Like Knicks owner James Dolan, Donald Trump is a walking advertisement for a wealth tax. The Artful Dealmaker long maintained he was a self-made billionaire who started with "a small loan of $1 million" from his father. Then the New York Times exposed that he'd inherited at least $413 million in today's dollars from his pops, a sum he was able to max out through a variety of tax schemes, some of which were straight-up fraud. Over the years, the Business Man Who Makes Business Deals jumped on a financial rollercoaster, cruising through periods of success and also such disaster that his father had to move in and bail him out. In the end, some analysts suggest Trump would have been better off just putting his money in an index fund.

All that's to say that the American economy would probably be better off—and certainly, scores of Atlantic City contractors might be—if Trump's inheritance had been properly taxed and spent on the commonwealth. And Trump's story is not an altogether remarkable one. Roughly 60 percent of American wealth is inherited, so, like our president, many of our multi-millionaires and billionaires didn't do a lick of work to slide into the Fuck You Money Club. But even those who have some claim to being self-made—like, say, former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz—have increasingly become a galvanizing force for taxing the rich every time they speak publicly.

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Howard Schultz says billionaires should be referred to as “people of means” or “people of wealth.” https://t.co/I3apM0h7aa — Waleed Shahid (@_waleedshahid) February 5, 2019

The moniker billionaire now has become the catchphrase. I would re-phrase that and I would say that people of means have been able to leverage their wealth and their interests in ways that are unfair. And I think that speaks to the inequality, but it also directly speaks to the special interests that are paid for by people of wealth and corporations that are looking for influence. And they have such unbelievable influence on the politicians who are steeped in the ideology of both parties. And once again I go back to this: If I should run for president, I am not in bed with any party. I am not in bed with any special interest. All I'm trying to do is one thing: walk in the shoes of the American people.

This is some doublespeak befitting of our age. Schultz, a billionaire, tries to dilute the simple reality—that he is a billionaire—by grouping himself into some larger, amorphous body of Human-Americans known as People of Means. These people have Influence, and they use the Special Interests, which he opposes because it's unfair, but also he hasn't proposed any change to American electoral or governing policy that would do anything to curb this Influence. There are no structural adjustments needed to a system where one percent of the people own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent.

Instead, the solution is to elect Howard Schultz, because Howard Schultz is not a Democrat or a Republican with an Ideology, and therefore is not beholden to rich and powerful people or corporations. Please do not remark on the fact that Schultz is a rich and powerful person who used to run a corporation, and who almost certainly runs in circles of rich and powerful people, all of whom like the country exactly as it is because they earned everything they've got and nobody's going to take a dime of it. You might have noticed a familiar note here: "I am not in bed with any special interest," Schultz said. "All I'm trying to do is one thing: walk in the shoes of the American people." Except he can't, because he's a billionaire multiple times over and long ago lost touch with what being an ordinary person is like.

And besides, we've heard this shtick before. I Alone Can Fix It.

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I have joined the political arena so that the powerful can no longer beat up on people that cannot defend themselves. Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it. I have seen firsthand how the system is rigged against our citizens.

The simple fact is that electing one person president and trusting them to single-handedly extinguish the influence of wealthy special interests is not how things work in a democracy. The structural problems in our system require us to clean up our elections—get the money out and give everyone full voting rights—and yes, to redistribute some resources from the people who have so much they couldn't spend it in 10 lifetimes to the people who don't have enough savings to cover a single emergency expense. It increasingly seems that voters are realizing that. As Jonathan Chait highlighted in New York, Schultz's favorable rating among the public is 4 (four) percent. 40 percent view him unfavorably, and everyone else said they didn't know who he is.

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Even prompting respondents with favorable takes on Schultz (“Howard Schultz is a true American success story … He believes that the system is broken and there are extremists on both sides, and only an independent centrist can solve the problems that Republicans and Democrats refuse to fix.”) got support for a Schultz campaign against any opponent up to 9 percent. Even Schultz's opaque internal polling, recently released to the public, showed he'd serve as a spoiler in a three-way contest with Trump and Democrats Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris, helping to re-elect the Artful Dealmaker. Nate Silver at Five Thirty-Eight suggests his socially liberal, fiscally conservative platform could appeal to some of Trump's 2016 voters, but Schultz's own best data-driven argument right now is that he'd prevent the election of a Democrat who'd raise his taxes.

Which, of course, is the whole point of his campaign. Like many other hugely successful people, Schultz believes he earned every ounce of what he has through superior skill and work ethic—with no help from the design of our political economy—and any attempt to get him to contribute more to commonwealth programs through taxation are literally "un-American." That's what he called Medicare For All, which enjoys 56 percent support nationally in a recent poll. In other surveys, it's garnered 70 percent support. He dismissed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's proposal for a 70 percent top marginal tax rate (45 percent support in a new poll) and called Warren's plan for a wealth tax of 3 percent on $1 billion or more and 2 percent on $50 million as "ridiculous."

Does it sound ridiculous to you? It doesn't to 61 percent of Americans, who backed it in a recent poll. In general, 76 percent of Americans believe the wealthy should pay more in taxes. A Fox News poll found 54 percent of Republicans favor raising taxes on the rich. That view sounds like the American political center, which Schultz claims to occupy because he believes the "center" is the midway point between the arbitrarily assigned positions of the two parties he so laments. This is the Gospel of Both Sides, where Democrats—who want to raise taxes on the rich to levels they were at throughout much of the 20th century—and Republicans—who, in their 2017 tax bill, carved out a tax loophole for private jet owners—are both equally Extreme.

Schultz isn't interested in what the Moderate Middle wants. He isn't going to take a walk in those Americans' shoes. He prefers his own loafers.



Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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