Mitt Romney Is Right: Tax the Rich Before the Pitchforks Come Out
The One Percent’s Problem Isn’t Envy. It’s Math.
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There is a saying among the One Percent that goes something like this: “If we don’t watch out, the people with the pitchforks will come for us.”
When the very rich talk this way, they are usually referring to tax policy and the growing squeeze on the middle class. The pitchforks are a metaphor, of course, evoking historic uprisings against entrenched wealth—think the French Revolution—when inequality boiled over into violent populism.
We are not yet in danger of an actual pitchfork uprising, but there is widespread and intensifying anger over the loopholes that allow the wealthy to avoid paying taxes altogether. Many manage to pay next to nothing, while ordinary Americans pay, on average, more than 25 percent of their income in federal, state, and local taxes. Bluntly put, people are fed up with a system that puts the rich ahead of everyone else.
“On the tax front,” Mitt Romney wrote recently, “it’s time for rich people like me to pay more.”
Wait—Mitt Romney said that? Romney, the very wealthy former Republican senator from Utah? The man who ran for president in 2012 with a plan that cut taxes on capital gains? Yes, the same Romney. And this time, he’s arguing to raise taxes on precisely the income streams that made him rich.
Unsurprisingly, the Wall Street Journal editorial page immediately attacked him for it. Of course they did. The Journal has spent decades defending the very structures Romney is now criticizing, and for them, any deviation from tax orthodoxy—especially from one of their own—is treated as apostasy. But Romney isn’t wrong. In fact, he’s coming to a conclusion that much of the country has already reached. Me too.
To be fair, the original goal of cutting taxes—especially on investment and capital—was to stimulate economic growth. In moments of stagnation or crisis, that logic can be sound, and at times it has worked. The problem is that what began as a tool to grow the economy out of downturns hardened into an ideology. Tax cuts became a religion, pursued regardless of circumstances, even as deficits ballooned, debt exploded, and interest payments on that debt grew larger than the entire defense budget. The context changed, but the doctrine did not.
Romney’s main target is the system for taxing inheritances, which allows the beneficiaries of massive estates to avoid taxes entirely. The current rules are extraordinarily complex, but the result is simple: as Romney noted, Elon Musk’s heirs could inherit hundreds of billions of dollars in assets and pay not a penny in tax. Similarly, those with large real estate holdings can continually buy, sell, and roll over properties while never paying taxes on their gains.
These inheritance and real estate arrangements aren’t “loopholes,” Romney argues—they’re “caverns,” allowing the ultra-wealthy to stash away untold trillions. Another cavern is the cap on payroll taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare. As things stand now, income above $176,100 is exempt. It’s time, Romney says, to “go where the money is.” Otherwise, both programs could face insolvency in less than a decade.
Romney is not a lone rich voice in the wilderness. In 2023, more than 200 members of the One Percent signed a public call to raise taxes on themselves. In a petition sent to political and business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, they urged modest new taxes on the “superrich”: 2 percent on fortunes over $5 million, 3 percent on wealth over $50 million, and 5 percent on those exceeding $1 billion. Among the signatories was Disney heiress Abigail Disney, who put it bluntly: “Extreme wealth is eating our world alive. It is undermining our democracies, destabilizing our economies, and destroying our climate.”
Other famous billionaires have joined the cause. Warren Buffett, Ray Dalio, Bill Gates, and Mark Cuban have all argued that the rich should pay more. Buffett has famously said he’s been “coddled by a billionaire-friendly Congress,” noting that he pays a lower effective tax rate than his own secretaries. He proposed the so-called Buffett Rule, which would require people earning more than $1 million to pay at least 30 percent in taxes. Mark Cuban has been even more direct: “F— yeah we should pay more in taxes!”
Cuban and Buffett belong to an extraordinarily exclusive club. There are just over 3,000 billionaires in the world, and together they control roughly $13 trillion in assets—more than the total value of the entire nation of Canada. Put differently, 3,000 people could buy all the privately owned real estate, stocks, bonds, and businesses of the world’s eighth-richest country. Expand the lens to include the One Percent, and you find that they control nearly half of all the wealth on Earth.
For all its excess, this concentration of wealth poses a real problem even for those at the top. First, when most people lack income and security, they can’t meaningfully contribute to economic growth. Second, without tax reform, developed countries will struggle to service the massive debts they are accumulating. The endgame is instability—and eventually chaos.
Looking specifically at the United States, Romney warned that “the government will need trillions of dollars to make up the shortfall. When lenders refuse to loan the money unless they are paid much higher interest rates, economic calamity will almost certainly ensue. Alternatively, the government could print more money, inducing hyperinflation that devalues the national debt—along with your savings.”
How did we get here? Both parties bear some responsibility, to be fair. Democrats delay reforms to expensive entitlement programs (recently Republicans are leading that charge to make no reforms, because they don’t want to lose power and will lie to keep it.) Republicans push tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy. Everyone talks about deficits and the soaring national debt, but no one acts. The result is nearly $38 trillion in debt, with annual interest payments now exceeding $970 billion. I was in those conversations, the decisions are excruciatingly hard…they might mean you lose your seat. And we have seen the cowardice of so many Republicans in congress.
The numbers are dizzying. And yes, many politicians have been bought off by campaign donations from the One Percent. But Romney’s voice matters precisely because he knows the system from the inside. With a fortune exceeding $175 million, he understands how wealth is protected—and how fragile public trust has become. His plea—tax me more—is not moral grandstanding. It’s a pragmatic warning.
A Harris Poll conducted last month found that most Americans believe billionaires wield too much political power. More than 70 percent want them to pay higher taxes, and 53 percent believe no one should be allowed to accumulate more than $10 billion in wealth.
The pitchforks aren’t coming. But protest and the ballot box are powerful tools. The recent election of a socialist mayor in New York City shows how fast public anger can translate into political upheaval. If the One Percent wants to preserve the capitalist system that has served them so well, they would be wise to listen—especially when one of their own is telling them the truth.
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