Mother Jones illustration; Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
The Washington Post sure seems bent out of shape over wealth taxes. And I suppose that makes sense, given that the once-storied publication is owned by one of the five richest dudes on the planet, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who put the kibosh on the paper’s 2024 endorsement of Kamala Harris, proceeded to kiss the ring of Donald Trump, and has remade the Post’s once-respected opinion section in his own image, declaring in February 2025 that its coverage would henceforth focus on “personal liberties and free markets.” Opinions Editor David Shipley promptly quit, to be replaced by Adam O’Neal, who jumped ship on Friday, citing personal reasons.
In any case, the Post has been pulling out all the stops when it comes to the wealth tax. They’ve run no less than 10 opinion pieces since March arguing against state and federal taxes on wealth and unrealized income—the “paper” gains that constitute the vast majority of the income of the richest Americans. The fact that the IRS can’t touch that income is how Bezos, according to ProPublica, managed to pay a true income tax rate of less than 1 percent from 2014 to 2018.
Here’s the Post’s recent lineup:
• March 2: “Bernie Sanders’s 2028 litmus test would strangle America’s golden goose” (Editorial board)
• March 8: “The myth of the billionaire wealth tax” (Megan McCardle)
• April 17: “This tax would rain a wealth of unintended consequences” (George Will)
• June 5: “The ‘buy, borrow, die’ myth” (Editorial board)
• June 27: “Gavin Newsom’s wealth tax two-step” (Editorial board)
• July 3: “Lower inequality does not guarantee better democracy” (Editorial board)
• July 16: “Socialists think wealth is stolen. They’re wrong.” (Marian L. Tupy, Cato Institute)
• July 21: “‘It should be laughed out of the room’: Four writers on midterm ballot measures” (Megan McCardle, again)
• July 19: “Medicare-for-all means taxes-for-all” (Editorial board)
• July 23: “I’m from Nebraska. Here’s what wealth-tax advocates don’t realize.” (Ben Nelson, former US senator; senior adviser for Saving America’s Family Enterprises)
This last one is particularly problematic for a publication whose editorial slogan is “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Saving America’s Family Enterprises (SAFE), the organization paying Nelson to promote its talking points, is a “dark money” group—a 501(c)(4) nonprofit that isn’t obligated to disclose who is funding it.
We’ll talk more about SAFE, but first let’s deconstruct this op-ed.
“As a factual matter, the threat of taxing the family farm out of existence is a myth.”
Nelson, an 85-year-old former Nebraska senator, was the Joe Manchin of his time—a Republican in Democrat clothing. Backed by the NRA and the notoriously anti-tax US Chamber of Commerce, he’s a staunch opponent of abortion rights and same sex marriage. More to the point, he was the only Democrat who voted for both of George W. Bush’s tax cut packages—Arlen Specter switched to Democrat only after doing so. In 2009, Nelson was the only Democratic lawmaker to sign Grover Nordquist’s Taxpayer Protection Pledge, a vow to oppose all tax increases.
His big revelation in the Post is that passing any of the proposed federal wealth taxes, or state-level proposals like California’s Billionaire Tax Act ballot measure, would be devastating…for farmers!
Are we stuck in a time warp?
That’s a semi-serious question. As I noted in 2024, and countless others have pointed out before me, the claim that wealth taxes—or the estate tax, in this case—hurts “family farmers” is “a well-worn Republican trope that amounts, fittingly enough, to a heap of cow manure.”
During the 1980s and 1990s, according to an exhaustive analysis published last year in Iowa Law Review, anti-tax zealots “discovered and capitalized upon an incredibly powerful image in the minds of voters: the threat to family farms. Tax opponents authored publications and held hearings detailing ‘family farm horror stories’ involving farms that would potentially have to be sold to pay the estate tax. It turned out not to matter that no policymaker, scholar, or journalist was ever able to uncover an actual example of a family farm that was sold to pay the estate tax.”
“As a factual matter,” notes the paper’s author, Kathleen DeLaney Thomas, a University of North Carolina law school professor and tax expert, “the threat of taxing the family farm out of existence is a myth.”
So, the Post knowingly published a pro-oligarchy opinion piece written on behalf of a dark money group and based on long-ago debunked propaganda, which makes one wonder whether the publishers view the paper’s slogan as aspirational.
Nelson (or whoever ghost-wrote his op-ed) concedes that most wealth tax proposals only target billionaires, but, he cautions, it’s a slippery slope. He cites a Hoover Institution study that concluded California would ultimately lose $25 billion in tax revenue if this one-time wealth tax passes, because billionaires would flee the state. But is that analysis any good? Not according to a group of prominent economists who support the wealth tax. In their rebuttal, they say the Hoover crew mischaracterized the proposal and made revenue estimates that rely “on a crucial and highly unlikely assumption.”
One hundred people were responsible for half the 2024 presidential election spending. That’s a democracy killer.
Speaking of billionaires, how many would actually leave the state? Nobody really knows. Peter Thiel, who purchased citizenship in New Zealand nearly a decade ago and is now reportedly trying to abscond to Argentina, never seemed inclined to remain in California. Allen Prohofsky, a former longtime chief economist for California’s Franchise Tax Board, told me that anyone who claims with certainty that a given tax change will cause an exodus is either lying or “delusional.”
“The people who really hate, hate, hate taxes? Most of them have already left California,” he says. But for people thinking about it “there’s a host of variables: Where can I get employment? Where does my spouse want to live? What’s the cost of housing?”
“Where are your grandchildren in school? Where is your health provider?” adds Harvey Dale, a tax law professor at New York University who advises billionaire clients in his private practice. Leaving one’s state, or nation, is “a very complicated and ultimately personal decision,” Dale says, “but it doesn’t blend down easily into something simple.”
Nelson’s conclusion: The IRS should simply collect the estimated $700 billion in taxes that go uncollected each year, and that way “farmers wouldn’t be forced to sell their assets.”
Yes! The IRS should do that. But the agency couldn’t manage it even before Donald Trump rose to power. Historically, every time IRS special agents encounter rich Americans who are cheating the government and start digging in, the oligarchs call in favors and next thing you know the agency is defunded again and the investigations are shut down. Trump’s IRS will never collect the money. His minions and (former) trillionaire Elon Musk gutted the agency to such an extent that it can’t even handle basic customer service, as my colleague Stephanie Mencimer recently revealed.
Even the fact we’re talking about Musk in this context should be the most compelling argument for taxing the unrealized gains his wealth was built on. The nation’s growing cadre of billionaires, more now than ever, is exercising vast, undeserved power over public affairs. As Jeffrey Winters, a scholar of oligarchy at Northwestern University, noted in a Mother Jones excerpt of his latest book, Musk was the biggest influencer of federal elections during the 2024 cycle, spending more than $291 million—a fortune for most, but a pittance for him.
What’s more, Winters wrote:
Former Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon’s grandson Timothy, a man few Americans knew existed, spent about $197 million, and [Sheldon] Adelson’s widow, Miriam, ranked third with more than $148 million. All told, 100 individuals invested $2.4 billion in the 2024 election—almost half the total cost of the presidential contest and 16 percent of all federal election spending. The problem is bipartisan—oligarchs poured money in for Democrats and Republicans alike.
One hundred individuals. Half the presidential election spending. That, my friends, is a democracy killer, which underscores how the Post, with its relentless anti-tax rhetoric, is complicit.
Given that SAFE and its hired gun Ben Nelson want the taxman to collect all of those unpaid taxes, you might think that restoring ample funding for IRS enforcement would be among the group’s goals.
It is not.
According to IRS filings, SAFE exists “to advocate against federal tax proposals that complicate the tax code, encourage tax avoidance, or harm small businesses, family farmers, homeowners and the middle class.” Indeed, these salt-of-the-earth farmers, concerned young homeowners, and earnest middle-class folks (or actors portraying them) star in some highly misleading videos posted on SAFE’s website to warn against taxing unrealized gains.
One video implies, for example, that someone who buys a $500,000 house could be taxed annually on the increase in the home’s value. That’s completely false. If a couple buys a $500,000 house today and sells it for $1 million after two years—a realized gain, by the way—they won’t owe a dime, because the IRS exempts $250,000 in home-sale profits ($500k for a couple) from taxation.
This aligns with a standard—and false—Republican scare tactic: The IRS is coming for your middle-class family!
So whom does SAFE really represent? It doesn’t disclose its donors, but some clues can be gleaned from its personnel. Its president from June 2023 through May 2026 was Jim Doyle. He’s the owner of Portico Policy Advisors, “a research and strategic communications firm that conducts policy analysis for leading corporations, financial service firms, venture capitalists and nonprofits.” You may recognize some of his clients, like JPMorganChase, Citi, and TPG—an asset management firm with $306 billion under management that offers, among other things, “global wealth solutions.”
And nothing says “middle class” like global wealth solutions.
The vast majority of untaxed, unrealized income belongs to the richest 10 percent of Americans. Middle-class families have little.
SAFE’s treasurer is Matthew Mazzanti, a former intern for Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson. Mazzanti, eight years out of college, is also Chief Administration Officer at PPHC, “a family of premier advisory firms specializing in government relations, public affairs, and strategic communications” that includes lobbying shops like Crossroads Strategies, which in 2020 merged with the lobby practice of former Republican House Majority Leader Trent Lott and former Sen. John Breaux (D-La.), both now Crossroads principals and board members. The PPHC conglomerate is led by, in its own words, “established founders and seasoned corporate executives.” It boasts: “Our clients include nearly half of the Fortune 100.”
And I’m sure it’s very concerned with the travails of middle-class America.
In September 2023, SAFE and Breaux co-filed a friend of the court brief in the Supreme Court case Moore v. United States. Like Nelson, Breaux supported the Bush Jr’s 2001 tax cut package. He also sided with a Republican attempt to repeal the estate tax—which the lawyers for America’s upper crust have turned into a punchline. His position on Moore was therefore no surprise; the brief asks the court to rule that taxing unrealized gains is unconstitutional.
It never came to that, because Charles Moore’s gains were in fact realized, the court found, even if the money in question wasn’t distributed to him and his wife. But the opinions of conservative justices in the case shocked many legal observers by making clear that the Roberts court would not tolerate taxes on unrealized gains (Federal wealth taxes are already, for all practical purposes, unconstitutional, as I explained in my recent piece “How to Tax a Billionaire,” though states are not beholden to the federal rules.)
The constitutional issue is really the only decent argument against such a tax—not farmers, logistics, venue-shopping moguls, or the concerns of first-time homeowners with infants. And certainly not to protect the interests anyone below the 90th wealth percentile. The richest 10 percent of Americans, after all, own 87.4 percent of all corporate stock and mutual funds. Most families have little to no unrealized gains—and those would be exempted in any piece of legislation intended to rein in the out-of-control, republic-distorting, oligarchic wealth disparities between affluent households and those just scraping by.
Maybe the Washington Post can just spare us the propaganda next time, and tell the truth: The Roberts Supreme Court, Trump administration, and oligarchs of both parties (including Mr. Bezos), care more about wealth protection than American democracy—would that it survives the present darkness.