Read it.
Sigh. It’s all so exhausting. Not all of New York’s wealthiest residents are sounding alarms over Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plan to raise taxes on high earners. In fact, a small group of millionaires says the backlash is a bit over the top, according to Bloomberg.
Members of the Patriotic Millionaires — including filmmaker Abigail Disney, granddaughter of Roy O. Disney of The Walt Disney Company — argue the rich can easily afford to contribute more if it helps fund things like schools, transit and child care.
“I’ve gotten tax cut after tax cut after tax cut. And I never needed any of them,” Disney said, backing Mamdani’s proposed 2-percentage-point income-tax surcharge on millionaires. “All these things have fallen out from under the middle class — an education system that works, public transportation, infrastructure, health care.”
First of all, being a millionaire doesn’t mean that you know your ass from a hole in the ground—especially when, like Abigail Disney, you inherited your money and decided to dabble in artsy-fartsy occupations like ‘film-maker’. The number of billionaire Democrats demonstrates rather conclusively that Intelligence and Wisdom are ‘two different rolls’, as my brother the Dungeon Master used to say. (Bill Gates is the poster child for the notion that being clever and a fool is not impossible.)
Secondly, these people, when they argue that they’re happy to pay taxes, are doing a statist shuck-and-jive: After all, if they wanted to ‘pay more taxes’, all they have to do is write a check; I don’t know of a single layer of government that would turn it down. No—they want other people to pay more taxes, taxes that millionaires can usually afford and others maybe not so much. They just want to do the Socialist Two-Step of Spending Other People’s Money.
Thirdly, they are dyed-in-the-wool Democrats: The things that they say have ‘fallen out from under the middle class’ are all government services: ‘an education system that works’ (public, that is)’, ‘public transportation (which goes from where you aren’t to where you don’t want to be), ‘infrastructure’ (public roads, sewers, water, and electricity), ‘health care’ (paid for by the government, for preference). All of these are things that people within my lifetime used to pay for themselves, and could again if taxes weren’t so high. What these Bernies want, is for all of your money to be taxed away, and then returned to you via government subsidies—under their control, and the control of political hacks like themselves. This is the Democrat program, and has been since Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty (which, despite trillions of dollars spent, doesn’t seem to have reduced poverty by a bit).
The next time you hear a ‘millionaire’ bloviate about how they would be glad to pay more taxes, just mosey on up and ask, ‘Well, why don’t you write a check, rather than trying to increase MY taxes along with yours?’ Watch them scuttle like roaches for the cracks and crevices, leaving a spoor of word-salad behind them.
