Billionaires Shouldn't Just Pay More. They Should Have Less.
We need to say the quiet part out loud.
Igor Volsky leads the Tax the Greedy Billionaires campaign and is the founder of Volsky Ventures. Previously, he served as the founding executive director of Guns Down America and has held leadership positions at Groundwork Action and the Center for American Progress.
When the Washington Post announced at the beginning of the month that it was laying off at least a third of its staff, many people saw this as yet another chapter in the decline of print media and an increasingly unstable media landscape. But the shake-up reveals much more: Concentrations of extreme wealth are corroding the free press, even its legacy institutions, and threatening our democracy. Whatever Amazon founder Jeff Bezos wanted when he first bought the Post in 2013, he appears to be increasingly using it as a tool to further his own agenda and grow his power at the expense of the rest of us.
After the layoffs were announced, Tax the Greedy Billionaires—a campaign I run focused on educating the public about the consequences of extreme wealth and building support for taxing it—spoke to staffers rallying outside of the Post building in Washington, DC, about the consequences of a billionaire taking over their newsroom.
Rushard Anderson, who was laid off from his role as social media editor, told us: “These piss-poor decisions made by Jeff Bezos are now not only causing strain on the company, but strain on my former colleagues and my friends.” The day’s layoffs cut the newspaper’s sports and books sections, debilitated both its international and local coverage teams, and left more than 300 union workers jobless.
Patrick Nielsen, a software engineer and co-chair of the Washington Post Tech Guild, highlighted a pattern that’s all too common in the world of billionaires: Buy something, break it, and then throw it out because it’s broken.
“So much of media depends on reader trust,” Nielsen told us, “and I think the more people see and feel that a billionaire with his own interests is dictating what the paper writes about, [that] destroys our credibility and it destroys our trust.”
Indeed, since taking over, Bezos has reshaped how the paper operates. Under his leadership, changes have included explicitly focusing opinion coverage on “personal liberties and free markets” (Bezos said he believed those “viewpoints are underserved in the current market” and “right for America”) and ending the long-standing tradition of presidential endorsements within weeks of the 2024 election (he wanted to avoid the “perception of bias” that endorsements bring). As a result, the Post hemorrhaged approximately a quarter million readers.
The Bezos-Post story is a perfect illustration of what extreme wealth actually does in the wild. It doesn’t just sit in a vault somewhere. It doesn’t ask or negotiate. It just reshapes the world around it to suit the person holding it, and leaves behind a newspaper with half as many journalists. A hospital that no longer has enough nurses. A neighborhood that no longer has affordable apartments or housing options. Same story, different industries.
We need to say the quiet part out loud: Taxing the ultra-wealthy isn’t just about funding new programs or making them pay their fair share. It’s about chipping away at their wealth, which is warping our economy and democracy alike.
Private Equity Shows Us How This Plays Out in Practice
Over the past decade, private equity—firms that buy companies with the intent to grow their value, sell them, and provide a return to shareholders—has moved aggressively into hospitals, physician practices, nursing homes, and emergency care. The playbook is consistent: acquire, cut costs, raise prices, extract. Their goal isn’t to provide better care to patients; it’s to use the hospital, nursing home, or other institution as a vehicle to accumulate wealth.
Private equity firm Apollo Global Management now owns two of the largest hospital systems in the United States and controls 235 hospitals across 37 states. Under Apollo’s ownership, hospitals have been burdened with sky-high debt, reduced staff, and degraded essential services, including OB-GYN and pediatric care. It’s a story repeated across the country: Billionaire-run private equity loads hospitals with debt, cuts operating costs, and shuts down “unprofitable” services so investors can extract more cash while patients in entire regions lose access to basic care or pay more for what’s left.
And it’s not just hospitals. Major health insurers are in on it too, funneling skyrocketing premiums into shareholder payouts rather than controlling costs. The largest health-care companies increased shareholder dividends and stock buybacks by 315 percent between 2001 and 2022, allocating 95 percent of their profits to Wall Street investors. The result? Premiums for employer-sponsored family coverage climbed to over $25,000 annually.
Taxing the ultra-wealthy isn’t just about funding new programs or making them pay their fair share. It’s about chipping away at their wealth, which is warping our economy and democracy alike.
It’s a similar story in housing. Billionaire-run investment firms currently own at least 1.6 million housing units in the United States. They’ve systematically purchased hundreds of thousands of single-family homes across America, pulling them from the market for would-be buyers and converting them into rental income streams. (As just one dystopian example—in Detroit, the firm RealToken bought up homes and sold them as cryptocurrency tokens to overseas investors, leaving the houses in their care in dire, unsafe conditions.) Private equity firms then deploy aggressive revenue-maximizing tactics to generate returns for their investors while increasing costs for families.
It’s no coincidence that many of the metropolitan areas where private equity landlords own a large share of apartments—Tampa, Phoenix, Dallas, Atlanta, and Charlotte—have experienced some of the sharpest rent increases in the country. Invitation Homes, backed by Blackstone, the world’s largest alternative asset manager, alone owns more than 80,000 single-family homes. When a single entity controls that much of the housing supply in a given market, rents don’t go up by accident.
This is wealth working as intended. It’s what happens when you have enough capital to reshape entire markets in your favor and then use the political influence that same capital buys to make sure no one passes a law to stop you.
This is what gets missed in the “pay your fair share” framing. We’re not just talking about wealthy people holding onto money that should be taxed. We’re talking about the ultra-wealthy actively using that wealth to increase your rent, raise your hospital bill, lower your wages, and reduce the quality of the care and services you receive. The money isn’t sitting still; it’s working against you.
Massive Wealth Is Bad for the Economy
The consequences of extreme wealth also reach into your ability to start a business, compete in a market, and build wealth of your own.
When wealth pools at the top and gets parked in financial assets rather than spent in the real economy, it slows growth, reducing aggregate demand by an estimated 1.5 percent of GDP. Five million people with $100 to spend can buy more goods and services across a broader swath of the economy than one person with $500 million. After all, one person can only eat so many dinners or take so many trips.
That slowdown hits aspiring entrepreneurs especially hard. Billionaire-backed corporations use their concentrated capital to dominate markets, undercut prices on competitors, and sustain losses indefinitely until they’ve captured the market. Would-be competitors, those without access to that kind of capital, simply can’t survive the war of attrition.
The promise of the American economy has always been, at least in theory, that if you have a good idea and you work hard, you can build something. Extreme wealth concentration is quietly dismantling that promise, not through any single dramatic act, but through the steady, grinding pressure of markets that are rigged before you even show up.
Make Greed a Sin Again
In short: Extreme wealth concentration is itself the crisis. It’s not just that billionaires aren’t paying enough taxes to fund public services. It’s that the existence of billionaires, with their capacity to buy newspapers, hospitals, housing stock, and governing institutions (billionaires spent $2.6 billion attempting to influence the 2024 election alone), is actively making the rest of our lives harder.
The fact that 300,000 households sit on more wealth than the entire US national debt isn’t just an inequality statistic. It’s a power structure. And that power structure is being used, every single day, to extract value from the rest of us. Higher rents. Higher medical bills. Lower wages. Less media accountability. More influence with elected officials.
“[Bezos is] one of the richest men in the whole world,” Nielsen, the Post Tech Guild co-chair, said. “He could blink and have the amazing work our journalists do funded in perpetuity. But he chooses not to.” And that’s because Bezos’s ultimate goal isn’t to sustain a media institution that can hold power to account and provide a valuable service to the public; it’s to make more money and amass the power that comes with it.
Taxing extreme wealth is about dismantling these coercive concentrations of power.
They shouldn’t just pay more. They should have less.
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