Daily Debunk: Table scraps from billionaires
We don’t need the occasional bike path; we need billionaires like Ken Griffin simply to pay their fair share
Billionaire Kenneth Griffin has contributed $20 million to defeat the Fair Tax Amendment, because he stood to owe an extra $26 million in taxes in 2018 under a progressive income tax. (Wikimedia Commons/Paul Elledge)
By Ameya Pawar and Ted Cox
Kenneth Griffin, founder of the Citadel investment fund, is a philanthropist. That doesn't necessarily make him charitable.
Griffin is one of the state’s richest residents, and we sing his praises when he opens up his checkbook to toss $12 million to then-Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel to create separate walk and bike paths along the Lakefront Trail on the Lake Michigan shore, as he did in 2016, or when he throws another $5 million to Mayor Lori Lightfoot to repair the same paths after storm damage earlier this year.
Griffin is known to be a bicycle enthusiast, and the message he’s sending would seem to be, “Hey, I’m a good person — even if I don’t want to pay my fair share.”
Because, according to the Illinois State Board of Elections, Griffin also took out his checkbook earlier this month to contribute $20 million to the Coalition to Stop the Proposed Tax Hike Amendment, a group fighting the Fair Tax Amendment on top of the state ballot in the Nov. 3 general election.
Daniel Biss, the former state senator and gubernatorial candidate now running to be mayor of Evanston, pointed out on Twitter: “Ken Griffin is awful in many ways, but he's a savvy investor. If you accept this report that he made $870 million in 2018, then the fair tax would cost him $26 million in a year like that. No wonder he's willing to spend $20 million to avoid paying it.”
According to the Service Employee International Union’s Healthcare Illinois, Griffin has also contributed $20 million to President Trump and congressional Republicans — no doubt in part as thanks for the $1 trillion tax cut to the very rich passed at the end of 2017, and in hopes for more.
All right, no surprise there. Billionaires are apt to be pretty skilled when it comes to keeping accounting in their heads, and it’s only natural that they’d use their money and other levers of power — say, by cozying up to big-city mayors with funding for bike paths to curry their favor — to influence tax policy, government regulations, and other nuisances of the rich and wealthy.
But here’s the thing. Citadel Investments got caught in the financial meltdown that brought on the Great Recession at the end of 2008, and as part of the bailout of AIG it also received $200 million in taxpayer funding. The government was there for Griffin and Citadel to prop it up in a crisis, and what is his response?
A sort of billionaire a la carte in picking and choosing the causes he’ll contribute to, but foremost among them the fight against a graduated income tax in Illinois, to the tune of just under what he stood to pay in additional taxes anyway.
Permit us to say as Illinoisans that we don’t need table scraps from billionaires when it comes to building bike paths. We simply need them to pay their fair share.
Otherwise, we sustain a system that the Rev. Martin Luther King decried more than 50 years ago as “socialism for the rich” and “rugged free enterprise for the poor.” That dynamic has only gotten worse since then.
Understand, the fair tax isn’t punishment for the rich. It’s an expectation that they pay their fair share by paying a little bit more than the average family making $60,000 a year. The Fair Tax Amendment would allow Illinois to adopt a graduated income tax, and the brackets set by the General Assembly cut taxes or keep them level for 97 percent of state taxpayers, up through those making $250,000 a year, with those making more paying a slightly higher rate, up to a top tax bracket of just under 8 percent for those making more than $1 million a year.
It’s projected to raise more than $3 billion a year, bolstering public education and other critical state services, with Griffin’s estimated $26 million a nice start.
So let’s make that happen, and after that, when Ken Griffin gives a few million for a bike path, we’ll grant that he just might be genuinely charitable.