Bill Gates shows what he's made of

[NOTE: expanded version of this post in a DailyKos diary]

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The world’s richest man lives on the other side of Lake Washington.  In recent years, urged strongly by his wife Melinda, he has created the world’s largest and most generous charitable foundation.  He has made it very clear that he intends to become the world’s greatest philanthropist, insisting that he will give away the great majority of his fortune (90%?, 95%?) before he dies.

Still, even the relatively small proportion of his lucre that fails to become largesse will end up as a very large fortune for his three children.  To illustrate, assume that he’ll give away 95% of his current net worth, estimated recently by Forbes as $53.0 billion, and that his wife predeceases him.  That leaves an estate of $2.65 billion for his children.  Not exactly chump-change.

And also well above the exemption amount above which the estate tax is applied.

Now, Bill’s father William H. Gates Jr. (our Bill is actually William Henry Gates III) has become very well known hereabouts for his strong advocacy in favor of the federal and state estate taxes.  In 2003, he and co-author Chuck Collins published a well-received Beacon Press book on the subject:  Wealth and Our Commonwealth:  Why America Should Tax Accumulated Fortunes.

However, Microsoft Bill’s views on the matter haven’t been nearly so clear.  The famously apolitical Bill III rarely deals with political issues, much less political candidates.  While his successor Steve Ballmer is clearly a Republican, Bill Gates has distributed his political contributions in no particular direction.  According to opensecrets.org, in 2006 Bill has given money to (among others) David Dreier and Jay Inslee, George Allen and Ted Kennedy, Maria Cantwell and Dave Reichert, Jack Carter and John Ensign, the DSCC and the Washington Republican Party.  Pattern?  What pattern?

It’s refreshing and intriguing, then, to see that William H. Gates III recently made a large contribution to the No on Initiative 920 committee.  That’s a Washington state initiative, on this year’s general election ballot, designed to repeal the state estate tax.  That tax, which exempts the first $2 million of the estate, which specifically exempts taxing the estates of family farmers, which comes into play for only about 250 estates per year (only the richest one-half of one percent of non-farm estates), which isn’t “double-taxation” because Washington has no individual or corporate income tax, is earmarked for deposit into Washington’s Education Legacy Trust Account.  As explained on the No on Initiative 920 website,

The Account funds four crucial education programs: it pays for 7,900 higher education slots around the state, for increased financial aid for Washington state college students, for reducing K-12 class sizes in our schools across the state, and for a Learning Assistance Program for K-12 students who are underperforming academically.

One would, of course, expect William H. Gates Jr. to have contributed to the No on Initiative 920 committee.  And he has.  According to reports from the state’s Public Disclosure Commission (PDC), Bill’s dad gave $5000 in June and another $10,000 in August.  But the PDC reports also show contributions by William H. Gates III, to the tune of $10,000 back in March and $150,000 in early September.  That last contribution is the second-largest chunk of money contributed to the No on Initiative 920 campaign, trailing only the $500,000 given by the National Education Association. 

On the other hand, Bill’s contribution pales by comparison to the $839,825 (so far) that downtown Seattle developer and uber-Republican Martin Selig has selfishly contributed to the principal campaign to kill the estate tax, constituting nearly 70% of the total contributions to that effort.  Selig’s self-aggrandisement is particularly loathesome in light of Darryl’s guest post of a few weeks ago on HorsesAss.org, wherein he outlines the background of repeal-campaign leader Dennis Falk.  One assumes that Mr. Selig knows full well that he is funding a John Bircher, a homophobic and violent rogue cop, a black helicopter/UN-is-communist conspiracy nut, a member of the virulently anti-semitic Christian Patriot movement.

Getting back to where we started, it’s wonderful to see that Bill Gates has made it clear where his sympathies lie on the issue of the estate tax.  I have long believed that he probably sees eye-to-eye with his father (and his good friend Warren Buffett, the second-richest man in the world) on the subject, but now we have some tangible evidence that it’s so.  Perhaps we’re beginning to be able to answer the question proposed by Salon‘s Andrew Leonard way back in early 1998—Is Bill Gates a closet liberal?—in the affirmative.

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