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Mercedes Schneider: Big Money Buys Key Elections in Louisiana

By dianeravitch
November 27, 2019 //
1

If anyone doubts that big money is buying our democracy, read Mercedes Schneider’s post about the recent election in Louisiana.

Anyone who doubts that ueber-wealthy ed reformers are purchasing elections in other states need only consider this November 10, 2019, campaign finance reportfor the Louisiana Federation for Children (LFC) Action Fund PAC. Even so, as one quickly realizes when following ed reform money, the connections readily become numerous and complicated.

Let’s see how concise I can keep this this post centered on a single, LFC campaign finance report.

LFC is a state-level tentacle of the American Federation for Children (AFC), the school choice vehicle formerly chaired by US ed sec, Betsy DeVos. Louisiana gubernatorial challenger, Eddie Rispone is the former LFC chair. and also the former treasurer of the LFC Action Fund PAC.

According to LFC Action Fund PAC’s November 10, 2019, filing, three out-of-state donors (two individuals and one PAC), donated a combined $825K in October 2019. The same three donated a combined $2.6M in 2019 alone. They are Arkansas billonaire and Walmart heir, Jim Walton; California billionaire William Oberndorf, who succeeded DeVos as AFC chair, and a school choice PAC, Public School Allies:

  • William Oberndorf (CA): $275K in 10/19; $550K YTD (year to date).
  • Jim Walton (AR): $350K in 10/19; $912K YTD.
  • Public School Allies (VA): $200K in 10/19; $1.2M YTD.

Public School Allies lists as its address “6312 Seven Corners Center #354
Falls Church, VA 22044,” which is a UPS drop box. However, the October 24, 2019, Chlakbeat reports that Public School, Allies is the “political arm” of the City Fund, created in 2018 to spread school choice by three individuals, including former New Schools for New Orleans (NSNO) CEO, Neerav Kingsland. From Chalkbeat:

The political arm of The City Fund, the organization with ambitions to spread charter schools and the “portfolio model” of school reform across the country, plans to spend $15 million to influence state and local elections over the next three years.

That political group, known as Public School Allies, has already directed money toward to school board races in Atlanta, Camden, Newark, and St. Louis, and state elections in Louisiana, Georgia, and New Jersey. Donations have ranged from $1 million to as little as $1,500.

The information was shared by Public School Allies and, in a number of cases, confirmed by campaign finance records. The $15 million comes from Netflix founder Reed Hastings and former hedge-fund manager John Arnold, the organization said.

According to his Linkedin bio, Kingsland worked for both Hastings and Arnold “leading education giving” immediately prior to establishing the City Fund.

Sure makes it read like the City Fund “belongs” to billionaires Hastings and Arnold.

But they are not alone. In 2018, billionaire Bill Gates gave the City Fund $10M “to increase the number of high-quality public schools in Oakland.” Of course, to the City Fund, a “public school” is a charter school.

Those complex ed-reform funding paths always seem to end with a few millionaires and billionaires, tossing their cash and puppeting the strings of American K12 education.

Open the link to read the list of officials who were elected by out-of-state billionaires.

Here is the thing: They can buy the seats, but once they have bought them, they have no plans that will actually improve anything. They love power. They buy elections.

Big money is a malignant force in our democracy.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Democracy, Louisiana

New Orleans: Nearly Half of the District’s Charter Schools Receive a D or F from State

By dianeravitch
November 24, 2019 //
17

Ouch!

New Orleans is the nation’s first all-charter district.

New Orleans is supposed to be the shining star of the charter movement, proving the value of school choice and market-based reforms, closing schools and replacing them with new schools, then closing failing schools, ad infinitum.

But newly released state grades reveal that nearly half of the district’s charter schools (49%) received a grade of D or F, meaning failing or near failing.

Della Hasselle writes in the New Orleans Advocate:

The release of the state’s closely watched school performance scores earlier this month offered an overall update on New Orleans schools that seemed benign enough: A slight increase in overall student performance meant another C grade for the district.

But a closer look reveals a startling fact. A whopping 35 of the 72 schools in the all-charter district scored a D or F, meaning nearly half of local public schools were considered failing, or close to it, in the school year ending in 2019. Since then, six of the 35 have closed.

While New Orleans has long been home to struggling schools, the data released this month are concerning. There was an increase of nearly 11% percentage points in the number of schools that received the state’s lowest grades from the 2017-18 school year to 2018-19.

Someone, please let Betsy DeVos know.

Let Cory Booker and Democrats for Education Reform know.

Let Michael Bloomberg, Reed Hastings, Bill Gates, and Eli Broad know.

Let the Mind Trust and City Fund know.

Tell the Walton Foundation, which has poured over $1 billion into charter school proliferation.

Wow. Some model for the nation to follow!

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Bloomberg, Michael, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Failure, Privatization, Walton Foundation

Will Bunch: Why Bloomberg Cannot Win

By dianeravitch
November 22, 2019 //
7

 

Former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg has officially entered the Democratic primaries. He will skip the first four primaries and join the race on Super Tuesday, focusing on the states holding their primaries then.

One of the world’s richest men, with a net worth estimated by Forbes to be $53 billion, Bloomberg is positioned to be a force to counter the candidates who emerge from the first four nominating contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina. In defiance of the traditional nominating calendar, Bloomberg has planned to skip those contests to spend heavily in states that will vote in March, including the 14 states including California and Texas that will award delegates on Super Tuesday.

Will Bunch is a regular opinion writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He earlier wrote a scathing critique of Mike Bloomberg’s decision to enter the Democratic primary race. 

Bloomberg enjoyed an adoring press in New York City. Things have changed now that he is going national.

Bunch opens by describing a posh black-tie dinner in D.C. where Bloomberg boasted of his success as mayor in restoring a vibrant polity in New York City.

As those exact words were leaving the mouth of the tuxedoed mayor, a couple hundred of “the people” whose freedom of political expression Bloomberg had just hailed were wet and shivering on the main roadway of the Brooklyn Bridge, tied up in plastic handcuffs that cut into their wrists as they awaited a bus and a trip to a dank city jail cell. New York’s police force — heavily militarized under Bloomberg, now able to shoot a plane from the sky — had just arrested 768 Occupy Wall Street marchers, allowing them onto the iconic bridge but then surrounding them in a kettle tactic. The Occupy protesters were speaking out against the kind of inequality that Bloomberg and his mid-sized cop army had vowed to protect and serve: economic inequality.

Bloomberg, he writes, is the candidate of the “black tie oligarchy.”

Bunch adds:

Was Team Bloomberg really paying close attention to Tuesday’s off-year election results? If so, did they not notice that the ousting of a Republican governor in red Kentucky was largely the work of public school teachers, the kind of voter who recoils at Bloomberg spending a chunk of his vast wealth to support charter schools that are wrecking public education? Or did they take heed of the election of radical reformer Chesa Boudin as San Francisco’s new district attorney, the latest sign that voters in Democratic strongholds have had it with the mass incarceration regime that Bloomberg long championed? Oh, and did they think Democrats here in Pennsylvania — a key battleground state — will forget the cool $1 million that Bloomberg dropped to foist Trump-supporting Sen. Pat Toomey on the state for six more years?

It’s utter cluelessness, but we’re seeing this more and more from the kleptocrats of America’s top 1 Percent. Since Ronald Reagan’s ascendancy in 1980, these men of vast wealth have created an entire culture around a myth, that their billion-dollar paychecks were a tribute to the sheer genius of an indispensable man, the modern CEO, and not the result of a game that was rigged by political corruption to tilt the playing field of postmodern capitalism their way, at an angle that would daunt climbers of Mount Everest…

Their long con is finally getting exposed, and that in turn is exposing their moral emptiness. Consider Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who launched a tech monopoly with the same ruthless ambition that John D. Rockefeller showed in creating a 19th century oil empire. But now Gates wants people to love him for giving some of that wealth away for causes that range from the admirable (global health) to the misguided (charter schools) in the hope that targeted, billionaires-know-best philanthropy will divert the masses’ rage away from structural inequality. That so many voters now support presidential candidates who would tax just a sliver of Gates’ unfathomable wealth for the common good has revealed him as a sputtering liar.

Gates recently insisted that he’s willing to pay some higher taxes “[b]ut, you know, when you say I should pay $100 billion, O.K., then I’m starting to do a little math about what I have left over.” Except Elizabeth Warren’s tax proposals would only cost Bill Gates an estimated $6 billion, which would leave him with $100 billion to play around with. Gates is just the latest of a half-dozen or so billionaires to go public with their panicked predictions that the left-wing populism of a Warren or a Sanders will destroy America as we know it. But only other billionaires and their paid consultants seem to believe them. They can’t accept the fact that — to borrow the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez line that became the title of Ryan Grim’s recent, excellent book — they’ve got money but we’ve got people…

Mike Bloomberg didn’t have to enter the 2020 race to see how all of this is going to play out between now and next summer’s Democratic convention in Milwaukee. He could have watched last week’s results from Seattle, where Amazon — run by Gates’ billionaire soul mate Jeff Bezos — spent a whopping $1.5 million to promote City Council candidates who would quell all the crazy talk about affordable housing and sheltering the homeless, funded by taxes on tech giants. Almost all of the anti-Amazon candidates won, including the movement’s leader, socialist Kshama Sawant. Ditto in Philadelphia, where the Working Families Party’s Kendra Brooks — opposed by chamber of commerce types, endorsed by Warren — won a historic City Council seat.

These voters are the ones who will decide 2020′s Democratic primaries — along with those school teachers in Kentucky and West Virginia, the women of the #MeToo movement, and African Americans tired of cops acting like an occupying army. And yet these are the same citizens that a graying misogynist media mogul who once created an army to preserve the unequal social order in New York is certain he can now seduce with a fistful of dollars?

Hmm. One of the slogans of the Network for Public Education is that “We are many. They are few.”

That is important to remember at election time.

Each person has one vote. No matter how rich you are, you personally own only one vote.

Even when politicians flood the political arena with money, we each have one vote.

Together we can reclaim our democracy.

 

 

Categories Billionaires, Bloomberg, Michael

ProPublica: How a Tax Break Meant to Help the Poor Benefited a Billionaire Trump Donor

By dianeravitch
November 20, 2019 //
2

ProPublica, the invaluable investigative journalism website, tells a sorry story about how a billionaire developer who donated large sums to the Trump campaign and won a hugely profitable tax break for his properties in downtown Detroit.

Billionaire Dan Gilbert has spent the last decade buying up buildings in downtown Detroit, amassing nearly 100 properties and so completely dominating the area, it’s known as Gilbertville. In the last few years, Gilbert, the 57-year-old founder of Quicken Loans and owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, has also grown close to the Trump family.

Quicken gave $750,000 to Trump’s inaugural fund. Gilbert has built a relationship with Ivanka Trump, who appeared at one of his Detroit buildings in 2017 for a panel discussion with him. And, last year, he watched the midterm election returns at the White House with President Donald Trump himself, who has called Gilbert “a great friend.”

Gilbert’s cultivation of the Trump family appears to have paid off: Three swaths of downtown Detroit were selected as opportunity zones under the Trump tax law, extending a valuable tax break to Gilbert’s real estate empire.

Does this qualify as “draining the swamp?”

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Detroit

Nancy Bailey: A Summit of Education Vandals

By dianeravitch
November 20, 2019 //
31

In her latest post, Nancy Bailey draws a contrast between a summit of fake education leaders and the summit that actual teachers reach when they teach their students and fight for their students and their schools.

Bailey describes the pseudo summit taking place in San Diego, where people who have never taught discuss how to reinvent education for fun and profit.

Read her list at the end of her post. It is a who’s who of the Disruption Industry, assembled in one place to celebrate themselves and the damage they have done to schools, students, and teachers across the nation.

 

Bailey writes:

Today’s National Summit On Education Reform meeting is a nightmare for teachers and parents. It involves those who want to replace democratic public schools with technology, ending schools and teaching as we know it. They will have children sitting in front of screens for instruction in warehouse charters, or at home all day.

Most of these self-acclaimed experts have not struggled to teach in gritty, overcrowded classes. They have not wiped runny noses or dealt with the trauma that some children bring to school. They never had to work towards unproven curriculum standards through Common Core. Nor have they had to face the reforms that, ironically, they and their ilk created.

They blame teachers for what goes wrong in schools due to their own back ass policies, but they’ll step up and take credit for anything that goes right!

You won’t find them on the streets of their cities fighting for the needs of children and a profession that nurtures those children. These individuals are above all that.

Florida Governor Jeb Bush leads the summit. As an American citizen Bush has every right to speak out about schools, but he doesn’t have the right to own them. Bush, whose educational background is in real estate and Latin studies, has leveled accusations against schools without doing due diligence to help students. His 3rd grade retention plan is a failed idea, but no one seems to have the power to end it, so children still are hurt by it.

Bush has been against schools and teachers every step of the way. When he had the chance to improve class sizes in the 90s, he hated the idea so much he was caught saying he had a “devious plan to end it.” Think what it would have meant if he’d studied the issue and been supportive of teachers, even negotiated.

What if he’d said, we can’t afford to lower all classes, so let’s lower class size in K-3rd grade when children are learning to read. But Bush didn’t want that. Look at life in Florida and the country now, a mix of underfunded public schools and unproven charters, and vouchers to questionable schools.

Please open the link and read it to the end.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Koch Brothers, Privatization, Vouchers

MIchael Tomasky: Why Billionaires Are Bad for Democracy

By dianeravitch
November 19, 2019 //
34

Let me explain why I post articles critical of billionaires on a blog about (mostly) education. Our nation, our states are underinvesting in education. Our teachers are underpaid. Class sizes, especially in urban districts, are too large. Too many teachers pay for supplies themselves. The rate of child poverty, which is correlated with low test scores, is very high (about 20%) compared to other developed nations. We can’t pay for education while lowering taxes and reducing revenues.

Michael Tomaskey makes the case in this important article that the concentration of wealth in a few hands is dangerous to democracy. The middle class is losing ground while money flows to the top. That’s wrong.

In addition, though he doesn’t mention it, some billionaires—the Waltons, for example, the DeVos family, Charles Koch—spend millions every year to eviscerate and privatize important civic institutions like public schools that belong to all of us.

Tomaskey writes:

This column is not a brief for Ms. Warren’s wealth tax or for her candidacy — I don’t have a preferred candidate. Instead, I want to make a simple plea to the country’s billionaires: Multibillion-dollar fortunes are often called excessive and decadent. But here’s something they’re rarely called but ought to be: anti-democratic. These fortunes will destroy our democracy.

Why “anti-democratic”? Why would it matter to our democracy whether Jeff Bezos is worth $113 billion (his current figure) or $13 billion?

Because any democracy needs a robust and thriving middle class, and we have spent the last 30 or so years transferring trillions of dollars from the middle class to the people at the very top. Just one set of numbers, from the University of California, Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman: The 400 richest Americans — the top .00025 percent of the population — now own more of the country’s riches than the 150 million adults in the bottom 60 percent of wealth distribution. The 400’s share has tripled since the 1980s.

This is carnage, plain and simple. No democratic society can let that keep happening and expect to stay a democracy. It will produce a middle and working classes with no sense of security, and when people have no sense that the system is providing them with basic security, they’ll make some odd and desperate choices.

This is obviously not hypothetical. It’s happening. It’s what gave us Mr. Trump (well, that plus the campaign lies). It’s what made Britons vote Leave (well, that plus the campaign lies). It’s what has sparked protests from France to Chile to Lebanon, and it’s what is making the Chinese model — no democracy, but plenty of security — more attractive to a number of developing countries around the world than the American model. Our billionaires ought to ponder this.

I imagine that Mr. Gates is repulsed by Mr. Trump on some level, and at the end of the day probably couldn’t vote for him. But if I could meet Mr. Gates, I’d ask him: Sir, do you not see the link between your vast fortune and the ascendance of Donald Trump? If not, I implore you to connect some dots. Wealth has shifted to the top. It has been taken away from the middle class. That makes people anxious. Anxiety opens the door to demagogues. It’s not complicated.

We need changes in our laws and institutional structures that will alter what economists call pretax distribution. This is a point made by the economist Dean Baker — that income inequality is less a result of tax policy than laws and regulations that have made the rich richer before taxes are even imposed. These changes have to do with monopolies, patents, executive pay and other matters.

And yes, we do need to tax rich people more. In my lifetime, the top marginal tax rate has gone (roughly speaking) from 91 percent to 77 percent to 50 percent to 35 percent to today’s 37 percent. That’s too low. I’m not with Bernie Sanders, who says there should be no billionaires. That’s too punitive. But I do think Mr. Bezos could get by on $15 billion or so.

Billionaires will protest that they’d rather give it away than trust the government with it. I applaud their generosity. But even someone as rich as Michael Dell, who went on a rather infamous riff along these lines at Davos, could not build a nationwide high-speed rail system, clean the country’s air and water (and keep them clean), create a network of free opioid clinics across the country or give towns that have been hollowed out by the global economy a second chance. Only government can do those things.

Somebody has to pay more if government is to function and to pay for education, Social Security, healthcare, defense, and infrastructure. Why not those who have the most money?

Categories Billionaires, Democracy, Funding

“LilSis” Maps the Walton Billionaires Who Are Crushing the Teachers, Parents, and Public Schools of Little Rock

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2019 //
10

LilSis (also known as the Public Accountability Project) pays careful attention to the networks and money behind nefarious efforts to destroy the public sector.

In this report, LilSis describes the corporate backers of school privatization against whom Little Rock teachers went on strike. The money behind this network of interlinking organizations and individuals is the Walton family, whose wealth clocked in at $163 Billion (that’s Billion with a B) in 2018.

LilSis writes:

A major backer of the anti-union, pro-charter agenda in Arkansas is the Walton family, whose foundation is a huge funder of the school privatization infrastructure that exists across the state. In addition to the Waltons, corporate elites from Murphy Oil, the Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce, the Arkansas Democrat Gazetteand others are backers of the school privatization efforts. These corporate interests are close to Governor Hutchinson, who supports their agenda, and they have close ties to the state Board of Education. In addition, they are also interlocked with a host of lobbyists and academics that push their agenda…

The Waltons are major advocate of charter schools nationally, and they carry out their school privatization agenda through their Walton Family Foundation, which showers hundreds of millions on pro-charter groups and schools. The foundation claims it has invested a whopping $407 million into pushing charter schools since 1997.According to a recent report put out by the Arkansas Education Association, the Waltons pump millions into propping up the state’s school privatization infrastructure – or what the report calls the “Arkansas’s School Privatization Empire.” 

It’s not just that the Waltons give big money to a few groups – it’s also that these groups then distribute that money to other organizations, lobbyists, consultants, and academics, creating a vast network of billionaire-funded activity to attack unionized teachers and push charter schools. 

For example, the Walton family Foundation gave $350,000 to the Arkansans for Education Reform Foundation (AERF) in 2017 – around 80% of all the contributions the organization took in that year. 

The AERF board includes other powerful funders and advocates of school privatization in the state, such as Claiborne Deming, the former CEO of Murphy Oil, a big backer of charter schools in Arkansas; William Dillard III, part of the Dilliard family that owns the Dilliard’s department stores; and Walter Hussman, publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the state’s flagship newspaper. Jim Walton is also on the board.

In addition to the $350,000 that the Walton donated to the AERF in 2017, Deming gave $60,000 and Dilliard III gave $10,000, while the National Christian Foundation gave $15,000, according the the group’s 2017 990 form.

AERF has in turn used the money it receives from the Walton billionaire fortune and other Arkansas elites to fund other school privatization efforts. For example, it gave $115,000 to Arkansas Learns, which describesitself as “the Voice of Business for excellent education options – including industry-relevant career pathways…” The CEO of Arkansas Learns, Gary Newton, is also the Executive Director of the AERF (for which he earned $189,639 in compensation in 2017). 

In turn, Arkansas Learns has the same board members as AERF, and Randy Zook, the CEO of the Arkansas Chamber of Commerce, whose wife Dianne Zook is on the state Board of Education that decided to end recognition of the Little Rock teachers’ union, is also a board member. Dianne Zook is also the aunt of Gary Newton.

What a cozy and mutually beneficial arrangement: The Waltons have a lot of money to hand out to achieve their goal of privatizing public schools and breaking unions, and the recipients take the money and carry out the Waltons’ wishes.

Any time you see a group called “XXXXXXX for Education Reform,” you can be sure it is committed to charter schools, union-busting, and privatization, and the odds are high that there is Walton money behind it.

The Waltons have claimed credit for subsidizing one of every four charter schools in the nation.

LilSis creates wonderful graphical depictions of networks.

Here is the LilSis graphic of the Little Rock school privatization network. 

Categories Accountability, Arkansas, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Little Rock, Privatization, Teachers, Unions, Walton Foundation

Walton Foundation and UNCF Collaborate to Lure Young African Americans into Disruption Movement

By dianeravitch
November 14, 2019 //
17

A friend share this link about a program in which the United Negro College Fund is funded by the far-right Walton Family Foundation to give summer internships to young African Americans to work in organizations that undermine public education, unions, and the teaching profession. The purpose of the program is to build a “robust pipeline of African Americans engaged in education reform in America.”

All of the summer interns will serve with trusted arms of the ultra-conservative movement.

Summer Internship – One of the principal elements of the paid summer internship program that exposes fellows to professional careers at leading K-12 education organizations and schools focused on education reform. Specifically, fellows are deployed as interns to organizations and schools located in such cities as Boston, New York, Washington, DC, Atlanta, New Orleans, Chicago, Indianapolis, Memphis and Nashville. Examples of internship host organizations include Teach for America, New Schools Venture Fund, Paul Public Charter School, BUILD, Black Alliance for Educational Options, Thomas B. Fordham Research Institute and Stand for Children. During their internships, fellows apply what they have learned, acquire new skills, gain an understanding of the professional needs of education reform organizations and make meaningful contributions.

You can be certain that none of these bright young people will be assigned as interns at the NAACP, which called for a moratorium on charter schools in 2016.

Nor will any be detailed to work for Journey for Justice, a grassroots civil rights group that fights for democratically controlled community public schools.

Nor do I expect that any will have a chance to learn about the Walton assault on public education by spending a summer as an intern for the Network for Public Education.

They are not likely to have the chance to offer their services at any of the scores of local and state organizations that are fighting the power of billionaires like the Waltons and could really use their help.

Instead they will be trained up by the faithful servants of the privatizers and the oligarchy.

 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Race, Walton Foundation

Why Mike Klonsky Will Not Vote for Bloomberg

By dianeravitch
November 12, 2019 //
11

Mike Klonsky explains why he in not excited about the prospect of Michael Bloomberg’s candidacy for president. 

He writes:

Why is this billionaire Republicrat media tycoon and former New York mayor even considering jumping into a crowded Democratic primary as a 14-to-1 longshot? He knows the odds as well as anyone. One, because he can afford to, and two, he wants to be a hedge against the progressive insurgents like Warren and Sanders.

If either of them won the primary, I could even imagine Bloomberg running as an independent or third-party candidate in key battleground or swing states to draw away votes. Bloomberg is worried much more about the progressive ascendency than about his off-and-on frenemy Trump (who calls Bloomberg “Little Michael”).

Known as the stop-and-frisk mayor in New York, Bloomberg once claimed that the biggest problem was his cops “over-stopping whites”, and that he was just evening the score.

During his time in office, Bloomberg wielded his personal power against New York’s communities of color and their public schools. He imposed a tidal wave of privatization on the city, including a big swing towards privately-run charter schools. What pissed me off most was how he used our “small schools” rhetoric to promote charters.

He was an advocate of using standardized testing results as the main vehicle for evaluating school and teacher performance.

If you open the link, you will see a photo of Mike and Eva Moskowitz. He gave her whatever she wanted for her “no excuses” empire.

Bloomberg as mayor was an avid proponent of the main tenets of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law: high-stakes testing; closing schools with low scores; opening charter schools; opening scores of small schools and allowing them a “grace period” during which they were not required to admit students with disabilities or English learners. Bloomberg’s Leadership Academy (now closed) tried to lure non-educators into the role of principal and accelerated the careers of teachers into the principalship without the necessity of spending time as an assistant principal.

Categories Billionaires, Bloomberg, Michael, Education Reform

New York Times: How Warren Plan Would Reduce Billionaires’ Fortunes

By dianeravitch
November 12, 2019 //
29

The New York Times published an analysis of how Elizabeth Warren’s tax plan would affect the giant fortunes of the nation’s billionaires. 

If you subscribe to the Times, you can see how each of the biggest billionaires is affected.

Although they would pay big taxes, they would still be billionaires. Bill Gates denounced Warren’s plan at a Times-sponsored event, claiming that Warren would tax away $100 billion from him, leaving him a virtual pauper. Not so.

“Yes, billionaires will have to pay a little more,” Senator Elizabeth Warren said of the revised tax package she introduced recently, “six cents on each dollar.”

This modest-sounding proposal, though, would have a far-reaching impact on the wealthiest Americans when combined with her other tax plans — shrinking colossal fortunes over time and making it much more difficult to hand down multibillion-dollar legacies.

The tax bite for any individual would not equal the $100 billion that Bill Gates jokingly cited, but over time it would still sting, according to estimates by two economists who advised Ms. Warren. If her wealth tax had been in effect since 1982, for example, Mr. Gates, who had made his first billion dollars by 1987, would have had $13.9 billion in 2018 instead of $97 billion.

Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person, would have had $48.8 billion last year instead of $160 billion. And Michael Bloomberg, who is considering running for president himself, would have had $12.3 billion instead of $51.8 billion….

 

 

Categories Billionaires, Education Reform
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