“And it’s paid for by you. No billionaires will fund work like this because there’s no money in it. This is government-funded research to determine how the universe was created and whether we are alone in it. If NASA and JPL were not doing it, it would not be done.” As readers can likely imagine, those are the words of author Dave Eggers. They won’t age well, nor do they make sense now.
Eggers wrote them in the Washington Post in a wildly interesting piece extolling the virtues of Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and NASA more broadly. That both do remarkable things is undeniable.
At the same time, Eggers’s opinion piece speaks to the value of the Post fact-checking its contributors to the editorial page every bit as much as they do the politicians routinely featured in the newspaper’s pages. If so, Post-fact checker Glenn Kessler would have called out Eggers’s assertion that “you” pay for JPL, as opposed to billionaires who allegedly only do things that have “money in it.” About the latter, and given Kessler’s D.C. coordinates, he perhaps would have quickly suggested that Eggers Google “David Rubenstein” and “charitable giving.”
From there, Kessler would have referred Eggers to his response last year to one of President Biden’s empty laments about billionaires being undertaxed. Kessler reported that in fact, the 400 richest U.S. taxpayers are relieved of more federal taxes annually than the bottom 70 percent of U.S. taxpayers combined.
Applied to Eggers’s not-so-veiled swipe at the richest Americans (that they’re all multi-billionaires is a waste of words), Eggers was way off the mark as is frequently the case when pen is put to paper in order to vilify the rich. Massive government in Washington that grows and grows is decidedly not paid for by “you,” its costs are overwhelmingly shouldered by – yes – the billionaires. This includes JPL.
To which some of the more sanctimonious among us on the left and right will comment that “Tamny is way wrong, the billionaires aren’t paying for JPL and more. The grandchildren are. Hasn’t he seen how indebted the U.S. Treasury is?” The latter is a comment almost more separated from reality than Eggers’s is about who pays for JPL.
That is so because debt doesn’t just happen; rather it’s a market consequence of impressive “incomings” now (think tax revenue), and of much greater importance, a market expectation of much greater “incomings” (think tax revenue yet again) in the future. In other words, all the deficits and debt aren’t a function of billionaire (and soon enough, trillionaire) taxation that is too light now, and that will be too light in the future. Quite the opposite.
Missed by left, right, supply side, and surely Eggers too, is that the government that funds what Eggers loves (JPL), along with many things he doesn’t love (border security, for instance: see Eggers’s wonderful book about the genius of immigration, Her Right Foot) is able to do so precisely because billionaires are heavily overtaxed now, and they’ll similarly be heavily overtaxed in the future. Which is the problem, for you.
Indeed, one similarly guesses Eggers is unaware of the fact that the richest U.S. taxpayers similarly own the vast majority of public and private shares of companies. Which is no small thing. There are no companies and no jobs without investment first and the rich, by virtue of being rich, have the disposable income necessary to fund that which improves our lives, employs us, and yes, exists as the seed money for the ideas of tomorrow’s billionaires and trillionaires who will reach both plateaus via discoveries that will make the doings of JPL scientists and engineers appear pedestrian by comparison.
Notable about all this present and future wealth, and obviated by the $35 trillion in debt raised at the lowest rates of interest in the world, is the sad fact that a substantial portion of this wealth will be extracted by Congress to fund its own passions. Eggers will hopefully remember this truth the next time he walks JPL’s enormous campus in awe. If he’s being realistic, he’ll quietly thank “the billionaires.”
