Calling all right-wing billionaires: this is your last stand.
You are at a crossroads. If Joe Biden is permitted another four years in office, you may never again see a tax and regulatory climate like you’ve had since our politics lurched right under Ronald Reagan two generations ago.
It’s been quite a ride.
The top marginal tax rate was 70% on the day Reagan entered the White House. When he left for the last time, it was 28%—the lowest it had been since before the Depression. The broadly-shared prosperity of the era of post-war liberalism may have been sacrificed, but that was a necessary price for the return to Gilded Age levels of wealth and income inequality. By the time Trump took office, the top one percent of the population owned 39% of the wealth. The bottom ninety percent together held only 23%.
Because this imbalance was not enough, Trump and a Republican congress gifted the hyper-wealthy a tax law skewed heavily toward the top one percent at a cost of $1.9 trillion over ten years. But that law is set to expire at the end of next year if Congress doesn’t renew it.
A Democratic congress will allow the provisions most favorable to the rich to sunset and will want to reconfigure the tax code to the benefit of that bottom ninety percent. But the status quo can be preserved by a Republican congress and Donald Trump’s Sharpie.
So the checkbooks opened.
Last month, Timothy Mellon made a $50 million gift to the Make America Great Again PAC. His family wealth is estimated to be in excess of $14 billion.
Richard Uihlein added another $10 million. The Wisconsin-based shipping magnate is a billionaire with a long history of support for right-wing causes.
Hedge fund billionaires Robert Mercer and John Paulson. Oil magnate Harold Hamm. Las Vegas developer Steve Wynn (who actually knows how to run a casino). All are putting money behind Trump to help him close what had been a wide fundraising gap with Biden.
Outsized gifts from billionaires powered Trump to what his campaign claims is its largest monthly fundraising haul of the campaign—$141 million.
And while Biden also receives support from wealthy donors—like Michael Bloomberg, who put up $20 million—his campaign claims 96% of its contributions come from small donations of $200 or less.
That should tell you a lot about Biden’s priorities.
It’s not that business interests are unilaterally behind Trump. To the contrary—plenty of corporate leaders were shaken by the instability of the first Trump administration and worry that his plans for a second would trash the economy. Not a single Fortune 100 executive has donated to his campaign.
The people we’re talking about here are the ones who want to drown government in a bathtub.
And it’s hardly the case that large donations from wealthy right-wing donors are a new thing. But until Trump was convicted in court last month on 34 felony counts, the spigot wasn’t open quite as wide. Trump was having difficulty raising money, and his cash on hand gap with Biden was a looming problem.
That problem now appears to have been solved.
But this emergency cash infusion masks a deeper problem, which no amount of cash can address. This is an all-hands-on-deck moment for the American right, and specifically those who have benefitted from the tax and regulatory policies of the Reagan era, because they can see it slipping away.
While some of us concern ourselves with whether democracy can survive the next election, they are staring at the direction Biden has been moving the country and are wondering whether the carried interest loophole will survive.
Often lost in the deluge of political news is how Biden has set the country on a new economic footing that directly repudiates Reaganomics. His rhetoric about building an economy from the middle out and the bottom up is backed by policies designed to do exactly that.
Bidenomics embraces public investment in infrastructure and workers, support for social welfare programs, tax cuts for the working class, and tax increases for the wealthy and large corporations.
As an economic philosophy it is the antithesis of Reaganomics, and as a political position it would have been unthinkable during the Reagan years.
As much as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama may have wanted to attempt it, any effort to advance an economic policy built around higher taxes and increased spending was fraught with political risk.
Those on the right who were determined not to pay the bill could easily besmirch anyone promoting a larger economic role for government as an out-of-touch tax-and-spend liberal. And most of the time it would work. Many years after Reagan repudiated the economic policies of the Carter administration, liberal was still a dirty political word.
This is an all-hands-on-deck moment for the American right, and specifically those who have benefitted from the tax and regulatory policies of the Reagan era, because they can see it slipping away.
So while Biden often doesn’t get credit for being a transformational leader, his administration has been as consequential for setting a new economic direction as Ronald Reagan and FDR.
Now imagine what he could do in a second term with a Democratic congress and you can probably see why Biden poses a threat to the entire right-wing economic project.
Those supporting the project no longer have the pull they once did with the country. They need a second Trump administration to put a stop to Biden’s economic liberalism before it takes root and becomes the standard for a new political era.
But even that won’t be enough. They need Republicans to remain in power in perpetuity because they can no longer sell a changing public on the economic benefits of giving the super wealthy everything they want.
On Wednesday: The changing social climate and Project 2025
Mellon is also a leading contributor RFK, Jr. The Mellons have been at it longer than the Kennedys.
Do the Mellons, et al, think their wealth will save them from the guillotine?