Forgot Your Password?

New to The Nation? Subscribe

Print subscriber? Activate your online access

.nation-small__b{fill:#fff;}

The Billionaires’ Bathos Club

American plutocrats can’t stop whining about how extremely modest tax increases are killing their initiative.

New York real estate mogul Steven Roth, who recently complained on a Vornado earnings call that calls to tax the rich were akin to a racial slur, appears here in his safe space: haranguing a worker on a picket line in 2011.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani can reliably infuriate the ultrarich regardless of whether they live in New York City, whether his policies affect them, or whether they can spell and pronounce his name correctly. As a democratic socialist who believes the über-wealthy are paying far too little in taxes, Mamdani is able by his mere existence to send them into paroxysms of outrage and self-pity.

To listen to some of the nation’s wealthiest, you’d think Mamdani was putting them in danger of living like the average American, i.e., someone who struggles to pay higher food and gas prices, who’s increasingly at a loss to afford retirement and healthcare, and who must rely on heavy infusions of high-interest credit-card debt to get by. But no. Mamdani simply wants wealthy Gothamites to pay more taxes on pieds-à-terre worth more than $5 million. Higher taxes on second homes already exist in conservative strongholds like South Carolina and Montana, but if Mamdani adopts them in New York, the ultrarich argue, we might as well be in Soviet Russia. If they cannot have an unfair advantage in a city that’s increasingly unaffordable for middle-class people, they’ll take their ball and go home—or at least to Miami.

And what will the city do without them? They’re job creators, they argue. In a recent Financial Times story, one unnamed and aggrieved well-to-do restaurateur from Miami with a second home in Manhattan spells out the horrifying injustice of it all. “I think it’s shameful,” he said. “I provide a lot of money to people who are blue-collar workers who work for me, servers in restaurants. If we’re not there, there are going to be less people being paid.”

It’s irritating when people who claim to be enthusiastic capitalists ostensibly schooled in the basic exchange of money for labor nonetheless act as though paying workers for work is essentially charity. If this heroic wealth creator had no servers to staff his restaurants, he’d have no profits from it, either. Yet in his telling he should be applauded—and generously subsidized—for hiring people to make himself money.

Nevertheless, the idea that the wealthy benefit the city more than the city benefits them is pervasive among the billionaire and centimillionaire class. It’s rooted chiefly in their conviction that they deserve their wealth based on their superior personal merit—as well as the corollary folk belief that people who are struggling have simply made bad decisions or refused to work hard enough. In this view, hostility toward billionaires’ paying single-digit effective tax rates, or no taxes at all, thanks to a constellation of tax breaks, rigorous loophole navigation, and offshore tax shelters, is simply hostility toward success.

This worldview is on lavish display at the Washington Post editorial board, now entirely captured by the self-enamored plutocratic whims of billionaire Jeff Bezos. After scotching the paper’s 2024 endorsement of Kamala Harris, Bezos proceeded to announce that the Post’s opinion pages would furnish a nonstop and deafening chorus of cheers for the purest libertarian caricature of laissez-faire capitalism. In an editorial published last week, the editorial board adopted the hoary argument that any criticism of capitalism—in this case, New York Democratic Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s assertion that wealth hoarding is immoral and bad for society—was simply ill-disguised envy on the part of lazy and unmotivated economic failures.

“Every self-made billionaire—and most of them are self-made—was at one point worth $999 million,” these indignant defenders of unbridled greed announced. “Was everything they did up to that point legitimate? What made the additional million immoral?” The sad truth of the matter, the Post harrumphed, is that Ocasio-Cortez “has a low opinion of human potential.”

Where to begin? For starters, most billionaires are not self-made by even the most generous definition of the term. Extreme wealth in America is almost always the product of inherited money and resources and equity appreciation far out of proportion to the individual contribution of corporate founders and executives. It’s also never accumulated without the support and contributions of workers who are not compensated nearly as well for their work (or, in some cases, even credited for it). And the whole scheme of plunder is sealed by a mammoth assortment of resources and tax breaks........

© The Nation