On Friday, Senator Professor Warren gave a speech to the McIntyre-Shaheen Dinner in Manchester in which she linked her big proposal for universal child-care to income inequality and the dawning of an intractable oligarchy, which is shrewd politics, as well as the right thing to do. She said:

“We are failing mamas and daddies all across this country — and we are failing our kids, too. That’s just wrong. We’re the richest country in the history of the planet. Access to high-quality care and education during the first five years of a child’s life shouldn’t be a privilege reserved for the rich. It should be a right for every child.”

And the key to her child-care plan is her proposed "wealth tax"—a two-to-three percent levy on those people who have $50 million and up. This again fastens the issue of child-care to the issue of the income gap, and does so in a way that is easily understood by anyone juggling two kids and a job.

In addition, on Monday, SPW announced that, in the primary election anyway, she is swearing off big-money fundraisers and dinners with the fattest of the cats. From Fortune:

In an email to supporters, the Democratic presidential candidate and Massachusetts senator wrote that “this decision will ensure that I will be outraised by other candidates in this race. “We’re going to take the time presidential candidates typically reserve for courting wealthy donors and instead use it to build organizing event after organizing event, in the early primary states and across the country,” she further wrote.

(One of the non-economic considerations arising from Warren's proposal for universal child-care is whether or not universal child-care is an unqualified good for the children in question. A year ago, the National Bureau of Economic Research accepted a paper from three authors—one of whom was Jonathan Gruber of MIT, the health-care expert demonized on the Right for being the dark genius behind the Affordable Care Act—that, based on a comprehensive study of a similar program initiated in Quebec, concluded that the effects on the children in the program were decidedly mixed.)



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This is quite a gamble. As Fortune points out, even Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama, the twin avatars of small-donor presidential campaigning, both got over 40 percent of their money from large donors. Warren is now saying that she isn't even going to do that, at least during the primaries. (It's hard to imagine anyone going into a general election having hamstrung themselves this way.) But it is now clear already that the primary driving engine behind this election will be a referendum on oligarchy. It may not be pitched that way, but that's what it's going to be.

It's going to be framed that way through dozens of issues, but that's what the essential debate is going to be. If, for example, you plan to campaign as a "moderate," know that you will be running as a "moderate" on the subject of the New Gilded Age that everybody knows is underway, but that nobody of influence wants to admit exists. That is the shadow over this campaign that already is thick and dark.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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