Without doubt, one of the biggest, most common criticisms we encounter whenever we say we want our taxes raised is this: “If you want to pay more taxes, why don’t you just write a voluntary check to the IRS?” It’s a common response from our detractors on our social media posts. This is also a common question that members at our sister organizations in the United Kingdom and Canada encounter as well, albeit with their national equivalents to the IRS (HMRC and CRA, respectively).
It’s been three years since we devoted a whole Closer Look to this “voluntary checks to the IRS” subject. A lot has happened since then, both at our organization and in the world more generally, so we feel we’re due for another fresh, full response. As a matter of principle, we assume most questions we field are sincere and well-intentioned, and don’t like to brush off or sidestep any criticism we receive.
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Short on time? Here’s what you need to know:
- There are several reasons why writing voluntary checks to the IRS won’t help anyone. Chief among these reasons, we need mammoth redistributions of income and wealth and to put a check on the ultra-rich’s power over our economy, democracy, environment, media, and broader society. A few voluntary checks to the IRS just won’t do the trick here. For example, one of our members making a voluntary contribution to the IRS won’t stop someone like Elon Musk from buying his way into heading a government agency like DOGE in the future.
- Our tax code is grossly unfair. The 400 wealthiest Americans pay a lower total tax rate than the average American. Voluntary checks to the IRS from a handful of millionaires like us won’t solve this.
- State and local governments desperately need more funding for public services. Voluntary checks from a handful of wealthy people won’t provide nearly enough revenue that governments need to fill budget gaps.
- Patriotic Millionaire Canada member Emma Davis wrote an opinion piece for the Toronto Star about her decision to pay the CRA (Canada’s equivalent of the IRS) an extra $1 million in taxes voluntarily. She did this to prove a point: individual actions cannot solve entrenched structural problems, and that’s why we need to tax the rich.
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We were inspired to revisit this topic after Patriotic Millionaire Canada member Emma Davis gave the CRA an extra $1 million in taxes completely voluntarily, all to prove a point and give a rather creative answer to our detractors. In an opinion piece that ran in the Toronto Star last Thursday—Canada’s Tax Day—Emma outlined the reasons why she wants her taxes raised. Just like us in the US, she wants to establish fairness in the tax code, raise much-needed revenue for her government to invest in social services and infrastructure, and put a check on extreme wealth concentration and the undue power of the ultra-rich. She also announced her decision to pay $1 million in extra taxes, but was very candid about why she didn’t think her contribution would achieve these aims: “Do I think my $1 million is going to fix any of this? Of course not. I’ve paid an appropriate amount this year, but individual actions cannot solve entrenched structural problems. Only an effective and ethical tax code, mandatory and universally applied, scales enough to have a real impact.”
Emma’s piece sparked conversations across social media. Some Canadian influencers filmed some fantastic videos about Emma’s call to action, which you can watch here and here. Patriotic Millionaires Canada also put out some great quote graphics about the piece, which you can check out here and here.
We’ll now spend the rest of this newsletter making our fresh and full case as to why writing voluntary checks won’t fix what we want to fix. We’ll keep our focus on the situation in America, but our arguments can be applied to our friends in Canada, the United Kingdom, and around the world as well. We’ll then offer some broader reflections on why individual, voluntary actions can’t solve systemic problems.
Voluntary checks will not make our tax code fairer
There is an assumption—sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit—that people make when they ask why we don’t just write voluntary checks to the IRS. They’re assuming that we already pay our fair share in taxes, and that we just want to pay some extra on top of it.
Let us be as clear as we can possibly be: when we say we want to pay “more” taxes, what we mean is that we want to finally start paying our fair share. In other words, “more” and “fair share” are one and the same for us here at Patriotic Millionaires.
The tax code in America is woefully unfair and tilted to advantage the wealthy and high earners like us. We’ve written Closer Look after Closer Look after Closer Look highlighting all of the different ways that the tax system privileges our interests over those of working people. Case in point that should speak for itself: the 400 wealthiest Americans pay a lower total tax rate than the average American.
The sad reality is that, for the rich, paying taxes in and of itself is essentially already a voluntary exercise. Many of us are investors and essentially decide if/when we pay tax from our decisions to sell our assets. We can also afford small armies of tax lawyers that help us take advantage of every imaginable loophole, deduction, exemption, and low rate and come out the other side on Tax Day with a paltry bill.
Our 200 members writing voluntary checks to the IRS will not fix the inequities in our tax code.
We want all rich people to be required to pay what we rightfully owe in taxes—just like teachers, crossing guards, and bus drivers do every year. And we fail to see what’s controversial about that.
Voluntary checks won’t give state and local governments the revenue they need
States and cities need tax dollars to fund things like transportation, education, healthcare, infrastructure, and more. (The federal government doesn’t, but that’s a story for another day.) While the Patriotic Millionaires does not take a position on how revenues at any level of government should be spent, we do care about ensuring that state and local governments have the funds they need for whatever voters’ representatives decide are priorities. And we care about having a strong social safety net, without a say on the particulars of what that net looks like, so that working people have money to spend to keep their local economies humming.
As things stand today, unfortunately, many states and cities all over the country are struggling to raise the revenue they need to finance these kinds of public services. Even if all 200 of us voluntarily gave away our entire fortunes to our respective state and local governments, it simply wouldn’t be enough to make a difference in this regard. It would be like throwing a half cup of water on a one million acre forest fire. Filling budget gaps will require consistent and enormous infusions of tax revenue, and governments will only be able to find that revenue if they tax all rich people more. At the minute, they’re taxing working people disproportionately more than us to get that revenue, which is incredibly unfair and needs to change if they want to make any progress on balancing the books.
Speaking about fairness, public services—everything from courts, roads, schools, emergency responders, and more—make wealthy people’s success possible. Rich people should not view their tax contributions as a burden, but rather as an investment back into the communities that they benefited from. Voluntary taxes from a few millionaires just simply won’t cut it as a proper and collective “thank you.”
Voluntary taxes won’t reduce inequality or check the ultra-rich’s power
If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, you know the drill on how extreme inequality has become. If you’re not, the fact that Elon Musk is a stone’s throw away from becoming a trillionaire at the same time that 66 million Americans don’t make enough money to afford basic necessities should do the trick.
We will need mammoth redistributions of income and wealth to begin to close the obscene gap between the haves and the have-nots in this country. Similar to the budget issues facing state and local governments, a few of us writing voluntary checks to the government for the purpose of redistributing to lower-income people will just simply not be enough. We also can’t depend on corporations to find a conscience any time soon and share profits more widely with workers and less widely with executives and shareholders. Raising taxes on all the rich is the only way.
But perhaps most importantly, writing voluntary checks also would not put a check on the excessive power that flows to the ultra-rich on account of their wealth—not even a little bit. It would do nothing to stop people like Elon Musk from buying a whole social media company (Twitter/X). It would do nothing to stop people like Kylie Jenner from taking 17-minute private jet flights and throwing what’s left of our planet in the trash. It would do nothing to stop the Yass, Brockman, and Uihlein families from dumping millions into our elections and treating our democracy like their own playground. And it would do nothing to stop people like Jeff Bezos from buying The Washington Post and using it to promote his own political agenda; taking over a whole city for his wedding; buying up our most treasured cultural institutions and events; and doing it all on the backs of his miserably underpaid Amazon workers.
America is being run by a handful of very powerful, very large Goliaths. 200 Davids—even pretty rich Davids like us—writing voluntary checks just simply won’t be enough to stop them. The only chance we have to defeat them is by putting them up against another Goliath, and that Goliath is a fair and robust tax code.
Conclusion
To our naysayers and frenemies on social media, here are some responses we’re going to try out moving forward:
- We’ll write a voluntary check, so long as you can explain to us why it’s okay for Elon Musk—who’s an eyelash away from becoming the world’s first trillionaire—to pay $0 in income taxes.
- Let’s pretend you win the $500 million jackpot tomorrow and decide to give it all away to your state’s IRS. Will all of your state’s problems be solved?
- We’ll write a voluntary check, on one condition. You can guarantee that our checks will prevent billionaires from ever being able to take over Venice again to host their wedding.
- If you want to save the polar bears, why don’t you move to the Arctic and bring an ice-maker with you to rebuild their rapidly depleting sea ice habitat?
There are certainly situations where voluntary, individual actions can make a difference and are worth doing even if no one else is. Donating blood can literally save someone’s life. Donating food to your local food pantry can prevent a family from going hungry. Putting your cart back at the grocery store can make a worker’s day a little bit easier.
Donating extra to the IRS is not one of those situations. Establishing tax fairness, filling budget shortfalls, and reducing extreme inequality are humongous undertakings, and voluntary checks from 200 wealthy people won’t be worth a dime. These are massive, systemic problems that require massive, systemic solutions—i.e. reforming the tax code—that must, by definition, involve all of us rich people.
It’s like traffic laws. If America 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? To prevent car crashes and keep the roads safe, we all have to abide by the rules.
For the record, there is nothing wrong with voluntarily donating to the IRS. Our friend Emma Davis from Patriotic Millionaires Canada certainly has nothing to apologize for. What we’re saying, and what Emma stressed in her Toronto Star opinion piece, is that taxing all rich people, and properly, is the only way that we are going to be able to collectively solve the problems we as a society need to solve—before it’s too late.
As Emma said to close her piece, “This year, I proudly paid the extra tax voluntarily. Next year, I hope the government makes me.”