Here at the Patriotic Millionaires, Tax Day serves as a yearly reminder that the ultra-wealthy can bypass many of the frustrating hurdles in our tax code at the expense of working people— and that it’s on us to continually call on lawmakers to raise our taxes. But now more than ever, we need Congress to act urgently, as we are facing an inequality crisis so extreme that it threatens the essence of our democracy.
That’s why two of our members, Morris Pearl and Scott Ellis, published an opinion piece today for Tax Day in MSNBC in order to bring awareness to the very real threats facing our democracy and economy. In their piece, they write:
“We don’t have a problem with wealth in and of itself. We make no apologies for our own financial success. People need financial incentives to innovate and work hard, and in the end, their ingenuity benefits all of us. What we do, however, have a problem with is a small handful of people having so much wealth that it inevitably becomes power. We have a problem with billionaires like Trump and Musk using the government to improve their own financial situations and business ventures. More than that though, we have a problem with the fact that the tax code has done virtually nothing whatsoever to prevent the oligarchic crisis in which America now finds itself.”
We have yet to find a single person that likes Tax Day. Nobody likes paying taxes, or the headaches that come with navigating W2s, 1099s, 1098s, and tax-filing software. We millionaires largely avoid that stress—we pay our tax accountants the big bucks to handle it for us—but we still wouldn’t go so far as to say that Tax Day is our favorite day of the year.
But even though we dislike paying taxes as much as the next American, we understand how important fulfilling this sacred civic obligation is. And as our democracy hangs in the balance with everything going on in Washington these days, we understand this better now than ever before.
The gap between the wealthy and the rest of the country hasn’t been this wide since the Gilded Age, when robber barons like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and J.P. Morgan were around. According to the new Forbes’ Billionaires List, America’s 902 billionaires wield a record $6.8 trillion in combined wealth, which is more than what the entire bottom half of the country holds. Over the last few decades, as inequality has skyrocketed, no less than $50 trillion has been redistributed from the bottom 90% to the top 1%.
The extreme concentration of wealth in a few lucky hands harms our economy, our environment, our system of law, and more. But the threat that it poses to democracy is the most profound. A small cadre of billionaires basically catapulted their peer Donald Trump back into the White House with their funding in the 2024 election. Many of them were rewarded for their largesse with key positions in Trump’s Cabinet and administration, but none as much as his biggest benefactor, Elon Musk. America’s so-called “first buddy” has taken a chainsaw, both figurative and literal, to the federal government and culled it to his liking, leaving thousands of hardworking Americans without jobs or the security of funds from various social programs. And while Musk and the other billionaire oligarchs are busy building a wrecking ball to topple our democracy, Trump is busy building a bomb for the same purpose, as he threatens to pursue an unconstitutional third term in office, refuses to comply with court orders, targets perceived enemies at universities and law firms, openly expresses his intention to annex other countries, and purges the Justice Department of officials involved in prosecutions against him.
How do we get out of this mess that years of unchecked inequality has created and save our democracy? Three simple words: tax the rich. Elizabeth Pancotti, the Managing Director of Policy and Advocacy at Groundwork Collaborative, framed this well last week at our Expert Town Hall, “How to Beat the Broligarchs:” “[Saving what’s left of our democracy and increasing taxes on the wealthy], at this point, are now inseparable in our economy. And it is simply not possible to be for the former and not the latter…we need democracy reform, we need campaign finance reform, we need voting rights reform, but we cannot save or strengthen our democracy without taking on the tax code.”
Our tax code has failed abysmally in recent years in fulfilling its role to put a check on extreme inequality, as it once did in the mid 20th century. In 1945, the top marginal income tax rate was 94%; today, it’s 37%. In 1945, the estate tax had a top marginal rate of 77% and applied to estates worth over $60,000 (or roughly $1 million in today’s dollars); now, it has a 40% top rate and a $13.99 million exemption threshold. In 1950, the top 400 richest Americans paid an overall tax rate on all their federal, state, and local taxes of 70%; in 2018, they paid 23%, which was less than any other income group. And as our Founder and President Erica Payne likes to stress, the destruction of our tax code happened under the watch of both Democratic and Republican administrations.
The situation with our tax code is about to go from bad to worse as Republicans prepare to pass a “big, beautiful” bill that will, among other things, extend some of the worst and most regressive parts of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Last week, Republicans in the House and Senate got one step closer to making this happen by passing their respective budget blueprints, which leave room for no less than $5 trillion in tax cuts. They’re reportedly considering some small tweaks that give us hope, but there’s no doubt that, on balance, whatever “big, beautiful” bill they come up with will only be “big” and “beautiful” for millionaires and billionaires like us.
We’ve been saying that we need to tax the rich for a while, but we recently put our money where our months have been by unveiling our new legislative platform, “AMERICA 250: The Money Agenda.” The platform consists of four powerful, mutually-reinforcing pieces of legislation that would ensure prosperity and stability for America’s next 250 years ahead of its 250th birthday in 2026. They include:
- The “COST OF LIVING” TAX CUT Act, which would provide a Cost of Living Exemption (COLE) on federal taxes equal to the median cost of living for a single adult with no children, and shift responsibility for those revenues from the working class to the millionaire class.
- The “COST OF LIVING” WAGE Act, which raises the federal minimum wage to the median cost of living for a single adult with no children, and protects American workers by ensuring that every full-time job pays at least enough to support a single individual.
- The EQUAL TAX Act, which equalizes tax rates for capital gains and ordinary income over $1 million, and disrupts the “buy, borrow, die” strategy used to minimize and eliminate the tax obligations of the uber-wealthy.
- The ANTI-OLIGARCH Act, which would be divided into two phases. The first phase would prevent further wealth concentration by implementing significant taxes on the intergenerational transfer of wealth, on large sums of trust-held wealth, and on the true economic income of America’s ultra-rich. The second phase would dismantle the existing American oligarchy by taxing the wealth held by the ultra-rich sufficiently.
We love America. If we didn’t, why else would we call ourselves Patriotic Millionaires? But the sad truth is that the country we love so dearly is in deep trouble. That’s why we feel compelled to do something about it by calling on lawmakers to tax us more – and even giving them the legislative tools to make it happen. And what better day to do it than Tax Day?
Happy Tax Day, America. Tax the rich!