Also, a lot of wealthy people are increasingly of the mind that the rewards that they’ve gotten are disproportionate with the time and work put in. These windfalls feel like they’re much more indicative of a winner-take-all kind of economy than they were 20 or 30 years ago. There are concerns about automation and how that’s going to change work. Then there’s just the very practical concern that, given that consumer spending is the biggest driver of economic growth in the United States and that median household incomes haven’t meaningfully budged in 40 years, the market highs right now might just be sugar highs.
I wish it were also the clear moral case. This is the thing that frustrates me—the idea that poverty is always going to exist. I wish that it were more people saying, “No. Actually, we can eradicate poverty.” That’s not to say that everybody is going to be a billionaire tomorrow. But we can ensure that no American lives in poverty. What we’re lacking is the political will. But I hope that that sentiment grows.
To pay for a guaranteed cash income of $500 for workers earning less than $50,000 a year, you propose a 50 percent tax rate on income and capital gains for Americans earning more than $250,000. That might be a barrier to wealthy people taking this seriously, because the resources will have to come from them.
There are many ways to pay for a guaranteed income. However, I do think that the resources can and should come from the people who most benefited from the structure of the economy. We had tax rates at 50 percent for several decades after [World War II]. In the same period, we had record economic growth and broad-based prosperity. I’m not making the case, in the book and in general, that we just need higher taxes. It matters what our tax dollars are going to. Cash is just the simplest and most efficient thing to eradicate poverty and stabilize the middle class.
People are craving big ideas that push the boundaries of what’s possible. When you talk about the skills gap and jobs of the future, the classic Democratic response is jobs training. Jobs training has a pretty checkered past. There are some programs that have worked. There are many that haven’t.
People are quite perceptive that those kinds of ideas are more band-aids than true responses to the underlying dynamics of the economy. Those are not going to fundamentally change the rules of the road.
A crass question: Are you a billionaire now?
No, I diversified out of Facebook somewhat quickly after the [initial public offering] lock-up in 2012-2013. Sometimes people ask me for financial advice. Somebody asked me a couple weeks ago what’s the one piece of advice you’d give an entrepreneur starting a company. I was, like, “You should ask an entrepreneur.”
You mentioned in the book that you made a tax error before the IPO.
I didn’t have tax advisers. I had no idea. It was not a tax-optimized thing to do. I paid ordinary income [tax] on all of my Facebook gains.
Listen, I have more money than I could have ever dreamed and feel very fortunate. But both my husband and I feel that we’re stewards of it. We’ve made a commitment to give away the money over the course of our lifetimes. For us, it feels like money that we want to use to make an impact. It doesn’t totally feel like our own.
So you’re still really not focused on the investing side of things? No. We focus on giving it away. I’m not a professional investor. We have an investment management team that does it on our behalf.
Talking about the New Republic, you wrote that your “blind ambition” was “so irrationally bold, that any cool-headed outsider could have seen how the story would end.” Is it hard to get that cool-headed perspective when you are the richest person in the room?
If you’re the boss or you’re the [chief executive officer] or you’re the wealthiest person, you can and should think about the things that are going unsaid. In the New Republic case, it’s a little different. Plenty of people told me my expectations were too big. And I learned that there wasn’t a rabbit to be pulled out of the hat. The biggest long-term learning for me was that we didn’t need to go so bold, to shoot for the fences. The institution would have been better served with a more modest investment.