Billionaire-Owned Newspaper Rails Against Billionaire Tax

BREAKING NEWS! The newspaper owned by the world's third-richest man thinks it would be a very bad idea for the government of the country that enabled him to become so rich to take back five percent of his $232 billion fortune.

A post on Jeff Bezos' personal Substack – I'm sorry, an editorial in the Washington Post – argues that a new billionaire tax bill being pushed by Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna "would strangle America’s golden goose." The editorial never goes on to explain just how it would do this. Apparently we're just supposed to accept that any sort of curb on the ability of billionaires to accumulate more money than anyone could ever figure out what to do with would cause our economy to collapse in a heap.

Never mind that most of the wealth that our billionaire "golden gooses" supposedly create goes to them, while real wages for most of us stagnate. It's a pretty shitty golden goose that keeps all the gold to itself.

The Post editorial warns that "Sanders wants to confiscate 5 percent of all assets every year from America’s billionaires, with the goal of stealing half their fortunes," as if this would be a bad thing. "Even for billionaires," they add, "a 5 percent tax on every asset they own would virtually wipe out any gains they make in a normal year."

Really? Because ten years ago Bezos was worth roughly $45 billion, according to Forbes. At the end of last year he was worth $215 billion. That's a 378 percent gain over ten years. A tax of five percent a year would not only not have cut his wealth in half over time; it would have barely slowed him down.

The editorial really strains hard to come up with other things about a wealth tax that we ordinary folks should worry about. "[A] federal tax on unrealized gains would force people to sell illiquid assets every year," the editors write. The horror! Also, they warn ominously, "thousands of new bureaucrats would need to be hired to fight with tax lawyers over asset valuations for collections of wines, art, jewelry, and yachts."

Collections of yachts? I don't even own one stinking yacht, or even an inflatable raft, and I don't begrudge spending a little bit of cash to hire people to claw back an even greater amount of money from people who have literal collections of yachts. (In case you're wondering, Bezos only owns two yachts, though it should be noted that the larger of the two is literally longer than a football field and is the world's largest sailing yacht; the smaller "support yacht" that travels with it has a helipad and its own submarine. Together the two cost more than half a billion dollars.)

But let's get back to the editorial, shall we? The only real argument the editors have is that a five percent wealth tax might cause some of our billionaires to flee the country, thus depriving us of their talents and the money they pay in taxes. Never mind that the primary talent that our billionaires seem to share is a remarkable ability to make money for themselves. And never mind that because of the structure of our tax laws – and the fact that we don't (yet) have a billionaire wealth tax – the richest of our rich actually pay a much smaller percentage of what they effectively make per year in taxes than the typical American. (See this post by me to see how this can be.)

So if they want to flee, let them find a place that offers a better deal for them than the United States, which, again, is the country that enabled them to accumulate all their wealth in the first place and that often gifts them (as it has Bezos) with many billions of dollars in government contracts.

Despite the fact that it's extremely unlikely many billionaires would actually flee if the proposed billionaire tax were to become law (and what are the chances of that, anyway?), the threat of leaving does tend to spook politicians out of doing anything that might annoy the filthiest rich. Some call this the "billionaire veto," a potent way to use extreme wealth to pervert democracy.

And that's why I include Jeff Bezos in my list of prominent Brotopians, that elite group of techbros whose utopian dream is to basically be able to do whatever the fuck they want with their wealth without much in the way of pushback from the rest of us.

In Bezos' case, that includes pushback from the staff of the Post, the once-great-or-at-least-good paper he is speed-running into the ground. About a year ago, he informed his editorial employees at the paper that from that point forward "[w]e are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets," which is one way of saying that he was going to censor or push out any writers who might disagree with him on such topics as, say, billionaire taxes, all in the name of "liberty."

I can't say he's necessarily getting his money's worth from the editorial board, though, because I think the main effect of editorials like the one we've been discussing is just to make people madder about the power that billionaires have over us. And also the money they have that we don't.

So keep on railing about billionaire taxes, Washington Post editorial board, because it only makes those unlikely taxes just a teensy bit more likely.