Top Ten Billionaires Are All Yanks

The world’s ten richest persons, for the first time since Bloomberg has been keeping score, are all Americans. This feather in the national cap is shadowed, though, by a political cloud. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index reflects the achievements of job creators, investors, and technological innovators. Yet the left’s rising hostility toward America’s wealthiest is signaled by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has said “I don’t think we should have billionaires.” Hizzoner’s class warfare rhetoric is of a piece with, say, the push in California to impose a supposedly one-time wealth tax on billionaires. Nationwide, other Democratic efforts are afoot to raise levies on the nation’s wealthiest citizens. Feature, too, the cavalier talk by Seattle’s leftist mayor, Kate Wilson, who dismisses the “claims that millionaires are going to leave our state” as “super overblown,” adding that as for “the ones that leave? Like, bye.” Leftists like Ms. Wilson and Mr. Mamdani overlook the prospect that their most successful constituents could well take them at their word and opt to relocate to more favorable tax jurisdictions — as countless wealthy New Yorkers have already done in recent years. More broadly, even the London-based Financial Times concedes that wealth taxes have failed to prove the boon that liberals imagine, due in part to “the risk of capital flight.”This track record doesn’t seem to be impeding the drive among an ascendant American far left to tax the richest. The Bloomberg index offers a glimpse into the vast wealth that a relative handful of Americans have assembled, largely due to their own initiative, in recent years. The top ten of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index is led by Elon Musk with a net worth of some $942 billion. Mr. Musk’s enterprises have created tens of thousands of American jobs. The same is true of other figures on Bloomberg’s top ten. Feature, say, Larry Page, with a net worth of $303 billion, Jeff Bezos, with $283 billion, or Sergey Brin, with $281 billion, or Mark Zuckerberg, with $262 billion. These figures managed to generate riches for themselves while building wealth — and hundreds of thousands of jobs — for Americans as the corporations they helped create, including Google, Amazon, and Meta, have prospered. The impulse to tax the wealth generated by these creators is testament to a rising spirit of resentment on the left. “They’ll never even notice” a California union leader, Dave Regan, had sneered of his proposed 5 percent wealth tax on residents worth $1 billion or more. A group of Nobel laureates, including Joseph Stiglitz, back the tax. Yet Mr. Regan tells the FT he has been startled by the “virulence of the reaction to his plan for America’s first wealth tax.” Wealthy Californians say they plan to flee the state if the tax passes in a November referendum. Mr. Musk has already moved Tesla to Texas. Mr. Brin is among those leading the charge against the tax, which Stanford’s Joshua Rauh estimates will end up costing the state some $25 billion. That’s a far cry from the estimates of the tax’s backers that the levy would raise $100 billion for the public coffers, our Veronique de Rugy has reported.The calls for punitive taxation of billionaires comes at a time when Americans overall have never been richer, per the Census Bureau, and the poverty rate has never been lower. Rather than embracing the Marxist mentality of Mr. Mamdani and his ilk, today’s Democrats would be better off taking a page from their own past leaders, like JFK, who insisted that the best way to foster growth was by lowering taxes for all, because “a rising tide lifts all boats.”

Top Ten Billionaires Are All Yanks

Top Ten Billionaires Are All Yanks

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