'Tax the rich!'

That slogan is associated with leftist zealots and social justice combatants, usually in unflattering and unwarranted contexts. Many of them feel that we are living in, and making excuses for, an economic caste system that belies the principles of equality and social justice on which are nation was allegedly found.

But even "eat the rich" is a moderate, though less toned down, reaction to the lessons of history. After all, nobody's openly advocating that they be skinned alive. 

That would be a terrible denouement. Without them, we would be mired in inertia, rudderless and impoverished, according to the fan clubs who worship at the sooty altars of billionaires.

Rightist media slugs and think-tank savants who revere them are royalists with allegiance to a plutocracy. Those who acquire new-found riches are crowned with the epithet of "successful," which is a word that's supposed to stifle any inquiry into how it was attained.

The morbidly affluent are credited with enabling our existence, firing the engines of prosperity, thrusting America's prestige into the appreciative global community, and creating jobs for serfs who would otherwise have nothing to keep themselves busy.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his acolytes seek tax reforms that would at least take baby steps towards reversing the ghastly imbalance between the mega rich and ultra poor.  Such presumption sparked cries of outrage and threats from the petulant, crybaby "best and brightest" oligarchs, that they would relocate to a state whose tax code reflects an obeisance to wealth hoarders.

Citing low tax rates as a magic bullet, "supply side" economists, (who are called that because they believe that poor and middle-class Americans derive copious nutrition from scraps that fall off their banquet tables) warn of the proliferation of "class envy," and yearningly look back on the abundance of the 1950s as the decade when all was in order.

They think they remember a world that made more sense, when people knew their place and their limits without groveling or being obtrusively ambitious. It was the golden age of rugged individuality when shoeless people pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.

But here's a sobering and intoxicating fact:

According to the Tax Policy Center of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution, the highest marginal income tax rate between 1951 and 1963 was 91 percent or above. During a couple of years during World War II, it was 94 percent. 

Between 1915 to 1918, it soared from seven percent to 77 percent.

Since 2023, it's been around 37 percent. Yet even a call for a modest increase of a few percent infuriates the moneyed nobility.

Several variables may affect statistics, such as "the amount of income or types of income subject to the top rates, or the value of standard and itemized deductions," according to the report.

The human receptacles of opulence have proposed a solution to level the playing field: a "flat tax." All income levels would lay the same percentage.

Twenty percent for mighty millionaires is the weight of an aphid on their shoulders. Twenty percent for a civil servant, private industry employee or client of social services is a ton of bricks busted over their heads.

What is good for the self-identified goose should be good for the self-identified gander.

The same people who have no quarrel with billionaires being mollycoddled by the IRS, give no quarter to the poor and middle class, when they catch a break by schemes of minuscule larceny.  They want who they deem tax evading leeches who run cash-only flea market stalls or small businesses to be rounded up and perhaps have their newly acquired legal citizenship revoked for the moral turpitude of overstaying not a visa, but a rigged parking meter.

Immigrants are perhaps the primary scapegoats, although they are also represented among those who harness the system by milking it. The underground economy beckons like a beguiling seducer.

A minority of newcomers, like the rest of us, may take little liberties at the sales register, but let's first smite the exploiters of privilege who violate maybe not tax codes but codes of human decency.

In late April, Mayor Mamdani, being at the vanguard of the "tax the rich" movement, though not himself being a stranger to extreme creature comforts, staged a media event, with microphones, cameras and reporters galore, to draw attention to his "pied-a-terre" tax, which the mayor's office says "will levy an annual surcharge on one to three family homes, condominiums and co-ops valued above $5 million when owners have a separate primary residence outside of New York City."

His Deputy Mayor for Optics chose as the announcement venue, the front of the $238 million, 23,000-foot penthouse of Citadel hedge-fund manager Ken Griffin, whose net worth is estimated at over $50 billion.

The merits of the proposal aside, the event came off as a farcical, counterproductive and amateurish political charade.  Either Mamdani failed to calculate the potential consequences, such as doxxing, of singling out one person's home, or else he did it deliberately for that reason.

It's vastly worse than mere discourtesy and tackiness; it's a failure of tactical sagacity. It is self-destructive for the city to avenge the poor by inciting the rich to self-exile. 

Griffin employs many high-paying taxpayers in the city, whose contributions are needed to help offset its $5 billion deficit. He was planning a $6 billion Midtown office project that would have created 15,000 permanent jobs but is reportedly so angry that he was reconsidering it, before meeting with Governor Hochul.

It would have been even worse than the City's loss of an estimated twenty-five thousand jobs around three years ago, for which Rep. Ocasio-Cortez proudly took credit. 

Grandstanding for the sake of self-promotion is, at the very least, an unhelpful distraction.

Griffin certainly fits in the exclusive club of deservedly targeted billionaires. But by specifically identifying him and his property, against a backdrop of several recent violent assaults against prominent executives, the mayor did not elevate the case he was trying to make.

Griffin, like Ken Langone, is a billionaire not just tainted, but somewhat purified by intermittent acts for the public welfare. Griffin gifted $50 million to the University of Miami's cancer center, and another $50 million to the Miami Neuroscience Institute.

Together with David Geffen, he pledged a $400 million to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Griffin also endowed the American Museum of Natural History with $40 million, and $300 million to the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences as well as numerous partisanship-free scientific explorations and research. 

On the flip side, he chipped in $25 million to New York's Success Academy Charter Schools and is a vehement benefactor of non-public schools, having conspired with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Griffin has kicked in substantial donations both to Republican super PACs and Democrat, former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel's re-election campaign. He once told the Chicago Tribune that rich people should have more, not less influence.

Is there common ground that could be shared by both the unapologetically rich and us covetous counterweights who are the backbone of America?

Member of Congress on both sides of the ideological aisle, are in shatterproof accord on one issue: that astoundingly lucrative "insider trading," for which their constituents would go to jail, should remain legal for them.  In this respect, reactionaries and democratic socialists are kissing cousins.

Some of them, because of their insider trading perk, have parlayed their net worth from fairly modest means to dozens of millions of dollars within a few terms. But when anybody else tries to get into the act, the stern and righteous grandeur of the law is weaponized us to keep us in line, and sometimes in prison.

Awareness of this should inhibit us from taking the mirage of equality seriously. 

A US Special Forces soldier who participated in the capture of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and who had been privy to critically sensitive planning details, using  Polymarket, a cryptocurrency-based prediction market, made timely and heavy bets in advance of the operation. It landed him $409,000 and a federal indictment for "unlawful use of confidential government information for personal gain" and "theft of nonpublic information."

If guilty as alleged, he should be punished. But so should members of Congress who may not have cashed in on the Maduro caper but did on different matters of national security, foreign affairs and economics.

Taxing arrogance would dwarf the dividends from taxing the rich.

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