Daily Debunk: Wheel of Billionaires
Vote Yes for Fair Tax launches website lampooning disinformation campaign funded by wealthy anti-taxers
Sam Zell, Kenneth Griffin, and Richard Uihlein are lampooned in a new website launched by Vote Yes For Fair Tax. (billionairesgainstfairtax.com)
By Ted Cox
If you can’t beat them with facts and common sense, clobber them with comedy.
That’s the approach taken by the Vote Yes for Fairness group backing a graduated income tax in Illinois in launching a new website called “Billionaires Against Fair Tax.” It lampoons the disinformation campaign intended to defeat the Fair Tax Amendment and the millionaires and billionaires funding it.
Pretending to be a website featuring the views of billionaires and millionaires like Kenneth Griffin, Sam Zell, and Richard Uihlein — all of whom have contributed to the Coalition to Stop the Proposed Tax Hike Amendment — it starts out with them saying, “The Fair Tax Amendment in Illinois will make us billionaires (and millionaires) pay a little bit more in state income taxes. We don’t like that. We prefer the old way of taxing income, where teachers, nurses, and grocery clerks pay the same rate that we billionaires do.”
It soon adds: “And sure, a Vote Yes for Fair Tax will cut taxes for the 97 percent of people who earn less than $250,000 a year. But who’s thinking about us, the top 3 percent wealthiest?”
“The Fair Tax Amendment is simple. It’s a tax cut for the 97 percent of Illinoisans who make less than $250,000 a year and an investment of more than $3 billion to strengthen Illinois’ schools, health care, infrastructure, and more,” said John Bouman, chairman of Vote Yes for Fair Tax, in a statement accompanying a press release announcing the new satirical website. “Instead of arguing the facts, billionaires and wealthy special interests have done whatever they can to mislead and confuse voters. ‘Billionaires Against Fair Tax’ exposes the ultra-wealthy funders of these attacks against Fair Tax reform, bringing light to the special interests who benefit from the broken status quo.”
Attacking TV ads that have spread disinformation, such as the amendment potentially leading to a tax on retirement income or hurting small businesses or causing “tax flight” — none of which is true — the website explains: “We’re putting millions into slick TV ads. The other side offers hope, we sell cynicism. They give you facts, we’ve got scare tactics. Hey, it’s what we do.”
It also has an interactive “Wheel of Billionaires,” which spins until it settles on someone who’s contributed mightily to defeat an Illinois graduated income tax. When it comes up on Griffin it reads: “This hedge-fund honcho owns $1 billion of ‘ultra-luxury’ real estate — that’s right, a billion! Yet when it comes to paying his fair share, he’d rather bankroll misleading advertisements against it than support Illinois schools and health care.”
Last weekend, Griffin, founder of Chicago-based Citadel Investments, contributed another $7 million to the anti-tax coalition, bringing his total to almost $54 million. Former state Sen. Daniel Biss has estimated that Griffion would have owed another $26 million in state taxes in 2018 alone if the progressive income tax had been in effect.
Quentin Fulks, director of the allied Vote Yes for Fairness group backing a graduated income tax, told Chicago Tribune political reporter Rick Pearson that Griffin actually would have owed an extra $45 million if the tax had been in effect last year, adding, “It’s clear that Griffin and other wealthy Illinoisans are getting increasingly desperate that the days of paying the same tax rate as a nurse or a grocery-store clerk are numbered, but no amount of money can hide the fact that Griffin is spending millions to deny 97 percent of Illinoisans a tax cut.”