Imagine, you're better off financially than 99 per cent of the U.S. population. But you look up the ladder and you see things getting even better for your betters, the super-rich, and you simultaneously feel your chance of ever joining them to be slipping away.

How depressing, how ... tragic that must be for people caught in that situation.

The liberal college town, once best known as the home of Mork and Mindy, is now the home as the birthplace of the first carbon tax in the United States.