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At the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, a panel moderator asked Michael Dell, America's 17th-richest man, what he thought about the idea of raising the top marginal tax rate to 70 percent.
This idea has been in the headlines since Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez floated it in a 60 Minutes interview on January 6 as a way to pay for a Green New Deal.
The Davos panel found the question hilarious. When the laughing died down, Dell, the founder and CEO of Dell Technologies, dismissed the idea out of hand, claiming it would harm U.S. economic growth.
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For Dell's Billionaire CEO, Taxing the Ultra-Rich is a Joke
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @06:54PM (3 children)
That pretty much sums up nicely how the ultra rich feel about us plebs.
If you ever wanted a good example of elitism, this is elitism. Seriously. The ultra rich really see themselves as a class of its own. They're not evil, they're not sociopaths devoid of compassion or empathy (not all of them anyway), they truly, sincerely believe that they're inherently superior to the rest of humanity. It's like they're a different species. That's how they've been raised, that's what they've had drilled into their head virtually from birth.
For the sociopathic ones, they see this as a God-given right to manipulate and exploit. "Sheep were made to be shaved". Yes, I've heard that, with my own ears, and the person saying it was not joking.
For the more empathic, compassionate ones, they see their perceived superiority as a responsibility to take care of the less fortunate. But even then, they never perceive those they help as one of their own. Their relationship with them is more akind of a dog shelter owner taking care of those poor abandonned animals, or the crazy cat lady taking into her home all the stray cats. They're not hypocrits, they truly do it out of the kindness of their heart, but they don't, and never will, perceive those they help, as one of their own.
This kind of elitism is deeply ingraned in the human psyche, at the genetic level. We are a social species, but we are a highly hierarchical social species. No amount of education will ever change that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @07:15PM
The idea of fair taxation by-way-of-a-tax-on-wealth is that you constrain the sociopaths. As is, they are profiting from the misdirects that has the median think of taxes as being sales/property or income. Even the reporting on that Davos laughter failed to mention that taxes on capital, and not just capital gains, are the way to get a sense of fairness into the system -- without having to make moral judgments, and therefore without the hopelessness that you might have felt/found yourself in at the end of your post.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @07:37PM
Sums up the feeling of many of the ultra-rich. You have you exemptions there like Buffet, but most believe they are superior to the plebs and anything goes to try to prevent taxation.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Saturday February 16 2019, @12:19AM
I can think of someone who seems to be an exception to that, although he's not quite a billionaire: LeBron James. He's put a lot of his money into charity work in his home town of Akron focused on scholarships and now a school for kids who grew up the way he did. He's had regular conversations with these kids, and by all appearances genuinely cares about their well-being. I get the impression from people who've been involved that he does in fact have genuine empathy for those kids, precisely because he lived their life for 18 years before becoming a basketball superstar.
Of course, he's not at Davos, because (a) he's busy playing basketball, and (b) he doesn't seem to really identify with the likes of Michael Dell. A couple of the major differences between LeBron and Dell:
- LeBron got most of his money by the sweat of his own brow, whereas most of the other Forbes 400 got rich by either being born rich or making other people do the work. LeBron doesn't go into work wearing a coat and tie and sit at a desk sending a memo to Cheryl that the ball needs to go into the hoop this time, he has to put it there himself if he wants to keep on getting paid. And that makes him a very different breed from those who exploit others to live well.
- LeBron knows what it's like to be poor, because he was poor. Most of the super-rich never were poor: About half inherited their money. Most of the rest had a trajectory along the lines of "upper-middle class suburban childhood, trust fund pays for an Ivy League degree and an MBA, either work on Wall Street or start out in middle management, through various bits of ruthlessness, brains, and luck make it to the top levels at their company." Very few have ever seen a salary below $50,000 in their entire life.
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