were older, she took an overnight flight from California to New York, where she lives. She was travelling alone, but there was a full staff on duty to cater to her needs. As she got into the queen-size bed and secured the safety belt that stretched across the mattress, preparing to sleep for the next few hours, an unpleasant feeling came over her. “I couldn’t help thinking about the carbon footprint of it, and all the fuel,” she said. “It just felt so wrong.” … [NewYorker.com]
| SHEELAH KOLHATKAR is a staff writer & financial columnist at The New Yorker, & author of the NY Times Bestseller, Black Edge. Watch her discuss robots, automation and the future of jobs in America on MSNBC below, and learn more about booking Sheelah for your next event today. |
