I’m a multimillionaire – and I think the tax system doesn’t serve most Americans
Iam a multimillionaire in Tennessee, one of the more deeply conservative states in America. In my circle of friends here, I’m often met with scorn for wanting to tax myself and all of my fellow wealthy friends. I’m called a “class traitor” by some, and altruistic by others, but neither are quite true.
The way I see it, the reason for any law is to temper the worst vices of individual human nature, so our society can work for everybody. Not just for the rich or the poor or even just for the middle class – but for everyone.
For instance, I like to drive fast, but we have speed limits because speeding is dangerous. Thus, I obey speed limit laws even though I have convinced myself that I’m an excellent high-speed driver.
The same principle stands for the economy and the laws that govern it. Increasingly, a small percentage of people have most of the money in our country because our laws have made it easier for us to keep it. In 1973, the top 1% of income earners received 9% of the nation’s combined income. Today we receive more than 23%.
These imbalances are not sustainable and, more importantly, they just aren’t right. The top 1% now owns almost half the wealth of this country and received 83% of the benefits from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. I netted between $2-3m that I neither asked for nor needed from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
My gains were offset by across-theboard budget cuts that slashed public services working families depend on to make ends meet. Add that to the ongoing issue of stagnating wages and thousands of job losses at the very same companies that benefit most from that tax bill, and you can start to draw a line between the rampant deregulation of our economy and the current flashing red warning signs of a recession.
Take wages, for example. Millions of workers still make under $15 an hour, because the Tennessee senator Lamar Alexander, who represents me in Congress,
refuses to bring the minimum wage bill to the floor. He is adhering to a mantra I hear too often down here: American people just don’t need it. But in a 70% consumer-driven economy, my business needs it just as much as the workers do.
Tax cuts for the rich at the expense of the working class is not a sustainable system for our economy. From my vantage, as a CEO in manufacturing, it’s clear that my peers do not, by and large, take their tax savings and reinvest them in higher wages and job creation – all the things that might help stave off a recession. Instead, they tend to keep it all to themselves, because our tax laws allow them to.
It’s akin to an open highway with no speed limits. And it’s not a question of if an economic crash occurs – it’s when.
When an economic downturn does happen, rich and poor alike would be better served by an administration that has invested in the majority of Americans.
Fixing the problem doesn’t mean I need to write checks to the treasury, as many of my friends down here often suggest. That would only be a drop in the ocean, for an inequality problem that exists in the trillions of dollars. Individual actions aren’t enough to counter an entire system that supports and incentivizes the worst of human greed.
Rather, fixing the problem means that our elected officials need to implement a tax system that puts my money, and the money of all multimillionaires and billionaires, to its best use: running our military, building our roads and bridges, educating our youth, providing healthcare. This kind of tax policy acknowledges that that government has to be paid for, and those of us that have derived the most from this country must pay more simply because we can.
If we stay on our current trajectory, we will be the first generation to leave much, much less of a country than we were given by our parents. To avoid it, it’s time to put up more guardrails against the greed of the 1%.
Stephen Prince is the vice-chair of the Patriotic Millionaires and a businessman who founded National Business Products, now known as Card Marketing Services, in 1993
Individual actions aren’t enough to counter an entire system that supports and incentivizes the worst of human greed