‘It Beats Pitchfork Rebellions and the Guillotine’: Why These Super-Rich Americans Are Asking For Higher Taxes
This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox.
As far as political protest goes, this was among the most civilized I have ever witnessed. The organizers did not make any noise beyond the idling truck covered in changing digital billboards. There were no chants on the sidewalks, no signs to leave behind as litter. The workers at the estate of billionaire Jeff Bezos looked with curiosity that quickly gave way to indifference as the visitors’ vehicle flipped through a three-minute slide deck mocking the Amazon founder: “Congratulations! You won capitalism! Now pay your damn taxes.”
What was most notable about this protest were the people behind it: the type of folks who share slips at the yacht club, flight paths for their private jets, and memberships in elite schools’ alumni groups. The self-described Patriotic Millionaires were making their latest foray into Washington, D.C., on April 15, also known as Tax Day, to shame Congress into taxing people like them a whole lot more, and mock some of their own for their differing opinions.
“Taxation is a nice compromise,” says Chuck Collins, an inequality foe whose great-grandfather was the ubiquitous meat magnate Oscar Mayer. “It totally beats economic, social collapse. It beats pitchfork rebellions and the guillotine.”
Extreme, maybe. But it’s that rationality that pervades the couple of dozen Patriotic Millionaires and their advisers who spent Tuesday talking policy in Dupont Circle and Wednesday trolling Bezos before going to the Capitol to lobby lawmakers. The surnames are as familiar as they are linked to Americana, including Abigail Disney, the granddaughter of Roy Disney and grandniece of Walt.
And they’re getting face time with likeminded lawmakers, such as Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland who attended the Tuesday session and Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts who joined a Wednesday event on Capitol Hill. For Democrats, nothing dovetails better with their party’s midterm messaging than some of the richest people in the country framing a tax hike on themselves as not only manageable, but the ultimate champagne problem.
But in a federal government controlled by Republicans and led by Donald Trump, it’s hard to see this pitch penetrating those actually deciding tax policy.
As we chatted in a conference room on the sidelines of the group’s two-day policy meeting here in Washington, Collins argued the public is moving toward the Patriotic Millionaires’ thinking. “Attitudes about inequality are starting to shift and are shifting in our favor in terms of a wider understanding about the harms, and why you should tax high wealth and invest it in things that matter,” he says.
Scott Ellis, an ed-tech executive and former management consultant at McKinsey, described the concentration of wealth as “the single most important root cause” of the world’s problems. His modest proposal: a $100 million cap on household wealth and a 50% wealth tax starting above $30 million. “It’s hard to argue that $100 million is not enough. … How do you get your trophy for winning capitalism?” he said.
It’s a tough sell beyond these take-my-money activists. But as Morris Pearl, a founding member of the club and a former managing director at BlackRock, put it bluntly: “People are saying millionaires like me are going to move out of the city if they raise our taxes. That’s absurd. The whole point of being a millionaire is so you can live wherever you want to live. … I’m not going to move somewhere else because of my taxes. People who don’t want to pay taxes don’t live in New York.”
Again, it is the privilege of indifference. But there’s another version of it—that of the masses, resigned to the status quo, which was on display at Bezos’ compound. The driver arrived promptly at 11 a.m. in the tony section of Washington where the Obamas are neighbors. It idled outside the estate, which combined two mansions into one but is seldom host to its owner, who has become the avatar for billionaires who know how to game the tax code to pay a lower rate of taxes than most Americans. The few cars going down that tree-lined street simply went around without so much as a honk. “Tax me if you can,” the signage taunted with a picture of a laughing Bezos outside his manse. Groundskeepers at the estate across the street went about their business, hosing down the sidewalk. If anyone called the police, they never showed up.
After a few minutes, one of the staffers with Patriotic Millionaires turned to the small retinue of journalists on hand. “Can I tell them we’re good?” he asked. At 11:11 a.m., the show had moved on and was heading to Capitol Hill with the hopes of leaving the indifference behind. It might be tough to shake this Tax Day.
Make sense of what matters in Washington. Sign up for the D.C. Brief newsletter.