For Immediate Release

Sunday, September 12, 2021

‘America’s billionaires are popping champagne’

Says Patriotic Millionaires President and Founder Erica Payne as House Ways and Means Committee Previews “Pay Fors” 

WASHINGTON D.C. – Tonight, in response to reports that House Democrats on the Ways and Means Committee are likely to maintain significant levels of preferential treatment for the rich in the federal tax code and to refuse to fully fund President Biden’s Build Back Better Agenda as the Administration requested, Erica Payne, the President and Founder of the Patriotic Millionaires, released the following statement:

“America’s billionaires are popping champagne tonight as the House Ways and Means Committee – led by Chair Richie Neal – fails the President, fails the country, and fails history.”

Morris Pearl, the Chair of the Patriotic Millionaires and a former managing director at BlackRock, Inc., said,

“They failed. It’s that simple. This is not what the American people voted for when they elected Joe Biden as President.”

The Patriotic Millionaires issued the following statement:

“In their proposed “pay fors,” the Committee both refused to end the preferential treatment the rich receive in the tax code and refused to fully fund the President’s Agenda, choosing instead to maintain even some of the code’s most egregious tax loopholes like the stepped-up basis, a tax giveaway to America’s wealthiest families, and the carried interest loophole, which allows fund managers to pretend they are investors with regard to taxes.

If this proposal becomes law, working people in America will continue to pay almost twice the tax rate of millionaire investors, heirs to billionaires will continue to inherit enormous amounts of money and property tax-free, and the concentration of wealth and power will continue until this country becomes what it is already fast approaching, a feudal aristocracy. And because the House Ways and Means Committee refuses to stand up to the 55 profitable multinational companies that paid no federal income tax last year, corporations will continue to play international shell games with their profits while moving American jobs overseas.”

It is now incumbent on Members of the Senate Finance Committee to come through for the President and the American people.”

For more information please contact Sam Quigley via email at sam@patrioticmillionaires.org