Interview by Shawn Gude

Billionaires are a politically active bunch.

In the 2012 elections, the Koch brothers shelled out about as much as the entire labor movement. Between 2001 and the end of 2012, 92 percent of the country’s hundred richest billionaires (combined wealth: $2.2 trillion) contributed to a political cause. “A remarkably high portion (36 percent),” political scientist Matthew Lacombe reports in his new coauthored book Billionaires and Stealth Politics , “bundled contributions from others and/or hosted political fund-raisers.”

Yet they’re also eerily quiet. Over the ten-year period that Lacombe and his coauthors (Benjamin Page and Jason Seawright) look at, 96 percent of Forbes ’s one hundred richest Americans (as of 2013) said nothing in public about Social Security. That’s likely because most of them want to gut the popular program. As the trio of political scientists write, “many or most billionaires appear to favor, and quietly work for, policies that are opposed by large majorities of Americans” — cutting Social Security, reducing taxes on the rich, and freezing or even scrapping the minimum wage.