Extreme Wealth Deplored by ‘Patriotic Millionaires’ Group

Last updated on: January 31, 2025 at 2:33 pm by Jack Hartjes

0 Comments

Extreme Wealth Deplored by ‘Patriotic Millionaires’ Group 2025-01-31T14:33:11-06:00 Jack Hartjes

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Marlene Engelhorn, millionaire heiress, protests at Davos with sign "tax the rich."

Marlene Engelhorn, inheritor of what she considers “extreme wealth,” protests at the Davos convention, January 15. (Image credit: Boursorama)

Extreme wealth and ‘wealth extremism’ are threatening democracy and global stability. That’s the judgment of over half of the respondents to a random survey of the world’s millionaires and billionaires. The Patriotic Millionaires group conducted the survey, and Press Reader carried the story.

Commenting for the article, Marlene Engelhorn said, “The superrich are buying themselves more wealth and more power while the rest of the world is living in economic fear.” She is the heiress of billionaires and of a German medical technology company. The 32-year-old multi-millionaire decided years ago that she wanted 90 percent of her money taxed away.

“Tax the Super Rich,” said some protesters’ signs at the Davos World Economic Forum, National Public Radio reported. The annual Oxfam report, released at the start of Davos, said the same, and a growing segment of the superrich agree: their extreme wealth should be taxed away.

Some statistics on extreme wealth:

“On average the fortunes of the richest 10 billionaires – eight of whom live in the U.S. – grew by $100 million a day in 2024.”
Meanwhile, “the number of people living under the World Bank poverty line of $6.85 a day [nearly 44 percent of the world’s population] has remained unchanged since 1990.”
“36 percent of overall billionaire wealth was inherited in 2023.” (These first three are from Oxfam.)
All but three billionaires age 33 or younger, 25 in number, inherited their wealth, according to Forbes.

My Baby Boomer (born in 1964 or earlier) generation in the U.S., but not so much me personally, holds $95.9 trillion in household wealth. That’s out of $147.1 trillion total U.S. household wealth. Young people, mostly by luck, can be possessors of extreme wealth, but mostly, Forbes concludes, wealth is transferring to the elder population. And to the already rich!

“The rich get richer and the poor get poorer” is a common saying, a version of which Jesus already knew and decried:

Take care what you hear…. To the one who has, more will be given; from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. (Mark 4:24-25)

Tax, not philanthropy

Why call it “extreme wealth,” as if being very rich were necessarily something bad? After all, many of the superrich are also generous with their money, donating millions to charitable causes.

Engelhorn answers that not taxing extreme wealth, for instance by an inheritance tax, distorts democracy. It gives too much power to the superrich. Even if they are great philanthropists, their generosity is also power, including power to influence elections. Their personal charities do not necessarily align with society’s needs.

Engelhorn doesn’t want the power that her inherited millions offer her. She thinks that power belongs to her society through that society’s elected representatives. But her country, Austria, abolished its inheritance tax in 2008. So she developed an interesting plan to give away the money she thinks should be taxed. “I’m creating the tax I would want to pay,” she says, as reported by The Guardian.

Her plan avoids arrogating power to herself. A “Good Council for Redistribution” decides where her money should go. 10,000 randomly selected people in Austria received invitations to join the council. From the hundreds who responded statistical methods settled on 50 adults reflecting the country’s demographics. Engelhorn paid the members of this council to “spend six weekends thrashing out thorny issues such as inequality and redistribution.” Then they got down to the business of deciding how to redistribute Engelhorn’s inheritance. Engelhorn herself had no say in the redistribution. Ninety percent of her wealth went to the council to give away.

Tax Me Now

Engelhorn, raised in a bubble of the superrich, concluded, concerning her untaxed inheritance:

Something’s not right about me inheriting millions, not being taxed, while a person who is working 40 hours, maybe more, maybe two jobs, has kids perhaps … and they get taxed on their work. (from the London Guardian)

Gabriel Zucman, advisor to the G20 countries on how the whole world could tax the ultra-rich, notes in a Guardian article:

Billionaires worldwide were paying an average of 0.3 percent tax on their wealth.
The average wealth of the top one tenthousandth of individuals grew between 1987 and 2024 on average 7.1 percent per year.
Billionaires’ share of global wealth grew in that period from 3 to 14 percent.

Then there’s “Tax Me Now,” a group Engelhorn co-founded. It has brought together hundreds of superrich who call on political leaders to tax their extreme wealth.

My own conclusion: It’s no crime to be rich, but it’s a sinful characteristic of our world that there are billionaires. And, potentially in the next 10 years if extreme and rising wealth inequality continues, trillionaires.

A last word from Marlene Engelhorn

Engelhorn has determined ultimately to give away all of her “extreme wealth,” get out of the “feudal wealth soup” she was born into, and get a job like 99 percent of the population. She concludes:

I do acknowledge that it’s not going to be easy. To me, really, starting a working, taxpaying life is ascending. It’s a step up into the democratic party of our society, the democratic 99 percent.

Business, Finance and Religion

Uncategorized

Previous Post

November 27, 2024

Nick Cave and a Rocker’s 'Faith, Hope and Carnage'