This may be hard to believe, but my journey with the Patriotic Millionaires began with a second helping of chocolate pudding.
Before I joined the Patriotic Millionaires, I was a Managing Director at BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management firm. During the financial crisis of 2008, I was part of the team at BlackRock hired by the Federal Reserve, Treasury Department, and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to structure and assess the cost of the Citibank bailout. I then worked on similar projects in the UK, Ireland, and Greece.
As part of my work with bailouts in Greece, I attended a meeting on the top floor of a bank in downtown Athens in the summer of 2013. At one point during the meeting, I walked over to a window so people wouldn’t see that I had taken a second chocolate pudding from the dessert buffet. As I ate my treat, I looked out the window and saw what initially appeared to be a parade down on the street below. I quickly realized, however, that it was actually an angry riot or protest making its way towards the parliament.
I sat back down at the conference table and tried to refocus on the meeting, but I couldn’t stop thinking: was I doing any good for those poor, desperate people on the street? Or was I only helping to save the jobs of the Greek bank executives sitting around me by helping to bail out their bank?
That experience led me to ask bigger questions about the broader state of the economy and to do some soul-searching about my place in it as a person of wealth. One thing led to another, and a few months later, I resigned from BlackRock to work full-time with the Patriotic Millionaires. Fast forward ten years and I’m still here, now as the Chairman of the board and with a much larger staff and membership to boot.
The Patriotic Millionaires’ mission is broken down into three main priorities: taxing the rich, paying the people, and spreading the power. My personal experiences in life inform my conviction that each of those priorities provide the key to reducing extreme and rising inequality in America, which I believe is causing the divisive politics that is in turn the greatest threat facing our country.
As things stand in America today, thanks to special rules, wealthy investors like me pay far lower tax rates than people who work for a living. A common refrain that I hear is that investors need tax breaks as incentives to invest, create jobs, and grow the economy, but I know from my own experience that this could not be further from the truth. Even if tax rates on investment income were very high, I would always choose to invest because, the last time I checked, the alternative – stuffing money under mattresses – doesn’t exactly produce the greatest returns.
Contrary to popular belief, tax cuts for wealthy people like me have never and will never “trickle down” to benefit everyone else. If we really want to create jobs and grow the economy, the best way to do it is to get more money to the millions of working people who are the real job creators in this country, not rich investor types like me. I have hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of stock in Apple, but I cannot honestly say that I have created a single job for the company by sitting at my computer watching its stock price go up. Rather, it’s the millions of people who buy iPhones each year who deserve the credit for Apple’s employee payroll. Our economy is driven by consumer demand and will collapse if people don’t make enough money to buy products and services. That’s why it’s so important for people to be paid well at their jobs, for the minimum wage to be raised to a level that people can afford to live on, and for tax relief to be directed at them.
But the issue with inequality – with millionaires like me getting richer and richer and everyone else getting poorer and poorer, day in and day out – is not just about what it means for the economy. It’s also about what it means for our democracy.
Let me tell you a story to explain what money can do for you in American politics. Back in 2004, I was involved in Howard Dean’s Democratic presidential primary campaign. After Dean dropped out and John Kerry became the presumptive nominee, my wife and I were set to watch the Democratic National Convention on TV. However, my wife decided that she wanted to go to the Convention. And what do you know: a few days later, after a few phone calls to the right people and a large donation to the Democratic National Committee, we found ourselves playing pool with Ben Affleck and listening to President Obama’s famous “purple state” speech as honored guests.
Wealthy people like me have an incredible amount of power and influence over American politics. Lawmakers spend hours upon hours talking to donors but can barely spend any kind of meaningful time with most of their constituents. The end result is a system of government that responds to the preferences of the wealthy and well-connected while ignoring the concerns and needs of everyone else.
I love America, but I am genuinely worried about what will happen to us if we continue to let inequality grow unchecked. They did that in South Africa in the 1980s, and it didn’t end well for anyone, including wealthy people at the top like me.
I don’t want my granddaughter to grow up seeing scenes like the one I saw in Athens a decade ago. That would not make for a happy childhood. I want her to grow up in a country where everyone from every background has what I had when I was growing up — the ability to thrive, succeed, and have their voices heard – not one where millionaires like me reap all the benefits and call all the shots.
With my money, I could give my granddaughter a lifetime supply of chocolate puddings if I wanted. But the best and biggest inheritance I could ever give her is a safer and healthier country for her to grow up in, and I am trying to do my part to make that happen through my work with the Patriotic Millionaires.
Morris Pearl chairs the Board of Directors at Patriotic Millionaires. He was formerly a Managing Director at BlackRock and had a long tenure on Wall Street, where he invented some of the securitization technology connecting America’s capital markets to consumers in need of credit. He has also co-authored two books: Tax the Rich: How Lies, Loopholes and Lobbyists Make the Rich Richer (2021) and Pay the People: Why Fair Pay is Good for Business and Great for America (2024).
Morris is available to speak to the media about the Patriotic Millionaires’ general work and mission, in addition to taxes, wages and corporate behavior, unions, and inheritance.
To get in touch with Morris, please contact Emily McCloskey, Deputy Communications Director, at emily@patrioticmillionaires.org.