Patriotic Millionaires

The Patriotic Millionaires share a profound concern about the destabilizing level of economic and political inequality in America, the root cause of our current social unrest. We seek to reform our country’s political economy so that it naturally generates greater economic and political equality, the preconditions for a stable, prosperous nation. We center our work on three “First Principles”: Equal Political Representation, a Livable Minimum Wage and a Fair Tax system.

The group first came together in 2010 to demand an end to the Bush tax cuts for millionaires, instantly sparking the public’s attention. Overnight, the group became a media sensation, and we’ve built on that momentum ever since. Over the last decade, the group has generated hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of media attention, appearing on outlets from the New York Times to MSNBC to NPR; from the cover of the New Yorker to USA Today. The Patriotic Millionaires’ reach is so vast that our work has been featured in over 75 countries in the last year alone, in major outlets such as BBC, Deutsche Welle, and CBC. 

The group is chaired by Morris Pearl, a former BlackRock executive who retired after a long career on Wall Street to work with the Patriotic Millionaires full time. Patriotic Millionaires members include investors and business owners from across the country engaged in a wide array of industries. Our members include: filmmaker Abigail Disney; technologist Steve Silberstein; lawyer Roberta Kaplan; investor Lawrence Benenson of Benenson Capital Partners; textile entrepreneur Great Neck Richman; philanthropist Molly Munger; corrugated cardboard magnate Dennis Mehiel among many others.

In addition to driving the public narrative, the Patriotic Millionaires have met privately with hundreds of elected leaders from both parties. We have testified in front of lawmakers at the local, state, and federal levels on issues from minimum wage to campaign finance to tax policy. We had the honor of joining President Obama in the White House in 2012 for his Tax Day address and in 2014 for the signing of the Executive Order raising wages for federal contract employees.

The Patriotic Millionaires’ newest book Tax the Rich: How Lies, Loopholes, and Lobbyists Make the Rich Even Richer, published by The New Press in April 2021, explores how the rich and powerful rig the country’s economy and political system in their favor through manipulating the tax code. Our book Re-Negotiating Power and Money in America outlines the group’s core values and suggests specific pieces of legislation to advance those values. Our book How To Think Like A Patriotic Millionaire: Taxes dives into how the tax code, particularly Donald Trump and the Republican party rewrote it in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, offers disproportionate advantages to millionaires, billionaires, and corporations. Here is a link to our brochure.