(C) Fairness & Accuracy in Media
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Media Owned by Wealthy Find a Wealth of Reasons Against a Wealth Tax [1]
['Alan Macleod']
Date: 2020-12-01 20:15:29+00:00
The coronavirus pandemic has greatly increased wealth inequality in the United States, a key issue in this year’s presidential election, with many Democrats murmuring about—or even demanding—a new wealth tax. Surveys showed the idea is overwhelmingly popular with the electorate, with voters in 11 polled states more than three times as likely to support than oppose a candidate backing a tax on the assets of the wealthy.
And America’s super-rich (who have seen their fortunes surge since the beginning of lockdown) got nervous. A month before the election, CNBC (10/14/20) reported that wealthy families were desperately trying to change ownership status of their assets—passing them down to their rich kids—before year’s end, in case of sweeping Biden tax reforms that could lose them millions.
And corporate media—whose owners are overwhelmingly from the class that would be paying a wealth tax—returned to throw cold water on the idea, after successfully sidelining the candidates who most enthusiastically promoted taxing the wealthy during the Democratic primaries this year.
The primaries put the notion of a wealth tax on the political table, with a number of high-profile candidates, including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, proposing one. While the idea was popular with the public (polls show it was strongly supported, with even half of Republican voters backing it), it was not popular with corporate media pundits, who rejected it as a “bad,” “foolhardy” (CNN, 2/17/19) or “terrible” idea (Washington Examiner, 2/15/20), “bad for workers” (Reason, 1/28/20) and an “administrative nightmare” (Time, 1/30/19).
A CNN opinion piece (11/27/19) warned that it would be just plain “wrong” to claim that a wealth tax is a serious solution, based as it is on “voodoo incantations,” and instead suggested a tax cut to address inequality. Fox News (12/31/19) attacked the idea as a misguided “fantasy.”
Pundits generally affected to believe inequality was a real problem that they wanted to fix—but that directly addressing it through redistribution wouldn’t work. Thus a CNN op-ed (11/19/19) argued: “Rising income inequality is indeed a problem for economic growth. But taxing wealth could exacerbate the problem, not fix it.” The authors, two staffers at the right-wing Illinois Policy Institute, claimed that seizing assets from “the world’s best allocators of capital” would stifle innovation and inevitably hurt workers.
There was a limited amount of positive coverage of any potential wealth tax. The New York Times (4/21/20), for instance, claimed a one-off Covid-19 solidarity assessment on the wealthy would “help prove that we are all in this together.” But the standard media line was that it would be too hard to implement (New York Times, 11/15/19), or simply unconstitutional and dishonest (New York Times, 1/24/20).
Joe Biden is not proposing any specific wealth tax. The president-elect even began his campaign explicitly reassuring wealthy donors that “nothing would fundamentally change” under his presidency. “I need you very badly,” he told them. Yet America’s rich are worried that a President Biden would be swayed by progressive forces in his party.
As a result, the concept again became a talking point for the media in the weeks before the election. And like last time, the tone was overwhelmingly hostile. Thus, a wealth tax simply “won’t work” (Daily Telegraph, 10/6/20), creates “false expectations” (Toronto Sun, 9/22/20) or might cost more to administer than it would bring in (Spectator, 10/8/20). “A wealth tax is not a solution for income inequality,” insisted Forbes (9/29/20), a magazine most noted for its glorification of billionaires, claiming it is a “policy driven by spite” against the rich, and would somehow “make everyone—rich and poor—worse off.”
CNBC (10/6/20), noting that Biden’s plans categorize those in the top 1.8% of income (making $400,000+ annually) as “wealthy,” insisted that those poor souls “aren’t exactly living large.” The cable network found “experts” willing to claim that that sort of annual income only provided a “relatively middle-class lifestyle” in much of the country. Why, they might only be able to afford three “modest” family vacations per year.
CNBC (9/23/20) also sat down with JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon, uncritically passing along his line that any wealth tax would be “extremely complicated” and “almost impossible,” an interview that was picked up and amplified across the media (e.g., The Hill, 9/23/20; New York Post, 9/23/20; MSN, 9/23/20; Forbes, 9/23/20). Wow, who would have thought that a billionaire investment banker would oppose a wealth tax!
Ultimately, a wealth tax as modest as some Democrats are proposing would affect precious few Americans, but still generate trillions of dollars of revenue from people who have largely been increasing their fortunes throughout the pandemic. That so much of the media are so dead set against the idea suggests whose interests they really serve.
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