Are you feeling the bbgb’s (my version of the heebie-jeebies, relating to the Bad Billionaire/Good Billionaire debate)? There have been a lot of efforts lately to convince us that there is such a thing as a good billionaire, and not just by billionaires. The arguments put forward include job creation and deservedness (which I’ll address in future blogs). But for many who believe there are good billionaires (and probably Santa Claus as well), the prevailing argument is that billionaires donate to good causes or good candidates.
I think we can agree that there are no-good billionaires. But let me be clear about this: THERE ARE NO GOOD BILLIONAIRES.
The expression that “every billionaire is a policy failure” captures the notion that there is a structural problem, e.g., tax, anti-monopoly or minimum wage policies, but that does not mean the individuals are not part of the problem. I’m not saying that all billionaires are not nice. I hear that the President is charming when he’s off camera (he’s even said so himself). But nice or not, it is the individual who takes advantage of the system to amass a fortune that is at least one thousand times larger than a poor millionaire. Good person, maybe. Good billionaire, never.
So-called good billionaires are no different than bad ones in three ways: 1) they are hoarding their wealth; 2) they have done nothing to dismantle the structure that allows them to be billionaires; and 3) they feel entitled to make decisions about what is good for everyone else and can do it better than everyone else. In short, they are plutocrats, excessively rich people with outsized influence over just about everything.
Chuck Collins writes in his book, Burned by Billionaires, “…billionaire power deeply affects you. Whether you are aware of it or not, where you live, what you eat, what news you consume, whether you feel economically secure, are all impacted by the billionaire class.”
For sure, when it comes to “charity,” there are differences among billionaires. For far too many, giving away money is transactional to increase their wealth and status, making it easy for us to label them malevolent plutocrats. For others, it is to make the world conform to their view of a better place. Let’s stipulate that these benevolent plutocrats are better than malevolent ones, but they ALL are plutocrats defending their plutocracy. Their benevolence doesn’t make them good… just less bad.
“[W]ith few exceptions, major donors from the ranks of billionaires … are nowhere to be seen except in defending the status quo and amplifying the problem [of extreme wealth]” wrote my colleague Larry Ottinger in Inside Philanthropy.
Billionaire charity itself has turned into a huge tax loophole. It more often than not goes to their private foundation or donor-advised fund to cement their after-life reputations; or tied to getting their name on a building or program; or done with appreciated property to avoid the tax on that appreciation for both income and estate tax purposes.
One of the things that has really taken me by surprise is how some of my friends and political allies opposed the California Wealth Tax initiative because it might hurt the “good” billionaires. To begin with, how many of these billionaires support candidates willing to fix the structural problems that allow for billionaires? It’s almost funny that the only California gubernatorial candidate to support the wealth tax was billionaire Tom Steyer, and the only billionaire to give to his campaign was him giving to his own campaign!
In the 2024 election cycle (and it could be worse this year), billionaires gave five times as much money ($2 billion) to Republicans (aka “make the rich richer”) than to Democrats. Yep, if you want to level the playing field, you need to throw out the baby, (benevolent plutocrats) with the bathwater.
The United States does not need benevolent plutocrats. We should not be finding ourselves defending them. Such was the message in a compelling piece written by Sharon Kyle for the LA Progressive: “…democracy cannot survive on the assumption that wealthy people will benevolently manage society on our behalf.”
To my knowledge, and please correct me if I’m wrong, no billionaire has ever said, “that’s a tax loophole, and while I can legally use it to pay less in taxes, I won’t” or “I will not use CLATs and GRATs or divided-interest trusts to pass money onto my heirs tax-less or tax-free.” When these charitable so-called good billionaires give 99% of their wealth away (which sounds like a lot), they still have hundreds of millions or billions of dollars left over (that is a lot!), and in many cases have made–or will make–their children centimillionaires.
If “good” is the goal, then every member of that ultra-rich class has a responsibility to un-billionaire themselves, un-centimillionaire themselves. Now that would be good.
P.S. My artificial intelligence explained to me that “heebie-jeebies,” an informal phrase describing a feeling of extreme anxiety, was coined by cartoonist Billy DeBeck in 1923. In his popular comic strip Barney Google. (You see where this is going….) In 1938 a mathematician Edward Kasner, with help from his 9-year-old nephew Milton Sirotta, coined the term “googol” to mean the number “1” followed by 100 zeroes. In 1997, Larry Page and Sergey Brin intended to name their company “Googol” but due to a typo (really!) it was registered as Google. And now we’ve come full circle as these two centibillionaires, plutocrat posterchildren, have managed to give me–and millions of Americans–the heebie-jeebies.