If you haven’t checked your calendar, it’s the first of April, which means we are exactly thirteen days away from our 2026 Spring Symposium, “HOW WE WIN, Tax the Rich, and Save the World.” Be sure to mark your calendars for April 14th at 9AM ET to tune into our livestream on our website, Facebook page, and YouTube channel and learn everything you need to know about how we can create the rich, stable, and free nation that the vast majority of Americans want.
We’ll have more to share about our Symposium and the exciting speaker lineup we have planned for it next week. But, seeing how today is also April Fools’ Day, we thought we’d have a little fun with the holiday—with a Patriotic Millionaires’ twist, of course. Unlike most, we aren’t spending the day cooking up elaborate pranks to play on our loved ones or coworkers. We aren’t telling jokes. And while we can certainly afford it, we also aren’t giving out 1,000,001 free coffees—sorry to disappoint!
Instead, we created a list of our top five “April Tax Fools.” These are people who have either said or done something so stunningly foolish related to taxes over the years that their comments warranted a closer look. Our hope is that, by shining a light on their tax tomfoolery, we can help you see the error of their ways and inspire you to get behind our tax justice agenda.
It’s worth noting that our “April Tax Fools” list is not exhaustive. There are a lot of people who have said and done a lot of foolish things on taxes, but we don’t have the space or time to list them all out. We only have the space and time to highlight five people who have promoted the most common tax myths we’ve encountered since we formed the Patriotic Millionaires sixteen years ago, but we would love to hear from you and who you think should have made our list.
And on that note, let’s get started!
President Ronald Reagan: “Trickle-down economics”
The most foolish thing ever said was that money given to those at the top was going to “trickle down” and benefit everyone else. If you’re unfamiliar with “trickle-down economics,” that’s pretty much the gist of it.
The late President Ronald Reagan did not coin the term “trickle-down economics,” but we still consider him the grandfather of this economic theory. Through his massive 1981 tax cut, his administration began a decades-long movement of tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. Thanks to what Reagan started, the 400 wealthiest Americans now pay lower total tax rates than the average American.
Has trickle-down economics panned out? No, it has not. Instead, Americans have experienced what we like to call “trickle-up economics.” Between 1975 and 2023, nearly $80 trillion in wealth was redistributed from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. And if that doesn’t convince you, consider this: At the same time that over half the country doesn’t have the financial resources to make ends meet, we are also steps away from seeing the world’s first trillionaire.
Randall Stephenson (Former AT&T CEO): “Lower taxes drives more investment, drives more hiring, drives greater wages.”
Randall Stephenson certainly bought the idea of trickle-down economics that former President Reagan was selling. Stephenson delivered this line during a TV interview in May 2017 in the lead-up to the passage of the 2017 GOP Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). He was more or less trying to convince us to believe in trickle-down economics by using corporate buzzwords.
Stephenson was speaking in support of the TCJA’s corporate tax rate reduction (from 35% to 21%). We’ve addressed this before, but Stephenson’s position was wrong. Research found that the TCJA’s corporate tax cut only boosted wages for C-suite executives and top-earning managers. Additional research has found that, in the years following the TCJA’s passage, economic growth did not accelerate, and consumer spending, business investment, and housing investment actually slowed.
We often hear variations of Stephenson’s thinking with regard to taxes for wealthy individuals too. Specifically, we often encounter critics that say that wealthy investors need lower tax rates as incentives to invest, create jobs, and grow the economy. We’ve responded to this line of attack, and suffice it is to say that it’s nonsense. The alternative to investing is stuffing your money under your mattress, and the last we checked, mattresses don’t provide good returns.
If lawmakers want to give tax breaks to people to create jobs and grow the economy, research shows that it’s best to give them to working people, who will spend their savings widely in their local communities. They should stop bothering with millionaires like us and mega-corporations.
Mitt Romney (2012 Republican presidential candidate): “There are 47 percent who are with [President Obama], who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims…these are people who pay no income tax. 47 percent of Americans pay no income tax…And so my job is not to worry about those people.”
Mitt Romney delivered this infamous remark to wealthy donors at a private fundraiser during his 2012 presidential bid. It’s similar to the “skin in the game” critique we’ve come up against with the introduction of the Working Americans’ Tax Cut Act.
We don’t deny that rich people like us pay the most literal dollars in tax. In 2022, the top 50% of earners in America paid 97% of all federal income taxes, and the top 1% paid 40%. But when you run the numbers on the rates of tax we’re paying using our true economic income, you’ll reach the inescapable conclusion that our income tax system isn’t all that progressive. And remember—there are so many other taxes besides income taxes—including sales taxes, excise taxes, payroll taxes, and tariffs—which are very regressive.
In short, Romney was off the mark in 2012. Contrary to what he implied, rich people do not pay their fair share in taxes. And we absolutely should worry about the millions of Americans who do not pay income tax (or who pay relatively little income tax) but who are struggling nonetheless to afford basic essentials.
The good news is that, judging by his December 2025 New York Times opinion piece, Romney has had a change of heart since his 2012 gaffe and now believes it’s time to tax the rich. And if he can come around on our issues, we’re sure our other critics can too.
Stephen Moore (Co-Founder of Committee to Unleash Prosperity): “When I showed up at the Patriotic Millionaires press conference, even though several speakers insisted, ‘I want to pay more taxes,’ when I asked if they would comply with the tax rates as high as 90% voluntarily, there was an embarrassing silence. No one raised their hand.”
This is a line in an opinion piece that Stephen Moore wrote after he made a guest appearance at our 2023 Tax Day press conference. He thought he caught us in a “gotcha” moment, but he did nothing of the sort.
We hear this sort of refrain a lot: “If you want to pay more in tax, why don’t you just write a check to the IRS?” We’ve previously addressed how donating money to the IRS doesn’t cut it. A few millionaires voluntarily paying more in tax is not going to do anything meaningful to solve what we believe to be our country’s biggest problem: the insane economic gap between the rich and the poor that threatens just about everything we hold dear.
Think of it this way. If America suddenly decided to get rid of traffic lights and stop signs at intersections, what good would it do if we were the only Americans that made an effort to stop and look both ways? The same thing applies to taxes. There are only 200 of us, and we won’t be able to do much good if we’re the only rich people in America paying our fair share in taxes.
Washington Post Editorial Board: “California will miss billionaires when they’re gone”
The Washington Post Editorial Board has become the unofficial mouthpiece for their boss, Jeff Bezos, who previously directed the paper’s opinion section to write in support of “personal liberties and free markets.” This headline from an opinion piece published by the Editorial Board in January is a shining example.
The piece argues against California’s “2026 Billionaire Tax Act” ballot initiative, asserting that the tax has sparked and will continue to drive a billionaire exodus from the Golden State. We talked about how this fearmongering was overblown back in January. To refresh, the evidence that we have available does not suggest that wealthy people leave in droves when their taxes are raised. Also, millionaires choose to live where they do for a variety of reasons outside of taxes; in fact, many of our members actively choose to live in high-tax places because they tend to provide a higher quality of life.
Only six billionaires left California before the January 1, 2026 cutoff to avoid the billionaire tax; two others reportedly left after. That doesn’t seem like an exodus to us. But even if we’re wrong and billionaires do start to leave California in droves because of the ballot initiative, we think this should strengthen, not weaken, state lawmakers’ resolve to work together to establish minimum tax standards for the wealthy.
One of our California members, Scott Ellis, appeared on Fox 11 Los Angeles and spoke in support of the wealth tax ballot initiative last week. Watch his debate with California Business Roundtable’s Rob Lapsley here.
Conclusion
As we said, there are plenty of people who have said outlandish things about taxes over the years. They have called the estate tax the “death tax” and an assault on the American Dream. They have argued in support of flat taxes. They have defended the carried interest loophole. There’s a lot of misinformation about the tax system out there, and plenty of it is coming from people who understand their money is power—and they get more money by keeping the tax code weak if people believe the false ideas they’re selling.
Our speakers at our livestreamed April 14th Spring Symposium, “HOW WE WIN, Tax the Rich, and Save the World.” will address these Tax Fools and won’t kid around about the need to tax the rich to save our economy, democracy, and planet from the existential threat posed by extreme wealth concentration. We’ll tell you everything you need to know about the Symposium next week. Until then, don’t fall for any tax tomfoolery!