Billionaires: Have Americans’ views changed?
Although most Americans have no problem with the likes of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk financing such pursuits as engaging their own personal space race, by more than a 3-1 margin U.S. voters think billionaires should have their wings clipped when it comes to exerting outsized influence over U.S. political campaigns.
Asked in the most recent in-depth survey by RealClear Public Opinion Research whether billionaires should be allowed to contribute “unlimited amounts” of political money, 66% of respondents said no, while only 21% said yes (with the rest undecided). Congress enacted just such a prohibition 20 years ago in the bipartisan McCain-Feingold campaign law. But in the ensuing two decades those reforms were eroded by a series of unpopular U.S. Supreme Court decisions — and by the willingness of leaders in both major political parties to accept vast sums of political “dark money” even while decrying its impact.
Democrats and independents are firmly opposed to billionaires’ bottomless political spending, with about 7 in 10 saying it should be barred, but even Republican voters (60%) were solidly opposed to it as well. Another area of near-consensus revolves around progressive Democrats’ proposals to levy higher taxes on the super-rich: Voters of nearly all stripes support it.
“At a time when there are precious few things Democrats and Republicans agree upon today, we found that solid majorities of Democrats and Republicans agree on at least two things,” said John Della Volpe, who designed and directed the poll. “One, billionaires should pay at least 20% of their incomes; and two, billionaires should not be allowed to contribute unlimited sums of money to political campaigns.”
“This isn’t to say that Americans don’t respect or admire the super-wealthy,” he added. “They just don’t believe that billionaires should be able to exert outsized influence or have the ability to corrupt a political system that needs to work for everyone.”
The June survey of 2,201 registered voters found significant partisan differences, but also wide areas of agreement about the role the super-rich play in America’s civic life. Voters’ views turn out to be nuanced and discerning. Misgivings about the influence of the richest Americans on elections, for instance, did not spill over to support for think tanks or schools of higher education, as large majorities in both parties (and independents) do not object to it.
There is one major exception to this accepting attitude regarding billionaires’ munificence, however, and it’s one with potentially significant implications: foreign money. At a time when a Swiss billionaire is underwriting a major Democratic Partyaffiliated think tank and a spate of universities are under scrutiny for taking Chinese or Saudi money, voters are overwhelmingly opposed to non-American billionaires supporting U.S. institutions, including think tanks, colleges, and universities.
By much greater margins, they also oppose foreign ownership of U.S. media outlets “that influence public policy.” This caveat might include TikTok; it certainly would apply to Fox News and the New York Post — but only before 1985, when Rupert Murdoch traded his Australian birthright for U.S. citizenship.
One doesn’t have to be a foreign billionaire to engender populist views about media control. Respondents were asked to choose between billionaires — or the public — when it comes to owning three categories of influential institutions in America today: sports teams, social media companies, and traditional news outlets. Regarding sports franchises, voters might not feel affection for their favorite teams’ individual owners (see fans of the Washington Nationals), but nonetheless, a plurality of Americans are comfortable with the status quo.
When it comes to social media companies, though, 43% of Americans think they belong in a public trust or something like it, with only 26% believing they should remain private property. Mark Zuckerberg, call your lobbyist. And billionaire news media owners — like Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post — really have their public relations work cut out for them. Fully 50% of respondents believe that news
media companies should be placed in a public trust or become public property. Only 21% are okay with billionaires owning them. That’s not necessarily a surprise, given the low esteem with which the public regards the Fourth Estate these days. But Americans have long harbored mixed feelings about the super-rich.
THE ORIGINAL ROBBER BARONS
By the time John D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford were born in the mid-19th century, the word “billionaire” was already in use. Prodded for decades by the newspapers, Americans eagerly waited for someone to reach the magic threshold.
The dubious honor fell to Rockefeller, at least in the popular press. The founder of Standard Oil was anointed the world’s first billionaire in 1916, even though his oldest son would describe the moniker as an exaggeration. His famous namesake was never worth more than $900 million, John D. Rockefeller Jr. asserted. Viewed in today’s terms, it’s a distinction without a difference: In 2022 dollars, the old man’s fortune was worth more than $24 billion.
Although the federal government broke up Standard Oil, its components (Chevron, Exxon, Amoco, and Marathon Oil) did all right for their shareholders. Rockefeller left philanthropic legacies, too, including the University of Chicago and Spelman College — he envisioned both as Baptist universities — and the enduring Rockefeller Foundation.
Such largesse was not uncommon among the titans of the Gilded Age and those who followed in their footsteps. An eponymous foundation also honors Henry Ford, whose Model T probably made him the world’s first actual billionaire. Ford also funded the construction and operation of one of Detroit’s largest public hospitals, supported historical preservation, and donated onethird of his wealth during his lifetime. This wasn’t uncommon. Railroad magnate Leland Stanford founded the famous California school that bears his name. Industrialist Andrew Carnegie financed the construction of nearly 1,700 libraries, provided millions in seed money for what became Carnegie Mellon University and Tuskegee Institute, and paid for the building of 7,000 church organs.
The upshot of such generosity was that Americans softened their attitudes toward
the very wealthy. There were other factors, too. Although the upper class had been widely derided since the Jacksonian era as “the idle rich,” the oligarchs of the 19th and early 20th centuries were hardly indolent. Many came from modest backgrounds. Even those, like Cornelius Vanderbilt, who were born rich, worked hard. Some were immigrants.
Moreover, the original “robber barons,” a term coined by the New York Times in 1859 to describe Vanderbilt, created their empires by building things, not by manipulating money. Led by Ford, these industrialists also paid good wages, contributed generously to philanthropy, and enhanced the nation’s economic life in the form of the mass employment that grew from their inventiveness. With apologies to F. Scott Fitzgerald, the famous author’s contemporaries didn’t really believe that the very rich were “different from you and me.” During the Roaring Twenties, they reflected the possibility of America.
The Great Depression changed much of that. As he sought reelection in 1936, Franklin D. Roosevelt vowed at the Democrats’ Philadelphia nominating convention to squelch the “economic royalists [who] hide behind the flag and the Constitution.” Roosevelt won in a landslide and made good on his threat. Notwithstanding FDR’s own blueblood background, the Roosevelt administration micromanaged businesses ranging from banking (which badly needed oversight) to local butcher shops (which didn’t), and raised the top marginal income rate to punitive levels — it would reach 94% by Roosevelt’s third term — while demonizing business leaders. Sometimes it could be personal. In 1944, Roosevelt invoked the National Recovery Act to force the Montgomery Ward department store chain to extend lapsed labor contracts. When company CEO Sewell Avery wouldn’t knuckle under to this threat, FDR ordered the U.S. Army to arrest him at his office.
Although it hasn’t yet come to that in 21st century America, class warfare has again been declared. It’s happened at a time when simmering resentments over a huge and growing wealth gap are being intensified by hyper-partisan politics and a generation that does not automatically appreciate the value of free-market capitalism. On Capitol Hill, the charge is being led by youthful progressives in the House, and in the Senate by wizened guardians of the old New Deal-era liberal faith.
Eighty-year-old Bernie Sanders, who until recently styled himself a “socialist,” ran for president in 2016 on a platform consisting mainly of demonizing “millionaires and billionaires” and attacking corporations. “The rich-poor gap in America is obscene,” he still says. “So let’s fix it.”
Sanders ran again in 2020, but in that cycle he was joined in the crowded Democratic field by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who brought specifics to the table in the form of a proposed “wealth tax,” consisting of a 2% percent annual surcharge on family assets exceeding $50 million and 3% percent for households worth more than $1 billion. It’s hard to get to Bernie Sanders’ left, however, and the erstwhile “Democratic-Socialist” from Vermont upped the ante. He unveiled an even more confiscatory proposal with more brackets, higher taxes, and lower thresholds.
Initially viewed as a gimmick, it turns out that the Liz Warren/Bernie Sanders gambit has staying power. Asked in the new RealClear survey whether they supported a “Billionaire Minimum Income Tax” requiring American households worth more than $100 million to pay at least 20% of their annual income in taxes, the support was overwhelming. Nearly three-fourths of Americans support the idea, 45% of them “strongly.” Even among Republicans, the support was highly popular (63%).
For many Americans, this isn’t personal; it’s strictly business. But not everyone feels this way — certainly not Sen. Warren, who outdid Sanders in one overt way: On the 2020 campaign trail, she displayed a deeper and more personal animosity toward billionaire Democratic primary candidate Mike Bloomberg than Bernie could muster. At a Feb. 19 debate in Las Vegas, Bloomberg had barely uttered a word when Warren ignored a moderator’s question and turned to the self-made billionaire standing just to her right at his lectern on the stage. “I’d like to talk about who we’re running against — a billionaire who calls women ‘fat broads’ and ‘horse-faced lesbians’,” she began. “And no, I’m not talking about Donald Trump. I’m talking about Mayor Bloomberg.”
It was all downhill from there for Bloomberg. As for Warren, the longtime consumer advocate, she was playing to her base. In truth, however, very few American voters feel that kind of personalized loathing for the super-rich.
“Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say they admire billionaires,” noted Della Volpe. “But regardless of political affiliations, respondents were about equally likely — around 1 in 3 — to say ‘I want to be them.’”
BUT ARE THEY ADMIRABLE?
Thirty-six years ago, on a pleasant San Francisco Bay Area day, corporate raider Ivan Boesky strode to the podium at the University of California’s Haas School of Business. Here was a self-made man, or at least the students who chose him as their commencement speaker believed. Boesky said so himself. His father had owned a trio of topless bars in Detroit, but the son had turned corporate raiding into a science, amassing a $2 billion fortune in the process — mostly by betting on stock price fluctuations in corporate takeovers that he either predicted or precipitated.
Boesky was invariably on the profitable side of these transactions, which he attributed to his own shrewdness. Actually, “Ivan the Terrible” was delivering briefcases full of $100 bills for inside information. He would soon pay hundreds of millions of dollars in fines to the government and serve two years in federal prison — a sentence that would have been longer had he not agreed to wear a wire and rat out his friends and colleagues, including Michael Milken.
Those revelations would start emerging before the year was out, but on May 18, 1986, the future titans of Wall Street and Silicon Valley graduating from Cal’s business school wanted to know his secrets. He did not disappoint. “Greed is all right, by the way,” Boesky said, to loud applause. “I want you to know that. I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.”
As Boesky’s stunning fall from grace was taking place the following year, this sentiment was echoed by the fictionalized Gordon Gekko in the 1987 Hollywood hit “Wall Street.” Played by actor Michael Douglas, the Gekko-Boesky character is rationalizing to shareholders that breaking up the fictional Teldar Paper company is a socially responsible act.
“I am not a destroyer of companies — I am a liberator of them!” he says. “The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed in all of its forms — greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge — has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the U.S.A.”
The real moral of the story in “Wall Street,” as in Ivan Boesky’s life, is that greed is not good. It’s corrosive. But both Ivan Boesky and Gordon Gekko were getting at a more subtle point. They were saying that the engines of dynamic capitalism, the system that has fed and housed and clothed more people in this world than any other — while developing life-changing inventions and life-saving technologies — are fueled by the dreams, and material ambitions, of those who will become fabulously rich.