Politicians and pundits like to say that millionaires deserve tax cuts over working people because they will use their savings to create jobs, raise wages and grow the economy.
I am a multimillionaire CEO who started and ran a manufacturing company, and I can say from first-hand experience that those politicians and pundits are dead wrong. Quite honestly, I think it is just self-serving nonsense that helps justify our absurdly low tax burden.
When my wealthy peers receive their windfalls on Tax Day, they do not, by and large, take their tax savings and reinvest them back into their companies to create jobs or raise wages. Instead, they keep them all to themselves for the simple reason that they can.
All available evidence backs me up. Over the last five decades, at no point have tax cuts for the rich worked to create jobs or spur growth. Instead, they have only served to increase the ever-growing gap between the rich and the rest. Today, the top 1 percent of earners in America take home no less than 20 percent of the nation’s income. Meanwhile, 11.6 million children live in poverty and over half the country lives paycheck to paycheck. This is not an accident but rather an inevitable consequence of decades upon decades of unnecessary and misguided tax breaks for wealthy people like me.
On this Tax Day, I want to ask — nay, demand — that lawmakers end this mess and tax the rich. Spending is not our nation’s problem; revenue (taxes, or a lack thereof) is our problem.
Don’t get me wrong: I don’t want to pay taxes any more than the next person, particularly my fellow millionaires. And the reason I don’t want to pay taxes is the same as everyone else’s: I am greedy. I want to keep every dollar that I make for myself.
But I part with most millionaires in this country in two important ways. First, I have enough self-awareness to recognize the limitations of greed. When I have too much money and average working people — i.e. my potential customers — don’t have enough, that could spell disaster for my business. I need my customers to have enough money in their pockets to be able to buy my products. For this reason, if anyone should get a tax break, I want it to be them.
Second, most millionaires I meet genuinely want to do good with their fortunes and give back to their communities. But unlike them, I understand that governments of all types — federal, state and local — serve society in ways that I and other wealthy people cannot. Despite our best efforts and intentions, the rich could never feed and house the less fortunate. We could never educate the masses. We could never build roads, bridges and other infrastructure that society needs to grow and prosper. We could never fight wars (many of which, if not most, we shouldn’t even fight in the first place). Whether we like it or not, only the government — with its reach, organization and power — can do these things.
If we want to get serious about lifting the position of the worst-off in America and changing our economy for the better, the first thing we need to do is get serious about fixing the tax code. We need to do away with the lower rates and special loopholes and exemptions that allow billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos to sometimes pay literally nothing in taxes. There is only so much good that rich people can do with money, and I want our tax code to start reflecting that reality.
But we can’t stop at home. Tax injustice and economic inequality are problems in all G20 countries, so changing the rules in just one place unfortunately won’t do the trick. We need global collaboration and coordination to avoid capital flight and share data, and this should begin in the countries that hold the most wealth.
We should also begin the process of instituting a global tax on wealth: A recent analysis conducted by the Fight Inequality Alliance, Institute for Policy Studies, Oxfam and the Patriotic Millionaires (an organization of which I am a proud member) found that a tax of up to 5 percent on multimillionaire and billionaire wealth could generate a staggering $1.7 trillion dollars annually, which could then be used to address pressing global concerns like poverty, food insecurity and climate change.
Economic inequality is the greatest crisis of our time. All the other crises facing our world — inflation, climate change, media manipulation, corruption, political polarization, etc. — can all be directly and indirectly traced back to it. That said, lawmakers should throw all their energies into tackling extreme wealth concentration, and they should take their first step in this fight by reforming tax codes worldwide.
I am a greedy millionaire who is concerned about myself and the rest of the world. Tax cuts for rich people like me have never, and will never, save us. In this spirit, on this year’s Tax Day, I say emphatically: Tax me.
Stephen Prince founded Card Marketing Services in 1993 and is vice-chair of the Patriotic Millionaires.