America Needs More, Not Fewer, Billionaires

Billionaires are getting a bad name. “Eat the rich” is the new mantra of the Left’s greed and envy lobby.

Once upon a time, we saluted and celebrated America’s empire builders who got rich but created great industries that built the richest nation on earth. Now the Left in America demonizes them.

We see the assault on wealth every day: wealth taxes, blue states are raising their income taxes on millionaires and billionaires, and many Democrats in Washington want to institute tax rates above 50%.

But much of this rich-bashing isn’t based on fact. Robert Reich of the University of California, Berkeley, wrote recently that average Americans pay a 14% tax rate, but billionaires pay less than 2%. Actually, those Americans in the top 1% of income actually pay almost 40% of the entire income tax — more than the bottom 90% combined.

That’s right. One in 100 Americans pays more than 90 out of 100. That sounds pretty progressive to me. These numbers don’t include the hundreds of thousands of jobs created by billionaires, nor the value of the products that we all freely buy. I was fortunate to become friends with Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx. Fred died last year, but built the greatest transportation company on the planet. He was a billionaire whose contributions to American society through overnight package delivery and tens of billions in wages were 100 times what he personally earned.

Or take Elon Musk. Musk’s IPO of SpaceX may make him the richest person on the planet — even approaching $1 trillion — but Musk has built amazing companies that are driving America into the future at warp speed — literally. He has made himself rich, but an estimated 90% of the gains from his entrepreneurial visionary mission have gone to others — not to himself. He is this generation’s Thomas Edison.

Musk was recently asked about whether he should pay more taxes. His response (and I paraphrase): Who do you think could spend $1 billion better? Me or the government? The question answers itself.

Remember, this is a federal government whose own auditors say it wastes hundreds of billions of dollars a year through fraud, improper payments, and redundancy.

Then there is Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon. He was recently asked about raising taxes on the rich. His response was exactly right:

“We don’t have a revenue problem in this country,” he said. “We already have the most progressive tax system in the world. … We actually have a spending problem, and that’s a skills issue.

“(The New York City school system spends) $44,000 per student. That’s 30% more per student than other big cities like Chicago, LA, and Boston. And it’s three times more than Miami and Houston. And by the way, New York City doesn’t get better outcomes. If we ran Amazon the way New York City runs their school system, your packages would take six weeks to arrive. We’d have to charge you a $100 delivery fee. And then when the package did finally arrive, it’d have the wrong item in it anyway.”

Bezos is no right-wing crusader and has traditionally been known as a Democrat who donates to many liberal causes. But he makes an important point about his real contribution to making America great:

“Even though I’m going to give away the majority of my wealth if I do my job right, the value to society and civilization from my for-profit companies will be much, much larger than the good that I do with my charitable giving,” Bezos said. “Amazon creates tremendous value. And by the way, all companies are creating value of some kind. That’s why people are voluntarily giving them money.

“Everybody out there who’s a potential entrepreneur, make sure you focus on that. You will be creating value for society if you’re successful at pleasing your customers.”

There are some 500 to 1,000 billionaires on the planet, and the vast majority of them built their businesses in the United States. We reward wealth in America — we don’t punish it or treat it as an ill-begotten windfall. Many billionaires, like Sergey Brin, are immigrants who came here with nothing. They came to America for the land of opportunity — not for a socialist experiment.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently claimed that no one can “earn” $1 billion. Well, our modern-day Henry Fords and Andrew Carnegies have done just that. They have made themselves and America rich. A tax system that penalizes people from getting rich will ensure that Americans don’t get rich — to the detriment of all of us.

Stephen Moore is a former Trump senior economic adviser and the cofounder of Unleash Prosperity, which advocates for education freedom for all children.

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