Martin Reed is a Sonoma County-based real estate agent and the Executive Director of the Sonoma County Tool Library, a nonprofit that lends tools free of charge to county residents. A longtime Sebastopol resident, Martin came to lead the Tool Library after becoming a devoted patron, borrowing a $2,000 demolition hammer to break up concrete in his backyard and never looking back. He recently led the library's move to a new home at 427 Mendocino Ave in Santa Rosa, along with a name change and expanded mission to serve the whole county. When he's not helping clients buy and sell homes or keeping the tool library running, you'll find him tending his backyard food forest with his partner Tania, raising chickens, and exploring Sonoma County with their dog Gia.

Our speaker for Thursday, May 28, 2026 was Mary Fricker, who gave part 2 of her presentation, “The Roaring 2020s: We can Fix Our Future.” Mary is an independent publisher and writer who has won many journalistic awards, including the 2012 Best in Business Award for digital blogs. She is also the co-author of the bestselling “Inside Job-The Looting of America’ Savings and Loans.” Today’s presentation focused on Mary’s 9 suggestions for how to fix our financial problems. Mary believes that the deregulation of finance starting in the 1980’s created a financial world of Shadow Bank that most people don’t see. The rich get richer while the rest of the country is stuck with an unstable economy.

Mary believes that we must unwind “financialization.” She suggests 9 non-partisan steps to fix the economy. 1st, fix banking and investing by bringing back the Glass-Steagall Act (which was repealed in 1999), that is, go back to regulating banks and other financial institutions and limit certain financial transactions to federally regulated institutions. 2nd, let only banks or credit unions take deposits, and all deposits must be insured by the FDIC or the NCUA (the credit union equivalent). This may be the most important fix we can make to protect Americans from a financial panic. Many popular investments, such as money market funds, are made with Shadow Banks. The problem is that depositors can demand their deposits whenever they want, even though the bank may have loaned that money to someone else. This can cause catastrophic financial panic and a run on the bank. Regulated banks can withstand runs caused by such panics but Shadow Banks are more susceptible to failure when these runs occur due to the riskier nature of their investments and the lack of federal insurance.

Four of Mary’s 9 fixes relate to taxes. The “trickle-down” theory does not work. The rich do not carry their share of the nation’s financial burden. Although income taxes are progressive and the rich are theoretically subject to higher tax rates, in reality the rich rely on income that isn’t taxed in the same way that wages are taxed, so they avoid their full share of the tax burden. To level the field, Mary’s 3^rd suggestion is to fix income taxes. All income above the standard deduction, including salaries, self-employment income, carried interest, dividends, capital gains, foreign income, stock options, and tax-free bonds, should be taxed at the same rate. The 4^th suggestion is to fix payroll taxes. This year’s Social Security and Medicare withholding cap is $184,500 and once a taxpayer has exceeded that cap, the taxpayer does not contribute further to Social Security or Medicare. Mary’s suggestion would require taxpayers to make Social Security and Medicare contributions on all of their income. This would result in a much stronger Social Security system. The 5^th suggestion is to fix business taxes. Businesses now have too many deductions. She proposes to allow all such deductions, but first all businesses must pay a minimum 15% tax on all income. Mary’s 6^th suggestion is to fix the IRS and require that it spend 50% of its efforts auditing the wealthiest 10% of taxpayers.

Mary’s 7^th, 8^th, and 9^th ideas, respectively, are to limit a corporation’s right to buy back its own stock, place a nationwide cap on annual credit card interest at 10%, and fix the bankruptcy code (by repealing 2005 legislation) to make it easier to file for bankruptcy.

Thank you, Mary, for the many thoughtful ideas about the reasons for our country’s inequitable and unstable financial system and about how to fix that system.

On a regular basis, our resident photo pro Warren Smith, submits pictures of what is going on at the weekly meetings. You can always find the most recent pictures at the websites photo journal called "Meeting Sighting" Please note that all the meeting photos for the entire Rotary year are at this location with the most recent on the last page.

Thanks for all the great pictures Warren! Link to Meeting Sightings. The most recent are on the last page!