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CAN DEMOCRACY AND BILLIONAIRES COEXIST?  
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Sam Pizzigati
May 30, 2024
Inequality.org
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_ Not on this planet. The wealthiest of our wealthy, a just-released
report from Americans for Tax Fairness points out, are doing their
best to keep these good times — for America’s rich — rolling. _

Photo: Yahoo!Finance,

 

One person, one vote. The classic essence of democracy. But what if
that one person happens to be a fabulously rich? Does that one person
actually have just “one” vote? Can we have anything approaching
democracy when some among us are sitting on fortunes grander than the
rest of us can even imagine?

Americans have been actively debating questions like these for almost
a century and a half, ever since we entered the era that Mark Twain
quite artfully tagged the “Gilded Age.” We never totally ended
that gilded epoch. But we came close. By the 1950s, Americans of
massive means faced
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rates as high as 91 percent on their income over $200,000, the
equivalent of about $2.4 million today.

In those same years, the wealth America’s wealthiest left behind
when they entered the great beyond faced
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estate tax top rate that could go as high as 77 percent. Wealthy
married couples here in 2024, by contrast, can _totally_ exempt
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much as $27.22 million from any federal estate tax.

Our wealthiest today have good reason to be high-fiving these
wealth-enhancing new tax realities. Top 1 percenters are now grabbing
21 percent of our nation’s income, over double
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1976.

Back in that same 1976, the always helpful World Inequality
Database reminds [[link removed]] us, the 40 percent
of Americans in the nation’s statistical middle held just over a
third of America’s wealth, 33.7 percent. The top 1 percent’s
considerably smaller share that year: 22.6 percent. Today’s story?
Our richest 1 percent hold just about 35 percent of our nation’s
wealth, our middle 40 percent less than 28 percent.

The wealthiest of our wealthy, a just-released report from Americans
for Tax Fairness points out
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are doing their best to keep these good times — for America’s rich
— rolling.

“Just 50 billionaire families,” the new ATF report details,
“have already injected more than $600 million collectively into the
crucial 2024 elections, with that number sure to show accelerating
growth in the final six months of the campaign.”

Stats like these, adds the report, offer “further proof that the
nation’s richest families consider democracy just another commodity
they can buy.”

Any transaction requires, of course, both buyers and sellers. In the
buying and selling of our democracy, the sellers sit in Congress, and
some have even called the White House home. This spring, one
particular former president has been doing “selling” aplenty to
get back to his former 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue address.

In one recent private event, the _Washington Post_ reports
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Donald Trump “asked oil industry executives to raise $1 billion for
his campaign and said raising such a sum would be a ‘deal’ given
how much money they would save if he were reelected as president.”

At another event with deep-pocket donors, held at New York’s
luxurious Pierre Hotel, Trump reminded all present that a re-elected
Joe Biden would let Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the rich expire at the
end of 2025. Warned Trump: “You’re going to have the biggest tax
increase in history.”

What can we do to significantly limit how deeply political candidates
can feed at the billionaire trough? _The Billionaire Family
Business_ — the new Americans for Tax Fairness report — advances
two core recommendations.

The first: We need to reform our current campaign finance landscape. A
good place to start would be ending our burgeoning “dark money”
political contribution charade.

To end run our already feeble federal limits on political giving —
and, at the same time, keep their donations secret — our
contemporary billionaires have over recent years been advancing
frightfully huge sums to non-profits that don’t have politics as
their “primary” purpose. These non-profits have then been moving
those dollars to billionaire-friendly candidates _without_ having to
publicly reveal the identity of the billionaires behind the
contributions.

But closing gaping loopholes like this “dark money” two-step, the
new Americans for Tax Fairness study recognizes, would only get us so
far. The wealth of our richest, just like water, seeks its own level.
Cut off one channel and that wealth will find another. To limit the
impact of our wealthiest on our politics, in other words, we simply
must limit the wealth of our wealthiest.

“We need,” as the new Americans for Tax Fairness paper puts it,
“more effective taxation of billionaires.” And that more effective
taxation must include moves to seriously tax the billionaire
inheritances that “leave economic dynasties with plenty of spare
cash to try to influence elections.”

Without those sorts of moves, the ATF concludes, we’ll continue to
have “no practical limit to how much billionaire families can
spend” on getting their “allies into office.”

Plutocracy can flourish in that environment. Democracy most definitely
cannot.

_[SAM PIZZIGATI, AN INSTITUTE FOR POLICY STUDIES ASSOCIATE FELLOW,
CO-EDITS INEQUALITY.ORG. HIS LATEST BOOKS INCLUDE The Case for a
Maximum Wage
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Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that
Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970
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* economic justice
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* wealth inequality
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* Wealth in the US
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* Income Inequality
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* U.S. Income Inequality
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* Billionaires
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* taxes
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* wealth tax
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* Rich
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* super-rich
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* top 1%
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* 1%
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* the 1%
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