As far as political protest goes, this was among the most civilized I have ever witnessed. The organizers did not make any noise beyond the idling truck covered in changing digital billboards. There were no chants on the sidewalks, no signs to leave behind as litter. The workers at the estate of billionaire Jeff Bezos looked with curiosity that quickly gave way to indifference as the visitors’ vehicle flipped through a three-minute slide deck mocking the Amazon founder: “Congratulations! You won capitalism! Now pay your damn taxes.”
“Taxation is a nice compromise,” says Chuck Collins, an inequality foe whose great-grandfather was the ubiquitous meat magnate Oscar Mayer. “It totally beats economic, social collapse. It beats pitchfork rebellions and the guillotine.”
And they’re getting face time with likeminded lawmakers, such as Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland who attended the Tuesday session and Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts who joined a Wednesday event on Capitol Hill. For Democrats, nothing dovetails better with their party’s midterm messaging than some of the richest people in the country framing a tax hike on themselves as not only manageable, but the ultimate champagne problem.
As we chatted in a conference room on the sidelines of the group’s two-day policy meeting here in Washington, Collins argued the public is moving toward the Patriotic Millionaires’ thinking. “Attitudes about inequality are starting to shift and are shifting in our favor in terms of a wider understanding about the harms, and why you should tax high wealth and invest it in things that matter,” he says.
It’s a tough sell beyond these take-my-money activists. But as Morris Pearl, a founding member of the club and a former managing director at BlackRock, put it bluntly: “People are saying millionaires like me are going to move out of the city if they raise our taxes. That’s absurd. The whole point of being a millionaire is so you can live wherever you want to live. … I’m not going to move somewhere else because of my taxes. People who don’t want to pay taxes don’t live in New York.”
After a few minutes, one of the staffers with Patriotic Millionaires turned to the small retinue of journalists on hand. “Can I tell them we’re good?” he asked. At 11:11 a.m., the show had moved on and was heading to Capitol Hill with the hopes of leaving the indifference behind. It might be tough to shake this Tax Day.
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