America has a billionaire problem.
If we keep dancing around it, our democracy will die and our way of life will die along with it.
The vast majority of Americans would never call for class war. They have no issue with heart surgeons, for example, making $1 million a year and enjoying luxuries earned from their outsized contributions to our society.
Wealth is not a moral failing, and Americans have long revered the entrepreneurial spirit that animates small business owners to build a modest fortune for themselves and their families.
But a growing class of malignant oligarchs has initiated a campaign to exert unchallenged control over our democratic institutions and our economy. The war has already started, and the billionaires have a significant head start.
These individuals are hoarding unfathomably large amounts of wealth and are now wielding it to suppress critical media, co-opt our politics and defang our justice system. They have rigged our tax system so that they pay dramatically lower tax effective rates compared to working people. They have consolidated corporate power to shield themselves from scrutiny.
We must either rise up and resist or cede what little political self-determination remains to a handful of oligarchs.
Like a cancer, billionaire control is metastasizing in every facet of America’s socio-political and socio-economic system. They control newspapers, television stations and every major social media platform. Last year, we learned the extent of oligarchical control over our judiciary when it was revealed that a handful of billionaires were showering Supreme Court justices with lavish vacations and obscenely inappropriate gifts.
They use their wealth to overwhelm the campaign finance system.
In May, Americans for Tax Fairness reported that 50 billionaire families have already injected over $600 million into 2024 election campaigns. But that figure didn’t include what billionaires recently committed to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
Physician and political donor Miriam Adelson, for example, reportedly plans to contribute over $90 million to a super PAC supporting Trump. We must not be naive. These contributions are quid pro quos. Billionaires expect — and get — things in exchange for those contributions. In return for her munificence, Adelson reportedly seeks Trump’s support for Israel’s annexation of the West Bank.
Last month, Trump proposed a deal to oil company executives: If they contribute $1 billion to his campaign, he’ll reverse Biden’s environmental policies they don’t like. The deal, according to The Guardian, would be worth $110 billion in tax breaks to the industry. A huge chunk of that $110 billion, of course, would land in the pockets of billionaires.
Most commonly, however, the political price of billionaire support is lower taxes. At a fundraising dinner at the home of a billionaire hedge fund investor, which netted him $50.5 million in contributions, Trump promised to renew and expand his 2017 tax cuts.
In a single tax year, just one of the many giveaways in Trump’s tax package allowed four billionaires to escape a total of $170 million in tax.
Here’s how bad it gets: In 2021, we learned that PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel had used a Roth IRA to avoid tax on $5 billion in gains. The next year, Thiel, who has openly stated that he doesn’t believe democracy and freedom are compatible, employed about two percent of the taxes he dodged to almost single-handedly buy a Senate seat for Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), who now is the GOP’s candidate for vice president.
It strains credulity to think Vance would ever cast a vote against his benefactor, Peter Thiel.
It’s a vicious circle. Billionaires spend millions to sponsor politicians, who support tax policies that enrich their billionaire sponsors, who then have even more excess wealth available to sponsor politicians.
Meanwhile, the reduced tax revenues are invoked to justify austerity policies that place health care, education and a comfortable retirement out of reach for average Americans.
While billionaires use wealth to gain power and power to increase wealth, and as the arrival of America’s first trillionaire approaches, most of us are hanging on by our fingernails. Over half of Americans say they lack the cash to cover a $1,000 unexpected emergency expense. But billionaires use the corporations they control to fleece the American public. Another few years of shrinkflation, drip pricing and dynamic pricing, and even a $200 expense will be a challenge for most of us.
Power, Frederick Douglass warned us, concedes nothing without a demand. Let us be clear-eyed: Oligarchs are embedding themselves into every facet of our system, across our economy and our democracy.
Checking their power will not be easy. But the first step is simple: We demand a tax system that prevents the accumulation of billion-dollar fortunes and whittles away the billion-dollar fortunes that already exist.
The danger of this moment is not class conflict, but failing to realize that a political conflict pitting billionaires against everyone else has already begun. If we ignore it, it will evolve into something uglier and more violent — something that could well undo the democratic promise of America.
Bob Lord, an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow, currently serves as senior advisor on Tax Policy at the Patriotic Millionaires.
