How ‘progressivity’ can help balance the burden of the COVID recovery

I used to attend church as a child, and one Sunday our minister told a story.

It was one of the first moments in life that I can remember when a story, read from a book, made me feel a deep disgust at something I perceived to be morally wrong.

It was genuine anger, in the chest of an eight-year-old.

The story was about a widow who lived in dire poverty in Jerusalem, in the time of Jesus.

(I left the church decades ago so I’m not proselytising; I’m retelling the story for its secular value.)

One day, Jesus was sitting with some friends in a temple forecourt and they were watching the crowd put money into an offering box.

Wealthy residents of the town were donating bags of coins to the temple. It looked like a lot of money, but as a proportion…