Earlier this month, one of our members, Abigail Disney, spoke at an inaugural event, “Tax Justice and Solidarity: Towards an Inclusive Sustainable Common Home,” hosted by the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences and the Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation in Vatican City.
Abigail joined world leaders, economists, and civil society leaders – including Pope Francis, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, Jayati Ghosh, Joseph Stiglitz, and Gabriel Zucman – in a high-level dialogue about international tax justice and the threat that extreme wealth concentration poses to democracies, economies, and global stability.
For this week’s Closer Look, we want to share the speech that Abigail delivered at the event. We recommend watching Abigail’s full remarks in the video below and, if helpful, using the transcript to follow along. She shares much of her personal story and gets to the heart of why extreme wealth is such a problem in our world today.
You can also watch a short clip of Abigail’s speech on our Instagram channel.
Good morning, and just, I’m so humbled to be here. I’m so humbled. So thank you for allowing me the chance to speak today.
And I’m speaking because I’m an inheritor. I’m an inheritor because my grandfather, Roy O. Disney, and his brother, Walt Disney, started The Walt Disney Company. They came from Midwestern American poverty, very poor. And everything they accomplished was because of their very hard work and creativity.
A lot of people think of them as the embodiment of what we call the American Dream. I, however, am not a representative of the American Dream. In this century, actually, very few people are. As an inheritor, I exist only because of some quirks in the tax system, some good luck, and some very loving grandparents. But nothing else. That means I’ve never had to work or be brilliant. For me, the table was set long before I was born and there was very little I could do to lose my advantages. Because of the way education, healthcare, housing, policing, and tax law work in my country, I’m well insulated from any mistakes I might make and inordinately rewarded when I even do the smallest things right.
I’ve seen all the good that wealth can do, but I have also stood witness to the way it can lead to personal, social, political, moral, and even spiritual corrosion on an epic scale. And now, as an American, I am grief-stricken as I watch the havoc that that moral and spiritual corrosion are capable of wreaking when they sink their teeth into a democracy. The billionaire-heavy leadership currently running riot through every governable institution in America did not arrive in Washington, DC by accident and they did not arrive there by merit either. Every word out of their mouths is an object lesson in the threat that they present to democracy as well as to the integrity of anyone listening to them.
It’s important to remember here that for the last half century wealthy Americans have been carrying out a well-funded and ferocious campaign to change the narrative about democracy and about money. My admittedly flawed country once told itself a story of how diverse people came together, and yes, they were mostly white and mostly men, but you know, come with me on this. Diverse people came together to build a remarkable nation. A place where people could join together to face a challenge like the Depression or the second World War. The heart of that narrative was that we need each other the way we need oxygen, and that the best things we do we do together.
That narrative was purposely replaced with another, darker one – that each of us is in it for ourselves. That the best way to build a society is where everybody sticks to their own solitary path. This new narrative urged us to raise ourselves up by our own bootstraps, and if you just spend one minute imagining how that works, you’ll understand how insulting and absurd that image is.
Central to the new narrative is the idea that the government is always wrong, can do nothing right or well, and that taxation is always and everywhere destructive. Taxes kill economies, they tell you. Taxes inhibit creation. And when I hear this, I wonder, how did my grandfather and great uncle build a global juggernaut of a company while they were paying a 91% marginal tax rate on their income and were able to provide so much that even their great-grandchildren are doing fine on over 50% in estate tax.
You can hear the soul of the new narrative in the attempt by our new vice president to explain how love works in public life according to “ordo amoris.” His Holiness, God love him, just this Monday reacted to the grotesque mischaracterization of love in public. He said, “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. In other words, the human person is not a mere individual, relatively expansive, with some philanthropic feelings…The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by…meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”
Another word for the notion that he’s talking about there is solidarity. And solidarity is what’s missing when the wealthiest among us live without regard for the massive dignity gap that flows from grotesque inequality. If solidarity existed in these very wealthy people, we would not be constrained by a system of taxation which has repeatedly been proven to supercharge the inequality dynamic.
Inequality exerts a downward pull on the moral lives of the very wealthy. I have seen the way wealth erodes character, the way it saps empathy out of even the most well-meaning people, and the way it leaves them under the impression that everywhere they go they must be protected from “them” by their private guards. No one can be trusted. Private guards, private airplanes, private parking lots, private restaurants, and even, last month in Los Angeles, private firefighters.
If you inherit, you are born into a world of unquestioned privilege, and no one bothers to tell you that other people don’t have it as good. That’s something you’re left to figure out on your own. For an inheritor, this privilege is morally neutral. When you’re young, you didn’t ask for it, you didn’t do anything for it. But if you don’t question it, and aggressively, what it will do is curdle. And it will curdle into entitlement, and that entitlement spreads like a fungus across every assumption you make, every comfort you slouch into, and every tax break you can charge us.
Inequality is a coin with two sides, and it’s easy to lose ourselves in exploring the advantages of those on top. But as inequality widens, the dynamics of advancement at the top are a perfect inversion of the dynamics of loss at the bottom. The billions that have fallen mysteriously into the hands of the oligarchs have come at the expense of those least in a position to give anything up.
How did this happen? Well, easily, as it turns out, through tax cuts causing cuts in services, by governments failing to support unionization and collective bargaining, by taxing capital gains differently than income earned for work, by leaving the most favored tax rates to those who simply wait for checks to arrive in the mail, rather than for those who work day after day to support their families. Rather than contend with a 91% income tax rate as my grandfather did, I often pay a lower marginal tax rate, effective tax rate, than does my housekeeper.
At the beginning of the 1980s, the working class in America did not lead perfect lives but they nevertheless were well represented by unions, contributed to pensions for their retirement, had decent access to health care, could afford generous and secure housing, and sent their kids to pretty good schools on pretty safe roads.
And yet the bigger the rewards for the wealthy have grown, the more they have pressed their advantage. Not unlike spoiled children. As a mother of teenagers, I am well aware that the longer it takes someone to explain something to you, the more likely it is that they’re lying. Apply that wisdom to the fact that the American tax code is six times longer than the Bible, and the tax code is a statement of the ethos of a nation, I worry deeply for my own.
Entitlement. Narcissism. Impunity. An unwillingness to acknowledge the suffering of others in any meaningful way. A willed ignorance about reality. An undisciplined idealism about how much philanthropy can actually accomplish and a deep intransigence about the idea that the world can ever be shaped in any other way. These are the characteristics I’ve watched form again and again and again in wealthy people around me. They are also the characteristics of those who should have no power – in fact, should be kept as far from power as humanly possible. And not just political power, any kind of power.
And yet, we have handed the keys in the United States to the wrecking ball to the very men (and yes, they are mostly men) who are bent on a kind of wreckage so absolute that when they’re done, I believe they will even try to wreck the ball itself.
We are in a bind. Not just democracy but global stability itself in many cases rests in the hands of those least able, much less willing, to acknowledge that every single person on this planet is deserving of a life of dignity, and that the world as it is currently shaped is a long way from being able to make that happen.
The only way out of this bind we are in is to get back to the place where it started. Taxes. When we eviscerated our system of taxation, when we let the wealthy call the shots, we started down the path that has led us to this point. When we tax income for work, we must tax it more favorably and more progressively than we tax capital. And we must tax wealth, not just income. There’s no way to create equality unless we go straight at wealth. And the millionaires complain about this, but my feeling is, if you can’t live on $999 million a year, you have bigger problems.
Those of us who see this must work against our own self interest for the good of the planet and for the good of our brothers and sisters around the world, all of whom are just as important, just as valuable, just as worthy of dignity as any one of us. Thank you.