One of yesterday's headlines that caught this blogger's eye was about Michael Dell's attack on AOC (D-NY) for proposing a 70% federal tax on incomes above $10M-threshold. Shades of "the goes my tax cut" are the current nightmares of zillionaires like Dell, the 39th richest person in the US last year. Eags is cautioning the Dems (& Dose) against internecine warfare within their ranks. This blogger has more sympathy with attacks on the zillionaires who do nothing good with their wealth except ostentatious spending on everything for themselves and their progeny. Speaking of self-centeredness, the blogger hopes that US Representative Elijah Cummings (D-MD) will convene the House Committee for Oversight and Reform and subpoena the complete income tax returns filed by one Donald J. Trump. Talk about a juicy target who is probably gripped by fear that Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her committee chairs (like Representative Cummings) will expose his tax returns for criminal acts of evasion. If that is the (fair & balanced) real means to economic justice, so be it.
[x NY Fishwrap]
Crazy Rich Progressives
By Eags (Timothy Egan)
TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing
What would you do if you could spend a billion dollars a week on any cause, political movement or society-improving innovation of your choice and still have almost $20 billion left over after a year?
Such is the happy problem that may soon be facing MacKenzie Bezos, one-half of the richest couple on earth. She and her husband, the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, recently announced plans to divorce after 25 years of marriage.
With half of the family fortune, Ms. Bezos would be worth about $70 billion, solidifying a title she may already hold — the richest woman in the world.
We don’t know her politics or her intentions. The Bezoses have spent money supporting same-sex marriage, early education and help for homeless families. Jeff Bezos is a quirky libertarian, and his Washington Post has been a scrappy counter to a president who has made a punching bag out of the Constitution.
But it’s crucial that the Democratic Party, now going through another torturous fight between its soak-the-rich side and the progressive pragmatists, remain open to enlightened people of wealth.
“No to the billionaires,” Senator Elizabeth Warren said in the first days of her campaign for president. “We are the Democratic Party and that is the party of the people.”
Her brushback pitch was aimed at candidates rich enough to self-fund their campaigns, like Michael Bloomberg. But this kind of binary thinking is a slight to history. The best president of the 20th century, Franklin Roosevelt, was a product of dynastic family wealth, as was John Kennedy. The Obamas, with their newfound riches from books and ventures into the entertainment industry, will soon have the kind of money to draw snark from the socialist wing of their party.
And Warren may have missed the announcement of another rich guy running for president as a Democrat, the venture capitalist Andrew Yang. He’s campaigning on a plan to guarantee every American aged 18 to 64 a basic income of $1,000 a month, paid for by a new tax on companies benefiting most from automation.
I know, I know: The last thing a country struggling with Neo-Gilded Age inequality needs is more influence from billionaire supercitizens. It’s bad enough that the Koch brothers bought themselves a budget-busting tax cut and an energy policy hatched in their corporate boardroom. An 85-year-old casino magnate, Sheldon Adelson, now has more influence on American foreign policy than even the secretary of state, the Koch tool Mike Pompeo.
But the Kochs pay for politicians in order to enrich themselves and to gut regulations affecting the polluting industries that made them billionaires. Adelson got a similar tax windfall for the millions he put into electing Republicans, with the added benefit of controlling the State Department’s view of Israel.
The progressive billionaires — Oprah Winfrey, Warren Buffett — are a different breed of fat cat. Mr. Buffett, the third-richest man in the world, has been saying “Tax me more” for years — or at least, “Tax me at the same rate as my secretary.” Like Bill Gates, who is the second-richest man in the world, he has pledged to give away the bulk of his fortune.
Last year, Tom Steyer spent more than $100 million of his own money helping Democrats get elected, and he says he will drop another bundle on Senate races in 2020. Look what he got for his Democratic House: new members calling for a 70 percent tax rate on earnings over $10 million. Steyer, Gates and Buffett are going to get soaked for their political passions. And good for them.
The same goes for Bloomberg. He also spent more than $100 million last year on behalf of Democrats, and ballot initiatives on gun regulations and climate change. This got him a kick in the teeth from the Warren crowd.
God knows why George Soros continues to pour millions into promoting democracy abroad and going after hate speech at home. For that, he’s a target of crazed bombers and a victim of verbal poison from the likes of people such as the actor James Woods. Just a few days ago, Woods called Soros a “grizzled old Nazi prick” in a tweet. As a Hungarian Jew, Soros the boy had to hide from the Nazis.
The ideal financing model is one perfected by Beto O’Rourke. He raised $80 million, without sucking up to PACs or corporate donors, and nearly knocked off the most hated man in the Senate, Ted Cruz of Texas.
But we don’t live in an ideal world. Which brings us back to MacKenzie Bezos, a novelist of some acclaim. She may well follow the lead of Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of the Apple co-founder, whose political spending has been aimed at recruiting Democratic female candidates.
I would bet that the time Ms. Bezos spent studying creative writing at Princeton under Toni Morrison did not make her want to build a wall or turn a blind eye to climate change. If her heart is open to benevolence for the greater good, then the least the Democrats can do is not close the door. ###
[Timothy Egan now writes a semi-monthly column at the NY Fishwrap online. Egan — winner of both a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 as a member of a team of reporters who wrote the series "How Race Is Lived in America" and a National Book Award (The Worst Hard Time in 2006) — graduated from the University of Washington with a BA ( journalism), and was awarded a doctorate of humane letters (honoris causa) by Whitman College (WA) in 2000 for his environmental writings. Egan's most recent book is The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero (2016). See all other books by Eags here.]
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