Recently, I listened to Katie Phang, attorney, legal analyst, and former MSNBC anchor interviewing Erica Payne, the founder of Patriotic Millionaires. This group of wealthy individuals, who have an income of at least $1 million a year or assets of $5 million or more, came together 16 years ago when President Obama caved to Republican pressure to extend the Bush tax cuts. The group advocated letting the tax cuts expire, and 56 of them signed a letter saying, “For the good of the country, raise my taxes.” Their motto is “Tax the rich, Pay the People, Spread the Power.” The group is completely nonpartisan – they can’t stand politicians on either side.
They want a rich, stable, free country and demand an economy that ensures it. Erica Payne emphasizes that these people enjoy being rich, and they intend to remain rich; that they are “not bleeding-heart liberals operating out of misplaced altruism.” They recognize that in order to have a healthy economy and a decent, stable, safe, free country to live in, the whole population needs to have a decent standard of living. The average working-class person needs to be able to earn enough income to provide for themselves and their family, which means, at the very least, having a decent place to live, adequate food to sustain their bodies, and a level of affordable health care to maintain health and cover extraordinary expenses caused by accidents and disease.
They would agree with the wisdom of what Paul Wellstone often expressed, “We all do better when we all do better.” Whether they care about the working class or not, they recognize that the huge income inequality gap that has been intentionally created and widened over the last 60 years has led to this point in our history when large groups of people cannot provide any kind of financial stability for themselves, including meeting needs as basic as buying food. President Trump and the Republicans in Congress were cavalierly willing to eliminate SNAP benefits (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known previously as “food stamps”) and slash Medicaid funding in their political gamesmanship, playing with people’s lives as if they were no more than plastic monopoly pieces.
Socioeconomic research has long shown that the insecurity of not having reliable or sufficient income, housing, or food causes continuous stress with the negative effects compounded by multiple deficits. How hard is it to imagine – if you haven’t actually lived through it yourself – the level of anxiety you or anyone would have coming home, tired after a long day at work, wondering if there’s going to be an eviction notice on the door; if there will be another stack of threatening late notices in the mail; if there’s food for dinner; if the water will be shut off because you didn’t have the money to pay the utility bill after recent large increases?
The Patriotic Millionaires recognize that people will do what they have to do in order to survive; that constant oppression and lack of resources causes desperation, which may result in criminal behavior; and that having to scratch for the barest necessities while living in a society which glorifies wealth and those that have it, can cause resentment, bitterness, anger, and revolutionary acts. The millionaires do not want to live in a society where they have to travel in armored cars, live as if imprisoned behind locked gates with guards patrolling the premises, fearing continually for their own safety. They recognize that living with continuous stress would also not give them the decent, safe, free environment they desire no matter how much money they have.
To me, this is one of those BFOs – a blinding flash of the obvious – that I was writing about decades ago as I witnessed the steadily decreasing taxes and increasing benefits for the rich in our tax structure. Ms. Payne identifies the timeline beginning with Barry Goldwater’s defeat in 1964. “Blinded by the Right (2002)” was David Brock’s political memoir giving the first insider view of the right-wing machinations. He was the right’s scandal reporter who was at the center of the dirty tricks operation of the Gingrich era, who orchestrated the attack on Anita Hill and whose writing triggered the impeachment of President Clinton. He was the right’s golden boy and a true believer until he could no longer deny that the political force he was advancing was built on lies, hate, and hypocrisy, and his book tells the story from the inside out.
Ms. Payne details that after Goldwater’s defeat, a group of “multi-multi millionaires started funding a network of institutions, think tanks, media-monitoring, and legal advocacy groups, which strategically made changes over 60 years to turn the country to the right. They took over all of the Republican Party and enough of the Democratic Party that it guarantees everything stays the same.”
Then in 2017, during Trump’s first term, the Republicans rewrote the entire tax code on a party line vote. In 2018, for the first time in history, billionaires paid a lower effective tax rate than anyone else in America. The Democrat trifecta with Joe Biden didn’t do much except put more money in for IRS enforcement, which was immediately removed by Trump when he took office. It is estimated the lack of enforcement loses $1 trillion a year in taxes.
Ms. Payne said, “The Democrats didn’t even close the single most egregious tax loophole of carried interest. Democrats don’t want to tax their donors any more than the Republicans do.” The carried-interest loophole allows wealthy Wall Street investment managers to pay the lower 23.8-percent capital gains tax rate on income received as compensation, rather than the ordinary income tax rates of up to 40.8-percent that they would pay for the same amount of wage income. In Feb. 2025, Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Wash.-03) and Rep. Don Beyer (Va.-08) introduced the Carried Interest Fairness Act to eliminate that loophole.
“The carried interest tax loophole stands as one of the most glaring examples of how the ultra-wealthy exploit and rig our broken tax system to their advantage,” said David Kass, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness. This change is long overdue and represents a critical step toward a fairer tax system that ensures these uber-wealthy individuals pay their fair share like everyone else.”
Morris Pearl, chair of the Patriotic Millionaires stated, “Wealthy people like me have an incredible amount of power and influence over American politics. Elected officials will spend hours with donors but barely any time with constituents. The end result is a system of government that responds to the preferences of the wealthy and well-connected while ignoring the concerns and needs of everyone else.” Access is what is running the country.
The Patriotic Millionaires are advocating for The Money Agenda, available on their website (patrioticmillionaires.org) which explains: “We have a political economy, structured by human beings. Since the mid-70s, $80 trillion has been funneled away, that is, stolen, from the 90 percent to the wealthiest 1 percent. We have created a dynamic that will get more unequal over time. People sleeping in their cars are paying twice the tax rate of the billionaires.”
Their solution, called The Money Agenda:
1) The Equal Tax Act: Equalizes tax rates for capital gains and ordinary income over $1 million, ending the preferential treatment of capital over labor while maintaining a benefit for small investors. Closes the stepped-up basis loophole, which allows valuing assets at market rate on the owner’s death, so the heir is not taxed on the appreciated value. This disrupts the practice of borrowing against assets until death, a strategy used to minimize or eliminate the tax obligations of the uber-wealthy.
2) Raise the minimum wage to the cost of living, $21/hour or $45,700 for a single adult with no children.
(Today’s federal minimum wage is $7.25 or $15,756 annually.) Protects American workers against the impending disruption of automation and AI by ensuring that every full-time job pays at least enough to support a single individual.
3) The Cost of Living Tax Cut Act: Because the federal government shouldn’t tax people into poverty. Provides a cost of living exemption on federal taxes, which eliminates income taxes up to the calculated amount for the cost of living (approximately $45,000 for a single adult with no children). It shifts responsibility for those revenues from the working class to the millionaire class, through a tiered surtax on income over $1 million. This plan is deficit neutral: The amount paid by millionaires is equal to the amount saved by workers.
4) The Anti-oligarch Act because concentrated wealth destroys democracy, and democracy is better than billionaires. Phase 1 prevents 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; Phase 2 dismantles the existing American oligarchy by taxing the wealth held by the ultra-rich sufficiently, including amending the Constitution if necessary.
The Patriotic Millionaires have been working on this agenda for 16 years. Their message to businesspeople from large corporations to small businesses: “If you can’t afford to pay employees $21 per hour, you can’t afford to have employees.” People are working for billion-dollar corporations making only two thirds of what they need to support themselves. The largest group using SNAP benefits are Walmart employees.
Ms. Payne’s message to voters is: “Working people won the elections and the key issue was affordability. Working people have more power than billionaires if they willing to use it.
Her advice: Go to your senators: Ask them, ‘Are you going to back the money agenda?
‘Are you going to be an original cosponsor of the cost of living tax cut paid for by millionaires?
‘Are you willing to tax your donors so working people can eat?’
She quips, “Presently, both sides are pretending to care about working people, which isn’t the norm, so take advantage of it.” She predicts that if working people get behind this, it will be signed into law in 2029 when we have a new president.
An attempt to grasp how much one trillion dollars is: If you spent one million dollars every day, it would take 2,739 years to spend $1,000,000,000,000. Doesn’t help much, does it?