Chris,
You might find these interesting…
Now your article claims that most billionaires are more like the Koch Brothers and less like Gates, Buffet, Bezos, Bloomberg. Note exactly true… the statement varies by the cut-off. At the top of the billionaires list, most are progressive, among the top 50 most are conservative, but when you look at political dollars, the majority of the dollars go to the progressive agenda.
If weigh political influence not by numbers but by billions of dollars of net work… as your article mentions the top three billionaires whose fortunes dwarf the rest of the billionaires are all progressives.
https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/#15d11b45251c
If we measure their influence by their contributions than a quick analysis by Forbes points out that far more billionaire donors are giving to progressive causes. A quick analysis of 2016 done by Forbes shows the following (I suspect 2018 would be more lopsided)…
“The next time you hear Senator Bernie Sanders rail against the nefarious influence of “millionaires and billionaires,” it might be important to know that 39% of the nation’s wealthiest donors are backing Democrats more than Republicans this election. Even more interesting, the number of card carrying liberal titans is likely to increase dramatically, as billionaires from new industries, especially Silicon Valley, are unambiguously Democratic cheerleaders*.”
So no doubt there are billionaires on both side of the political aisle, but because most of the “new billionaires” are coming from technology companies, they tend to be more liberal, younger, and politically active. This is important… because billionaires generally do not “passively” donate, but they expect to influence a party’s direction based on their donations…
Both the left and right media are acknowledging this…
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/tom-steyer-the-democrats-billionaire-for-the-people
Your article is pretty clear that billionaires operate in their own self interest… while the implication is that only conservative ones do, that is bit biased… they all do. Your article uses to bad examples of show how the wealthy act: Social Security and estate taxes… why? Social Security is funded by the middle class, not the wealthy. Estate taxes are really only an issue for a small group of billionaires that want to pass family businesses on to their children.
So it is no surprise “97% of the wealthiest billionaires have said nothing” on the issue… it is not their issue… On the estate tax, it is a bit more obvious… which billionaires own billion dollar family businesses want to pass them on to their children. More telling is where progressive billionaires and their Congressional lackeys came down on the carried interest deduction which would have impacted the wallets of many progressive billionaires… the killed the attempt to reform the unfair treatment as a condition for passing the 2018 tax reform bill.
My point was Progressives politicians are largely in the pockets of wealthy billionaires who have billions of dollars but only one vote. So they use the media to create a sense of impending doom, to mobilize the votes of the poor to back their candidates. But like their sponsors… most of those politicians seek to become wealthy and so they are perfectly happy passing policies to tax the middle class to fund programs for the poor (most of the middle class is conservative… so screw them, right?). But these politicians are not going to go after the wealthy… you don’t bite the hands that feed you or the people you want to be like someday. Follow the money…
