A Christian Plan to Help Billionaires

Are billionaires the reason we can’t have nice things? It’s tempting to think so. 

Consider Elon Musk, having been messily ejected from President Donald Trump’s orbit after his Department of Government Efficiency project ended in failure, with little to show for it other than an appalling and growing body count. Or Jeff Bezos, whose reported interference with The Washington Post has helped reduce the one-time standard bearer of ferocious journalism to a husk of its former glory. 

And every so often, when people remember that billionaires are taxed less than others, a groundswell of lefty populism springs up and argues that taxing billionaires would pay for universal healthcare, for free college, for trains from New York to Los Angeles—pick your progressive white whale. It’s a nice idea.

But I think this is a bad reason to tax billionaires. The math isn’t mathing, and even if we could enact some sort of meaningful tax on billionaires, it would not deliver on the promise many leftists think it would. There are, however, very good reasons to tax billionaires and at least as far as I as a Christian am concerned, one of them is simple obedience to scripture and love for my neighbors.

First up, let’s talk numbers. In 2021, the Biden administration released a study that found that America’s 400 wealthiest families are paying an average income tax rate of just 8.2%, while the average federal income tax rate sits somewhere around 13%. Over at Liberal Currents, Samantha Hancox-Li has written a good breakdown of what taxing billionaires would and would not accomplish. She notes that Medicare for All would cost something like $41 trillion over 10 years. If you put every American billionaire’s net worth in a big pot, you’d have $6 trillion. You see the problem. 

But Hancox-Li is not against taxing billionaires. She argues: “The problem with billionaires isn’t that they’re hoarding money that would otherwise pay for a Scandinavian social utopia. It’s that their money has become a source of wildly distorted political power that allows a few men with extremist views to wreak havoc on the rest of us.” 

I agree with her. Our elected leaders are under the sway of an elite group of absurdly wealthy men (and women, but mostly men) who can muscle their policy goals directly from fringe quackery into U.S. law, bypassing any sort of democratic process. Consider Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., for instance. His extreme anti-vax views are only shared by a small minority of voters, but what good is public opinion against the vaunted Kennedy fortune? We live at the whims of billionaires, and taxing their wealth would provide some measure of protection from their views. 

READ MORE: Taxing the Rich to Help the Poor? Here's What the Bible Says.

But there is another, more charitable reason I support taxing billionaires: Accumulating obscene amounts of resources is bad for you. It is poisonous to your soul, your mind, and your relationships. We do not need to look hard for examples. We can easily see exorbitant wealth’s adverse impact on the lives of everyone from Elon Musk to J.K. Rowling, once celebrated individuals turned insufferable bullies, but we don’t even need these anecdotes. 

Think about billionaires for a moment. Nobody needs a billion dollars. The very idea is ridiculous. Set aside the fact that there are millions of people in need; to be a billionaire is to be sitting on more money than you and your family could possibly hope to spend across all your lifetimes. It’s pitiful. There is no logical reason for people to live like this. We should help them. We should tax them. 

To be clear, wealth is not exclusively a threat to billionaires. The Bible’s warnings against riches apply to more than just the uber-rich. As Phil Christman writes in Why Christians Should Be Leftists: 

Jesus also, of course, tells us not to lay up for ourselves treasures upon earth. So much for the accumulation of capital. And, even though I would love to lean on the distinction between capital (possessions that we use mainly to generate profit, and thus to hoard power over others) and just regular stuff … well, I suspect Jesus views my beloved record collection with a certain skepticism too. You can’t serve God and mammon, and at least some of the time, mammon comes in the form of a special Japanese red-vinyl reissue with bonus tracks.

So when we talk about the Bible’s warnings against wealth, many of us need to be aware that we’re talking about our own material state. That’s good to remember and, I think, a foundation of any healthy Christian perspective on politics. As author and pastor Malcolm Foley told Sojourners, “The very possession of excess shows you have failed to wisely distribute what the Lord has given to you. We don’t properly ‘earn’ anything. All these things are gifts from God. And [God] wants us to steward and distribute, not hoard for ourselves.

“That’s a different way of thinking about any of the resources that we have, but also one that deeply undercuts the assumptions of neoliberal capitalism,” he continued. 

This has profound implications for all of us, but it has very particular implications for the mega-wealthy: a class of people our society views as the ultimate success stories but Jesus seems to see as cautionary tales. Think of Mark 10:23, when Jesus declares to his disciples, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the Kingdom of God!” 

Sometimes, this is construed to be about the rich’s chances of entering a pain-free afterlife. That’s possible, but when Jesus talks about the Kingdom of God, he’s talking about the here and now: the glorious present that is possible when God’s people follow the counter-cultural call to love one another in grace and humility. 

Understood this way, Jesus’ warnings to the rich make a lot of sense. The Christian faith calls us to live in community, sharing our resources and wealth with one another. “Do not be proud,” Romans 12:16 tells us. “But be willing to associate with people of low position. Do not be conceited.” Do these strike you as easy commands for billionaires to follow? Or does it sound like trying to get through the eye of a needle? 

Indeed, Jesus seemed to see wealth as a spiritual corrosive, something toxic to the soul. “Watch out!” he tells his disciples in Luke 12:15. “Be on guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.” In fact, wealth is one of the chief villains in the parable of the seed sown among the thorns: The seed falling among the thorns refers to someone who hears the word, but the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke the word, making it unfruitful” (Matthew 13:22).

Viewed this way, wealth is not something to be sought or hoarded but shared freely. As José Humphreys III writes, this allows us to start thinking of money “as a gift in God’s economy of generosity rather than a commodity that leads to inequity, anxiety, grasping, and greed.” And if anyone is unlucky enough to fall into billions of dollars, it is a kindness to part them from it so that they can be brought into community. And since I cannot in good conscience recommend any of us go full Robin Hood and rob billionaires, taxing them seems like an effective way to deliver this kindness. 

So this is why I maintain that while taxing billionaires might do some limited good for us non-billionaires, it would do very tangible good for billionaires themselves. A billion dollars in the bank account is the spiritual equivalent of radioactive waste in your refrigerator. It is unloving of us to leave them to it, not when we could drag them from the fumes. Taxing billionaires would be a widening of the eye of the needle, a flattening of the obstacles between them and the reign of God. It’s the loving thing to do.

A billion dollars in the bank account is the spiritual equivalent of radioactive waste in your refrigerator.