The Patriotic Millionaire is standing in his $2.5 million home, next to a granite-topped kitchen island big enough to pitch a tent on. Outside, the rain is pattering his pool and his fishpond.
He is worrying aloud about how he might lose it all.
Reality check: An interactive look at the question of who bears the tax burden.
“It is going to be really bad for rich people,” said Charlie Fink, 51, a former AOL executive, imagining an American financial collapse that could wipe out his wealth. “It’s going to be [bad] for everybody. But most people are living close to the bone anyway. So they have less to lose.”
In another part of Fairfax County, the man who teaches Fink to swing a golf club is not nearly as panicked. Tom Melideo’s country club is not hurting for members, and many of them have government contracting jobs that don’t seem likely to disappear soon.
“I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about” the future of the economy, said Melideo, 45, the club’s PGA head pro. “I’m too busy working.”
Last month, when President Obama called for increasing taxes on the rich, his Republican adversaries called it “class warfare” — an attempt to turn a recession-plagued middle class against the rich.
But, in the orbit of one Fairfax millionaire, the reality is different. The middle-class people Fink knows, the golf pro and the personal trainer, are fairly confident about their futures.
It’s the millionaire who’s worried. Fink has joined a group called Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength, arguing, Buffett-like, that the government should raise his taxes — because he’s scared of what will happen if it doesn’t.
“It’s maddening to just sit here in . . . Virginia and let the world unravel,” Fink said. “Which is a huge, huge threat to my personal wealth.”
At a town hall that Obama held in Mountain View, Calif., on Sept. 26, a member of the same millionaires’ group asked, “Would you please raise my taxes?” Doug Edwards, who got rich at Google, said that he worries for the future of federal student loans, infrastructure projects and job-training programs if the government does not obtain new revenue.
The millionaires’ group was founded last year, to press for the end of a George W. Bush-era tax cut for people making more than $1 million a year. Made up of both Democrats and Republicans, the group includes only about 200 millionaires, in a country where an estimated 3.1 million people have wealth greater than $1 million.
‘We’re doing okay’
Clearly, Fink may not represent the bulk of those 3.1 million: Billionaire New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (I), for instance, has criticized Obama’s proposal as “theatrics.” But in Fink’s small orbit, the guy with the most worries is the guy with the most — period.
“We’re doing okay, because we’re around the Beltway,” said Melideo, who gives Fink lessons at Fairfax’s International Country Club. Business at the golf shop dipped a bit when the recession began, but now it’s improving. The club attracted more than 40 new members recently.
Melideo, a slim, bald man with an easy manner, doesn’t agree that millionaires ought to be taxed more. He thinks the economy would benefit if the rich could keep that money and spend it. But he also doesn’t worry that a little extra tax on the wealthy would kneecap his business.
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