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.
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.
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, to name a few.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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