Click here for an excellent article at Substack by Robert Reich entitled "The poster child for the perils of dynastic wealth," subtitled "Four generations of Mellons are now bankrolling Trump."
A major financial backer of Trump is -- Andrew Mellon? Treasury secretary for Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover? Well, no, but Mellon's grandson, Timothy Mellon.
As treasury secretary, Andrew changed the U.S. tax code in ways that made it possible for Timothy to donate $20 million to Trump's MAGA super PAC; $30 million to the House Republicans' super PAC; $15 million to RFK Jr.'s super PAC -- Kennedy's candidacy is important to Republicans to siphon off votes from Biden -- and nearly all of the $54 million in donations to Texas Governor Greg Abbott's border wall fund.
Forbes estimated Timothy Mellon to be worth almost $1 billion in 2014, and in 2024, the magazine estimated the Mellon family was worth $14.1 billion.
Andrew held the position [of treasury secretary] for the next 11 years, from 1921 to 1932 — longer than anyone in the history of the country (or as Nebraska Senator George Norris once acidly put it, “three presidents served under Mellon”).
Thanks, Andrew.
Andrew's father, Thomas Mellon, successful lawyer and judge and originator of the Mellon family dynasty, started a bank in Pittsburgh in 1869 which attracted the deposits of robber barons like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Frick, and within a relatively short time it became the largest private bank between New York and Chicago.
Thomas viewed the acquisition of wealth as a mark of merit and poverty as a failure of character. Thomas wrote in his autobiography that voting rights were responsible for many of society’s ills, driving higher spending, borrowing, and taxes.
After the Civil War, Thomas toured the South, where he was disgusted to see Louisiana’s Legislature captured by what he called “stolid, stupid, rude and awkward field negroes, lolling on the seats or crunching peanuts.” He wrote that these representatives were puppets of white Northerners who were using “corrupt schemes to rob the property owners and taxpayers.”
Reich concludes his article:
Like his forebears (and like Donald Trump), Timothy Mellon rages against only handouts that go to those born without silver spoons. In his self-published 2015 autobiography, Timothy argued that expanded social programs have only made Black people “even more belligerent.”
“For delivering their votes in the Federal Elections, they are awarded with yet more and more freebies: food stamps, cell phones, WIC payments, Obamacare, and on, and on, and on. The largess is funded by the hardworking folks, fewer and fewer in number, who are too honest or too proud to allow themselves to sink into this morass.”
Timothy Mellon — and the tens of millions he is shelling out to Trump, RFK Junior, and Republican candidates for the Senate and House — is the product of a tax system pioneered by his grandfather that allows the perpetuation of dynastic wealth and the maintenance of its political power.
The Mellon money trail exemplifies the perils of dynastic wealth — and why we need a wealth tax in America. Or the capital gains tax must be applied to the appreciated value of assets held during someone’s life, before they die and hand them off to their heirs at current market value.
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