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Robert Reich served as labor secretary in the Clinton administration, where he was named by Time Magazine as one of the 10 most effective cabinet secretaries of the 20th century. He’s a Rhodes scholar, a best-selling author, a documentarian and a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley.
What he’s not, apparently, is a fan of billionaires clinging to their riches.
That jab at Amazon AMZN, -0.48% billionaire and world’s richest man Jeff Bezos went viral this week, picking up 126,000 likes in just a couple days. It also blew up on Reddit, where Reich was mostly applauded for his take on the wealth tax.
There were some exceptions, however.
“How about this: Jeff Bezos should fire everyone and replace them with machines. The unemployed can then look for other employers, start a business venture of their own or eat dirt,” Prethor wrote. “It’s easy to be an entitled asshole, it’s not so easy to create a multibillion-dollar company. Or even a small company.”
On Twitter TWTR, -0.94% , the responses were often more like this:
Elizabeth Warren, in a effort that Reich is clearly in support of, has been floating a plan to tax billionaires 6 cents on every dollar of net worth above $1 billion to fund her health-care overhaul.
“If Medicare for All can be financed without any new taxes on the middle class, and instead by asking giant corporations, the wealthy, and the well-connected to pay their fair share, that’s exactly what we should do,” she said.
Meanwhile, as Warren continues to climb the polls and the divide between the rich and poor keeps widening, there’s a bull market in billionaire bashing.
In a piece written for The Outline, Tom Whyman captures some of the resentment. “Every billionaire is thus more than a simple failure of policy,” he wrote. “Every billionaire is evidence of a basic glitch in the fabric of the moral universe.”
