In 1789, a crowd stormed the Bastille in Paris, launching the French Revolution against a ruling elite that they believed had become oppressive and out of touch. “More than two centuries later,” said Alan S. Davis, the founder and codirector of the Extreme Wealth Center, “Americans may have more in common with the 18th-century French peasants than we’d ever thought possible.”
Davis spoke during a July 14 webinar organized in partnership with People’s Action Institute, Americans for Tax Fairness and Tax the Greedy Billionaires, launching the Extreme Wealth Center, which will support research and policy work aimed at understanding and confronting extreme wealth concentration in the U.S. The center is an independent organization and is fiscally sponsored by the Tides Foundation.
The webinar was timed to coincide with the 236th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille and came on the heels of Trump signing a 2025 budget reconciliation bill whose tax cuts disproportionately favor affluent individuals and corporations. The webinar’s speakers, which included Rep. Delia Catalina Ramirez (D-Illinois) and Americans for Tax Fairness Executive Director David Kass, warned that the bill will further concentrate wealth in the hands of a tiny segment of the American population.
Davis said on the webinar that he has been studying the issue of inequality and taxes for 55 years, starting with a senior college thesis on tax policy, and then launching a tax reform organization in New York after finishing law school. “I didn’t fully appreciate the scope and dangers of massive accumulated wealth,” he said. “Extreme wealth is the biggest threat facing our nation, not only distorting our democracy and economy.”
His perspective was all the more striking because he’s deeply enmeshed in the world of philanthropy. A past IP guest contributor, Davis also is the president of the Leonard and Sophie Davis Fund, which was established in 2001 at the behest of his parents, and directs the fund’s social justice program, the WhyNot Initiative. Five years ago, the initiative launched Crisis Charitable Commitment to encourage foundations and wealthy individuals to step up their giving voluntarily.
In other words, if anyone’s attuned to the fraught symbiotic relationship between the concentration of extreme wealth and mega giving, it’s Davis.
I caught up with him the day after the webinar to discuss the center’s focus on making the “ultra-rich” — that is, households with over $50 million — “less rich,” philanthropy’s role in reducing extreme wealth and more. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you explain why you felt the center was needed?
There are two main reasons why extreme wealth is a problem. One is that there are obvious implications in terms of power and plutocracy, control over the political process and the economy. But beyond that, research shows there’s a correlation between inequality and the indicators that determine the health of a country.
The United States, being one of the most unequal countries, has performed in the lowest decile in terms of education outcomes, lifespan, infant mortality, incarceration rates, guns, math scores and trust in our fellow citizens. If we reduce extreme wealth, we’re going to improve on all of these indicators, and the dividend from doing that would be the resources to fund needed social programs.
We strongly believe that the problem is the ultra-rich, which we define as a household with more than $50 million. We’ve proposed the “Five and Dime” wealth tax — 5% on $50 million and 10% on $250 million and above. I was floored when the research showed that by next year, there will be 300,000 households each of which has $50 million or more, and that the total wealth will be $40 trillion, which is more than the national debt and more than enough money to fund most of the social programs many of us are fighting for.
Based on my understanding of taxation, we can trace today’s extreme wealth concentration back to the Reagan administration, which dramatically cut the highest personal income tax rate.
I think there is truth to that. Starting in the ’80s, there was a shift in attitude toward making money and the tax rates reflected that. Things got considerably worse during that time frame.
In the ’80s, ’90s and the early 2000s, tax advocates were focused on raising more revenue from everyone to pay for programs. Unfortunately, as the wealth gap widened, these same advocates did not adjust to the fact that there’s a tremendous difference between somebody who has $400,000 in income and somebody who has $4 million, and yet we charge the same marginal rate for both, which is absurd.
Will the EWC tackle charitable reforms that would reduce extreme wealth, like a mandatory donor-advised fund payout?
I started the Crisis Charitable Commitment to do exactly what you’re talking about, and we’ve had modest success. Right now, we’re beginning another round of trying to enlist signers and convince philanthropists to give more.
As for the types of reforms you mentioned, there are a lot of organizations and individuals who are making very good cases about mandatory payouts, and we’re going to leave that to them and focus on what we think is the more fundamental problem, which is the accumulation of extreme wealth in the first place.
Another huge problem is the charitable tax deduction. I want EWC to focus on moving the charitable deduction away from the ultra-rich and to the middle class. That’s the third rail of tax reform, particularly now, because the nonprofit world is reliant on billionaire philanthropy. We need to show a way for philanthropy to work without those billionaires, and that’ll be one of the projects we’ll be undertaking.
We saw how philanthropy flexed its advocacy muscle to nix the foundation excise tax increase in the reconciliation bill. Is there a role funders can play in chipping away at extreme wealth?
This is a tricky one, because we’re talking about the ultra-rich funding work to tax the ultra-rich, and there’s been very little evidence of a willingness to do that.
Organizations like Americans for Tax Fairness, Patriotic Millionaires, Excessive Wealth Disorder Institute and Inequality.org have been working on the issue for years, and there’s almost no philanthropic support. Our foundation’s WhyNot Initiative has been the largest funder for a number of these organizations, and we’re not the largest foundation.
So the short answer to your question is, absolutely, there’s a role to play. How can you be an early childhood education funder and not think that extreme wealth is getting in the way of what you’re trying to do? It doesn’t have to be the main focus of a foundation or individual, but something should be given to help these organizations move our tax policy. Right now, greed is the prevailing narrative in America. It should be shared prosperity, and we need philanthropy to move us in that direction.
We also know that many risk-averse funders don’t want to get their hands dirty in the nitty-gritty of tax policy.
I agree with you. I guess the question is, what is the purpose of philanthropy? Is it to fill the coffers that the government has not chosen to fill, or is it to influence government to do a better job at what they do? We tend to lean toward the latter.
But the “fill the gaps” role is a slippery slope, because if philanthropy fills the gaps, it encourages appropriators on the right to double down on their agenda.
It’s pretty obvious that the right has figured out that if they want to get something done, they’re going to influence policy. The payback is enormous. The funders of the Heritage Foundation or the Federalist Society know that’s where the leverage is.
The left doesn’t understand the leverage issue. There are groups like the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, Economic Policy Institute and the Roosevelt Institute that are addressing extreme wealth, and calling them underfunded doesn’t even begin to describe it. Think about the payback you would get if we had a better-functioning democracy where elected officials could fund early childhood programs. But unfortunately, we’ve had this attitude of, “Oh no, we don’t want to get into politics,” and it’s gotten in the way of progress.
Not only does the right understand the leverage issue, they’ve also spent the last 45 years telling us that government is the problem.
It’s absolutely ridiculous. You never hear somebody talking about the good things government does for us, and I think philanthropy has a role in making government function better, because if there’s the acceptance that government is bad, it’s going to be pretty hard to think that we should be raising taxes on the ultra-rich to fund government.
On the other hand, I want to come back to my earlier point. Even if we burn the money, we should still be taxing the ultra-rich. We should be preventing dynastic wealth. There’s no justification for allowing somebody to give a billion dollars to their child tax free. I think most people agree with that, so we need to support organizations that are working to prevent that from happening.
Related Inside Philanthropy Resources:
For Subscribers Only
Initiatives like “Tax the Greedy Billionaires” take an adversarial tone toward billionaires who, some would argue, are simply following the laws set out by Congress. I wonder if this approach may not be the most effective one in terms of winning voters’ hearts and minds.
It’s a great question. First of all, the purpose of the EWC is to change the notion that being a billionaire is a good thing, because, quite honestly, it’s a sign of greed. As you may have heard in the discussion of polling [during the webinar], the favorability of billionaires is starting to come down, and we want to accelerate that process.
But let me be candid with you. After the election, we were trying to read the tea leaves, and one of the things that was pretty clear was that the public was really angry. We decided to launch something called TGB, but originally it was Tax the Greedy Bastards, and that, I felt, captured the moment. But to your point, as we put the project together, my codirectors convinced me that that would not be a good direction for us, so we moderated it to Tax the Greedy Billionaires. We obviously took a softer approach with the Extreme Wealth Center.
We’re fighting a bit of an uphill battle because I constantly hear, “But if billionaires give their money away, then they’re okay.” That’s ridiculous. It’s not for the ultra-rich to decide what’s good for America; Americans should decide what’s good for America.
Which brings us back to the idea of philanthropy funding work to tax the ultra-rich.
If philanthropists believe that extreme wealth is a problem, we need them to make their voices heard. We also need the nonprofit community to make their voices heard. It’s extremely challenging to bite the hand that feeds you, but these times call for some courage, and hopefully that will translate to our elected officials speaking up.
We did a poll in a Republican district in California to see how people reacted to two statements. One was “No more tax cuts for billionaires,” and the other was “Tax the billionaires.” “Tax the billionaires” scored 24% higher than “No more tax cuts for billionaires.”
In other words, in a Republican district, people felt that it’s not just, “Oh, everything’s OK the way it is, just no more tax cuts,” no — they want to tax the billionaires. So that’s where the public is. We just need more people, philanthropists, nonprofits, everyone to step up, and let’s all work toward that notion of shared prosperity.
Correction (7/21/25): A previous version of this article stated that the Extreme Wealth Center was organized in partnership with the People’s Action Institute, Americans for Tax Fairness and Tax the Greedy Billionaires. It was the webinar announcing the center’s launch that was organized alongside those organizations.
