Is Billionaire Guilt A New Trend?

The Article: Billionaire Guilt — Is It A Trend? by Rick Ungar in Forbes.

The Text: Billionaires willing to support policies that come at their own financial expense is nothing particularly new. People like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates have long displayed a willingness to support policies that inur to the benefit of all Americans even when it might cost them a few bucks.

However, there is a new entry to the ranks of billionaires willing to speak the truth to the one-percenters at considerable expense of his own, sizable bank account—and he is someone who has been not only influenced the wealthy for many years but has also been responsible for making them a boatload of money.

More remarkably, he may be the first of his kind willing to admit that his good fortune has come at great cost to the American worker.

Bill Gross is the massively successful founder, managing director and co-CIO of PIMCO, the mega-bond fund that oversees nearly two trillion dollars worth of securities.

While Gross, a Republican, has amassed an estimated personal fortune of $2.2 billion and holds the number 252 spot on the 2013 Forbes 400 list, he appears to have reached the point in his life and career where he is capable of acknowledging that his good fortune has come at the expense of America’s working class—and he is now prepared to publicly say so.

Writing in his recent “Investment Outlook” for his PIMCO publication, Gross notes—

“Having benefited enormously via the leveraging of capital since the beginning of my career and having shared a decreasing percentage of my income thanks to Presidents Reagan and Bush 43 via lower government taxes, I now find my intellectual leanings shifting to the plight of labor. I often tell my wife Sue it’s probably a Kennedy-esque type of phenomenon. Having gotten rich at the expense of labor, the guilt sets in and I begin to feel sorry for the less well-off, writing very public Investment Outlooks that “dis” the success that provided me the soapbox in the first place.” (emphasis added)

Now that’s not something you hear from billionaires every day.

Gross continues—

“Still, I would ask the Scrooge McDucks of the world who so vehemently criticize what they consider to be counterproductive, even crippling taxation of the wealthy in the midst of historically high corporate profits and personal income, to consider this: Instead of approaching the tax reform argument from the standpoint of what an enormous percentage of the overall income taxes the top 1% pay, consider how much of the national income you’ve been privileged to make. In the United States, the share of total pre-tax income accruing to the top 1% has more than doubled from 10% in the 1970s to 20% today. Admit that you, and I and others in the magnificent “1%” grew up in a gilded age of credit, where those who borrowed money or charged fees on expanding financial assets had a much better chance of making it to the big tent than those who used their hands for a living.”

While I highly recommend that you read Mr. Gross’s entire piece, there is one more section I feel compelled to highlight as he addresses his fellow ‘one percenters’—

“But (mostly you guys) acknowledge your good fortune at having been born in the ‘40s, ‘50s or ‘60s, entering the male-dominated workforce 25 years later, and having had the privilege of riding a credit wave and a credit boom for the past three decades. You did not, as President Obama averred, “build that,” you did not create that wave. You rode it. And now it’s time to kick out and share some of your good fortune by paying higher taxes or reforming them to favor economic growth and labor, as opposed to corporate profits and individual gazillions.”

While Mr. Gross’ acknowledgement that America has become a nation that works quite nicely for the wealthy as middle class workers are increasingly left behind, is there any chance his fellow “one-percenters” will be willing to take a step back and acknowledge what Gross has had the courage and self-awareness to acknowledge?

The future of the American economy could very much depend upon the answer to that question. As Gross states in summation of his remarkable piece:

“And back to my original point. Developed economies work best when inequality of incomes are at a minimum. Right now, the U.S. ranks 16th on a Gini coefficient for developed countries, barely ahead of Spain and Greece. By reducing the 20% of national income that “golden scrooges” now earn, by implementing more equitable tax reform that equalizes capital gains, carried interest and nominal income tax rates, we might move up the list to challenge more productive economies such as Germany and Canada.”

“Our problems are significant, Mr. President, and “Obamacare” and the signing up for it is far down the list of what we need to correct in order to move in the direction of “old normal” growth rates. Surely a few astute observers in Congress know that as well. Until we can more equitably balance “Scrooge McDuck” tax rates to rebalance wealth and “GINI coefficients,” while at the same time focusing on investment in the real as opposed to the financial economy, then the prospects for markets – whatever the asset class – are anything but “golden.”

This is not a conservative vs. liberal issue.

This is a matter of understanding that the severe income inequality that we are experiencing in this country is the direct result of our losing sight of the fact that there is a big difference between free market capitalism and outright greed, yet greed has increasingly become the definition for modern day American capitalism. What Mr. Gross—a true master of capitalism—is telling us is that, sooner rather than later, the failure to distinguish between the two will destroy what is left of our economy.

I don’t begrudge anyone their good fortune. Most of those whom I know who have accomplished great wealth in their life have worked hard for it and I congratulate their success.

But let’s hope that Mr. Gross’s remarkable manifesto will be heeded by other ‘one percenters’ and that they too will reach that moment in their personal histories where they can understand that their good fortune has come at a great price— not only to millions of Americans who also work hard but cannot earn a livable wage but to the economy as a whole. If these great success stories can help repair some of that damage in the way Bill Gross has highlighted, nearly everyone can, in the final analysis, be a winner within the context of their own lives.