Mundane as it is to invoke F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous reflection that the rich are different, it is nevertheless important to note that he made the observation in times not unlike our own, when the gap between rich and poor was breathtakingly wide and the country only a stone’s throw away from a great collapse, triggered, in large part, by the very excesses the corporate class had bullied into existence.
The very wealthy think they are different, too, but not in the way Fitzgerald had in mind. The Andreessens and Thiels of the world would have you believe that the difference between them and everyone else is that they possess abilities, powers of discernment, and work ethics unique to people like them, and that their wealth is not only a direct result of those enviable traits but also a reflection of their superiority. Whether Fitzgerald had something else in mind I cannot say, but in my experience, the rich are different because money changes them.
To be clear, I am a member of the class of which I now speak. I’m a long way from being a billionaire, but I’m rich enough to tell you that we are all warped. Not only is the unearned and unasked-for wealth I have enjoyed no indication of my own nobility; it’s quite the opposite. The rich are different because of the way we’ve been shaped by all the things that come with wealth: entitlement, impunity, narcissism, isolation, inability to share power, unwillingness to take criticism, trifling access to natural human empathy, and a perversely cultivated ignorance, to name a few. The greater the wealth, the bigger the difference.
Privilege isn’t the problem in and of itself; it’s only positional. Slouching into privilege is the problem. An advantage like extreme wealth, inherited or earned, curdles quickly into entitlement. And when entitlement is widely distributed among the very powerful, it becomes everybody’s problem.
Examples of entitlement are legion, both fictional and not. The White Lotus wouldn’t be nearly as compelling TV as it is absent the entitled twits at its core. What makes those characters so easy to hate-watch is the way entitlement can cause an otherwise normal person to accept and even revel in the unnatural and morally dubious distinction between rich and poor in a time of radical inequality. The reveling requires inhuman levels of hardness, cynicism, and a deplorable level of chosen innocence.
Speaking from experience, I say it takes a very thick skin to manage the dissonance—cognitive, spiritual, moral, and emotional—that comes from walking by a human being asleep on a cold sidewalk in the wealthiest nation in the history of the world. Without a certain willed unknowing, I’d lose my mind. And, weirdly, staying aware of how close I am to losing my mind is precisely what keeps me sane.
Of course, it is not possible to stop and help every person. To try to do so would negate my ability to help anyone. But it is possible to see them, to understand them as equal in rights and dignity to oneself, and to feel at least some kind of feeling about their predicament. The more ease one feels at each of these interactions—and ignoring someone is, in fact, a form of interaction—the closer one gets to believing that empathy is at best an encumbrance and at worst the biggest challenge to an otherwise well-functioning society.
The proliferation of luxury private spaces is one way to circumvent the icky feelings of discomfort that come with moving through inequitable public spaces. The private planes, private lounges, private clubs, and private health care services that have mushroomed in the last couple of decades are one coping mechanism to which the very wealthy turn. But the impulse to cordon off public space—on top of being dangerously close to an acknowledgment that what is right under our noses is, in fact, making us feel bad—only supercharges one’s sense of entitlement. In my own life I have found my capacity to wait in a line, to stand in a crowd, or to wait for service in a busy restaurant to be atrophying.
One person I know, when dialing 911 in an emergency, stopped for a second to ask themselves, “Isn’t there a special number for someone like me to call?” This is a little funny and a lot tragic. When adrenaline fails to trump your sense of entitlement, when a medical emergency still cannot convince you that you are not something better than merely human, you’ve lost yourself to catastrophic arrogance.
None of this would matter much if not for the fact that where extreme wealth goes, power is never far behind. And power, like money, compounds. Power and wealth intertwine like snakes on a caduceus. Seeking either is like drinking salt water: The more you consume, the thirstier you become. Because of this, and because empathy can feel like an annoyance easily weaponized by the enemy, the wealthy are the very last people we want to trust with the lion’s share of power. And yet that’s precisely what we’ve done—we’ve constructed a government of callous power.
Our wealth gap didn’t just happen. The economy doesn’t work like Newton’s laws. It does what it does because people decide what it should do and implement policies to achieve those ends. In overcoming the devastation of first the Depression and then World War II, the U.S. economy managed to generate three-plus decades of relative wealth equity. And then, just like that, that relative equality began to ebb, not only as a fact but even as an aspiration. Any number of charts and graphs can drive this point home, but we don’t need charts and graphs to tell us what we can see as plain as day.
A long, well-funded plan is coming to fruition in this moment. It began forming in the aftermath of Barry Goldwater’s humiliating 1964 defeat at the hand of American voters, found expression in the influential 1971 Powell Memo that outlined the need for conservatives to invest in politics, and reached optimal velocity with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. It has been a campaign of policy change, education reform, and activism to capture the judicial branch. But more than anything, it has been a wildly successful public persuasion campaign that was spurred by an uncharacteristically telegenic and avuncular Milton Friedman on The Phil Donahue Show in 1979, telling America that “the world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests,” and it has culminated in the festival of reciprocal admiration and unquestioning mutual back-patting that constitutes today’s business climate.
The last 50 years have been a sickening catastrophe for the working class, a slow-motion emergency that unfolded right under our noses. Here we stand, with more wealth disparity than ever, with the super-wealthy unabashedly demanding ever more for themselves, and with an oligarchic president and Congress readying to offer us another tax break. This cut will come in spite of poll after poll showing that the inequity is intolerable to the general public, and that the wealthy should be taxed more. All this has been happening while, at the behest and with the loyal assistance of the world’s richest man, the federal government continues to be strip-mined. As clunky and inefficient as our government is, its condition—once DOGE gets done with it—will be feeble enough to drown in Grover Norquist’s notorious bathtub.
Were you worried about corruption? Well, I hope you’ve had your seat belts buckled while Elon Musk wielded his sword of Damocles over the departments from which he stands to gain contracts, payment, and influence, and by which he would otherwise be regulated. Watch as Peter Thiel and Bill Ackman cheer on the disassembly of the American university system, all the while preparing their business plans for the for-profit system with which they’d like to replace it. Were you worried about war? Well, our billionaire president has all sorts of fresh ideas about that. Nepotism? We are about to see what real affirmative action looks like.
Months into his tenure, Ronald Reagan attacked unions and public education, paralyzed the Environmental Protection Agency, stripped the public sector, and finished that all up with massive tax cuts. He also left behind a government in greater debt than when his term started. George W. Bush gave us a tax cut we didn’t need, started two wars with no clear objectives and no exit plans, and led our government from the surplus Bill Clinton had left behind to a deficit from which we have never recovered. In Trump 1.0, we got another unnecessary tax cut, the benefits of which went almost exclusively to the very wealthy, which created no jobs, and is estimated to have added nearly $2 trillion to the national debt.
Advocates of that 2017 tax cut promised that rising wages for working people would “trickle down” from the top, but it didn’t exactly work out that way. Those in the bottom 90 percent of company income distributions saw no change in their earnings, while CEO salaries soared, and corporations directed roughly 80 percent of their increased cash flow not to workers, but to stock buybacks and dividend payouts, And remember: The richest 10 percent own over 90 percent of shares. As workers have been asked to do ever more for wages that never rise commensurate with productivity, much less inflation, CEO pay has ballooned from around 42 times the average worker’s pay in 1980 to an outrageous 538 times today, according to a report by the Institute for Policy Studies. At every turn, the wealth keeps on trickling upward, defying gravity, logic, and any promises made along the way.
There is a meme going around that captures the spirit of this economic system. A photo shows Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, along with members of Reagan’s Cabinet, laughing uproariously at some joke. The caption reads: “We told them wealth would ‘trickle down’!” In the absence of shame, corruption turns into naked kleptocracy. In the absence of accountability, an enfeebled government becomes kakistocracy—government by the worst, the least qualified, and the most unscrupulous.
As the Bible says, “Ye shall know them by their fruits.” (Matthew 7:16)
But there is a path out of here. And it starts just where the oligarchs started a half-century ago—with taxes. If tax cuts were the bedrock upon which this faltering system was constructed, tax increases will be its Achilles’ heel.
In 2019, Rutger Bregman, Dutch writer and historian, caused a kerfuffle at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, when he suggested that, with all the wealth in the room, with all the private jets gridlocked at the local airport and all the talk of philanthropy, not one word had yet been said about taxes. The spontaneous (albeit scattered) applause that erupted at that moment was quite a departure from Davos’s normally reserved vibe.
Bregman went on to talk about a challenge Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell had posed on an earlier panel, with respect to a 70 percent top marginal tax rate: “Name a country where that’s worked ever.” Bregman reminded the audience that he could name one, and so can I. It is the United States of America. From the 1940s to the 1960s, when my grandfather (Roy O. Disney, who co-founded the Walt Disney Company along with his brother Walt) accumulated most of his wealth, the top marginal rate was sometimes as high as 91 percent. The estate tax was as high as 77 percent. And yet somehow he was still driven to innovate, and, somehow, he was able to accumulate enough wealth to provide for three generations beyond himself.
Of course, that was long ago and in a very different economy. But instead of brushing this part of our history aside, it wouldn’t hurt to ask if the current state of play is worthy of a country that claims to be fair, equitable, and supportive of social mobility. If massive inequality was not the plan all along, I suspect somebody somewhere might have raised the alarm long before now. And ever since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision 15 years ago, corporations and the wealthy class have pressed every advantage to pad their wealth and expand their power. The result is an American oligarchy; or, given the male-dominated nature of this particular incarnation of oligarchy, maybe “broligarchy” is the more apt term.
There is a utilitarian argument for why tax avoidance is a danger to the well-being of any economy. Disneyland thrived because of the national interstate highway system my grandfather’s taxes helped to pay for. The court system was healthy and high-functioning enough to enforce intellectual property and trademark law to protect the studio. And the workers who made it all happen could count on access to decent and affordable health care, a pension, roads that wouldn’t break their cars’ axles, and quality education for their children, all the way through graduate school, that did not break the bank.
The obstinacy of the anti-tax position leads to inescapable bouts of hypocrisy. Corporations’ position on taxes—specifically that the answer is always and everywhere an adamant NO—should be making some people uncomfortable. Considering how relentlessly they have lobbied to keep taxes low, corporations were nevertheless some of the first to suggest that the government should step in with unemployment benefits during the pandemic to ensure the consumer demand that would continue to fuel their profits. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what the taxpayer has been asked to subsidize. Taxpayers subsidize oil and gas companies that enjoy profits in the billions of dollars—billions that will never go on to serve the public interest. A more discreet form of taxpayer subsidy is the way our taxes fund the social services many full-time employees are forced to use. Employees at Walmart, for instance, are among the largest percentage of full-time workers who have no choice but to rely on food stamps, leaving taxpayers bearing the burden of the corporate refusal to pay a livable wage. Yet somehow, year after year, Walmart remains profitable, its shareholders happy as clams.
What Rutger Bregman took on at Davos those years ago is to me the most compelling argument for why it is time to fundamentally change what we think of as business as usual. Wealth has corrupted this country, and to pretend that the corporate decisions and strategies that generate much of that wealth have no moral dimension, or that taxation is a strictly utilitarian enterprise, is to pretend that money isn’t personal—that a person’s wage is not a life-defining condition. But if a business cannot pay a living wage, the problem is not the fault of employees. The problem is the business plan.
A tax code is a communal expression of social priorities—not simply a set of rules to be gamed. A tax code is a statement of moral principles. If a stranger were brave enough to read our tax code (which is several times longer than the Bible), the only conclusion they’d arrive at is that capital matters more than people, and that corporations and the very wealthy must be protected no matter the consequences for the overwhelming majority of citizens.
Over the years, as I’ve more and more often felt called to speak up about this calamity, the pushback on social media and from commentators has contained a healthy dose of, “Well why don’t you give it all away?” The assumption central to that question is that I am not busily engaged in doing precisely that. What’s more, it misses the fact that taxes are obligations, while philanthropy is optional. The well-being of any society should not rest in the capricious hands of a wealthy class that notoriously does not play well with others, can do whatever it wishes, stop whenever it wants, and is accountable to precisely no one.
Philanthropy will not save us. The moneyed class has rarely offered up any significant percentage of its net worth, and even if it did, the funds could never equal the work government does as part of its day-to-day business. Social Security, Head Start, Medicare and Medicaid—these are social programs that have changed exponentially more lives than anything any philanthropy can point to as a testament to its work (with the possible sole exception of the Gates Foundation’s excellent vaccine program).
What’s more, the philanthropists who want you to rely upon their benevolence to replace much of what the government does are some of the same people who have forced it to abandon the very programs that would moot much of their work. To be clear, advocates for a philanthropic alternative to government programs are asking that the government stop doing essential, life-and-death work at scale because government spending is always bad, and replace it with far less capacious programs, with no input from or accountability to voters and no recourse should that work be done badly or stop suddenly. But even taking inefficient bureaucracies into consideration, the public sector (often in partnership with philanthropy) has done a flawed but decent job of cleaning up and protecting our shared air and water; of ensuring that scientific research is robust, reliable, and cutting-edge; of guaranteeing that the poorest of the poor are not prevented from accessing the vital medical services that are their right; of protecting our elderly from poverty and dependency; of ensuring that our transportation systems continue to bolster and facilitate a vibrant economy; and of safeguarding our legal structures to support and defend our human rights.
History has led Americans to expect these jobs to be done well and at scale. The much-touted electoral anger we have watched grow in the last decade has risen in part as a result of voters having watched those expectations flouted as the resources our government requires to keep its promises were and continue to be steadily choked off. Neither philanthropy nor privatization will improve conditions for the harrowed American worker, nor for nearly enough other Americans who rely on government support simply to get through their days.
Taxes got us into this mess, and taxes are the only way out. The way to prevent the oligarchs seizing ever more power is to tax them proportional to their advantages (or more), to get money out of politics, and to acknowledge the simple truth that any person working full-time deserves a living wage.
Patriotic Millionaires, a group of which I am an enthusiastic member, despite the strategic obnoxiousness of our name, proposes a new plan for America, one that will stabilize the nation in the short term, and ensure that stability lasts over the long term as the economy continues to change. America 250: The Money Agenda starts with a “Cost of Living” Tax Exemption that will ensure that working people won’t be taxed into poverty by the federal government. The idea is to eliminate federal income taxes up to a reasonable “cost of living” threshold (around $40,000) and shift the responsibility for those revenues to annual incomes over $1 million with an Excess Income Surtax. The Equal Tax Act will remove the tax code’s preferential treatment of capital gains, instead treating all income over $1 million in the same way. Lastly, and most importantly for the preservation of our democracy, the Anti-Oligarch Act would, among other things, ensure that those with the most wealth pay to care for the society that enabled the accumulation of the assets being passed on. The only thing more depressing than oligarchy is hereditary oligarchy.
This is not rocket science, despite the weird fascination for such science displayed by our billionaire class. Sure, these proposals might feel like political impossibilities now, but I would imagine Lewis Powell thought the same thing when he got to work quietly changing all of our lives by way of his notorious memorandum. Our challenge is not what to do, but how to do it.
Our crazy quilt of a tax system needs fixing, to be sure. We could start by making an effort to collect the more than $400 billion that goes unpaid annually by scofflaws and tax cheats. We could close some loopholes, with which the books are riddled. We could end the stepped-up basis in estate taxes and equalize capital gains taxes with the taxes working people pay on their wages. We could join the substantial number of countries calling for a global minimum tax to fight the problem of capital flight. But more than anything we need to dramatically raise the top marginal rate and tax wealth itself.
Milton Friedman’s words to Phil Donahue take my breath away to this day. What a heretical idea to slip casually into a conversation, as though what he was saying and the ideas he was selling were not precisely the opposite of everything America had always believed about itself. What’s more, Friedman’s words run radically counter to my own experience of Americans even now. Most of the people I know are more than willing to set aside their own self-interest long enough to give birth, teach for criminally low wages, become firefighters, bail friends out of crises, take in stray dogs, and come to the aid of their fellow countrymen after the wildfires, tornadoes, and hurricanes that sometimes roll through the lives even of billionaires.
What’s more, there is substantial science to support the idea that people fall apart when forced into isolation, and that altruism is as natural to human beings as breathing. Without community, we all begin to die. And in my experience, the people most committed to the well-being of their communities live happier, more vital lives than do many of the people I know who fritter their lives away in private rooms, private clubs, and private airplanes.
The best piece of news I can give to my fellow millionaires and billionaires is this: All the highly curated evidence to the contrary, you are not special. No one is a loose electron, a rabid dog chasing his own tail, a piece of space garbage cast adrift into the great void. You were born and will die exactly as anyone else does, and when that time comes, I wonder if your treasured specialness will be a comfort or a regret. I’m willing to bet that the VIP pass you have leaned on all this time has caused you to miss some of the best parts of a life lived with kindness, with gentleness, and with a love that reaches past your immediate surroundings. No, we are not just individuals. We are much more than that. As Gwendolyn Brooks so beautifully put it, “We are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.”
As it turns out, every rewarding experience I’ve had, every beautiful moment I’ve been lucky enough to enjoy, has happened in one way or another because of the communities of which I am only one part. My children’s godparents, my oldest friends, and my wisest mentors all came to me in the process of my abnegating everything that any average outside observer might say makes me privileged, special, or extraordinary.
And I’m fine with that.
