Two liberal economists accidentally celebrate America’s entrepreneurs

The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There

Authors: Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick

Henry Holt and Co. (2026). $32.99 (hardcover) $16.99 (eBook)

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Mainstream left-of-center economics (not to be confused with the Democratic Socialists of America vision on the further-left wing of the progressive movement) has a problem, a problem of math. There are too many high-income Democratic voters, many of whom live in high-cost-of-living cities and states like California, New York, and greater Washington, D.C. These voters, like voters everywhere, tend to resist having their own taxes raised to pay for all the wonderful things the DSA types promise.

But what if there were taxes liberals could raise without hitting the nonprofit executives, union officers, senior government bureaucrats, and Brooklyn-based arts magazine editors who make up an influential share of the liberal-progressive political coalition?

Enter liberal economists Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick. The pair previously consulted for the Obama administration’s Internal Revenue Service to figure out how much money the IRS could, should the political winds favor, additionally harvest from so-called “pass-through” businesses. Their recent book, The Everywhere Millionaire, shows three million of these pass-through business owners hold at least $5 million in net worth each, and an average net worth of $25 million.

Zidar and Zwick refer to them as America’s “main street millionaires.”

The left’s WEIRD elite money problem

Those who vote for tax-and-spend liberals have more money than those who do not. Exit polls showed that Democrat Kamala Harris won voters making more than $100,000 annually in 2024, a first for a losing Democratic candidate. (Hillary Clinton split that group evenly in 2016 as well.) But these wealthy left-leaning voters don’t feel rich enough to be taxed to pay for the sunlit uplands their politicians keep promising every group Big Philanthropy funds into existence.

As I observed in my 2024 series on America’s “WEIRD Elite” (where “WEIRD” is an acronym for “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic”), this is why in his 2020 campaign President Joe Biden targeted his tax hikes on those making more than $400,000 annually. This is, conveniently, a threshold above the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates for the 90th-percentile salary for journalists ($144,140), college professors ($203,580) or lawyers ($351,600). These professions are often held by very liberal postgraduates who follow the more-status-than-income condition associated with left-wing politics in the early 21st century.

And for all the talk about taxing billionaires, there simply aren’t enough of them to pay for current spending, let alone the laundry list of new government programs social democrats (that’s a fancy European word for “socialists”) want.

Dave Burge, the internet personality known as Iowahawk, wrote a thought experiment on how little of the U.S. government you could fund by expropriating everything from billionaires, plus confiscating the annual salaries of all entertainers and athletes, then seizing 100 percent of all corporate profits, and much else. This “steal everything” plot would obviously work only one time; Burge conceded the billionaires might not surrender their fortunes without 500 timely “accidents” happening to every soul on the Forbes 400 list, plus 100 additional “almost-billionaires.”

Even then, way back in 2011, this gruesome but hypothetical Bolshevik budget could only fund the federal leviathan for one year. Burge’s math on this has probably not changed for the better since then.

There’s lots of money in pass-through businesses

But pass-through businesses provide many more targets to take from.

To a tax accountant, a pass-through entity is defined by exclusion as a for-profit enterprise that is not a C corporation (C-corp).

Among other advantages, filing as a C-corp allows a firm to list on public stock exchanges, issue a theoretically limitless number of ownership shares, and sell those shares to foreign owners. Going public as a C-corp permits access to other people’s money, and with it the potential to expand rapidly. But this advantage comes with trade-offs, and one is that C-corp income is doubly taxed as corporate income and as dividends to shareholders.

Avoiding this double taxation is the public-spirited justification for having pass-through status in the tax code. Unlike publicly traded firms on Wall Street, an entrepreneurial family that owns and personally manages a dozen privately held car dealerships or fast food franchises is not seeking access to all the world’s capital markets. That is why these enterprises have not been hit with the same tax burden as Amazon.

While the Tax Foundation is careful to note that “The taxation of business income in the US is anything but straightforward,” it identifies pass-through businesses as “including partnerships, S corporations, and sole proprietorships” that “pass through income [as profits] to owners’ individual tax returns, where it is subject to ordinary individual income tax.”

These businesses and their owners live all over the country (the “everywhere” in the title of the Zidar and Zwick book) and operate in all sorts of economic sectors. Zidar and Zwick speak of pass-through businesses that made “main street millionaires” in gutter manufacturing, legal services, ski wear manufacturing, human resources contracting, pizza joints, frozen appetizers manufacturing, and private practice physicians. Some of the businesses are quite large and quite lucrative: Bass Pro Shops and its billionaire owner Johnny Morris is singled out, with the outdoor-life retailer’s profits having propelled Morris to a net worth exceeding $8 billion as of year-end 2025.

Meet the kulaks

These businesses and their owners are all over the place (and therefore available for tax harvesting by all states and localities), reasonably numerous (but not so numerous that they can effectively oppose a motivated class war), and not universally small (because “small business” is still a strong political brand).

Even better for the social-democratic left, this big pot of everywhere money is disproportionately in the hands of conservative Republicans, unlike the pot of money that is held by the generally liberal Democratic professional-managerial class. The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), a prominent trade association for smaller businesses largely organized as pass-throughs, contributes to the GOP nearly exclusively and is best known for leading the unsuccessful Supreme Court challenge to Obamacare. Zidar and Zwick report a 2024 survey that found that small business owners were 9 percentage points more Republican than Democratic (against a general population that was three percentage points more Democratic than Republican), with politically independent businesspeople further leaning Republican by 10 points when pressed.

Institutional liberals have another reason to target pass-through businesses specifically. Pass-throughs are effectively never publicly traded, meaning that activists cannot use ESG investing tactics to jawbone them into adopting progressive corporate policies. Planned Parenthood won’t be able to bring a shareholder resolution targeting Hobby Lobby’s contraception policy, the Human Rights Campaign won’t be able to use ESG strategies to pressure Chick-fil-A about its leadership’s giving, and the Center for Biological Diversity won’t be able to file resolutions to all but close down Continental Resources, because those companies are privately held.

But Zidar and Zwick went to talk to some of the “main street millionaires,” and a funny thing happened on the way to easy, coalition-friendly expropriation. The authors found that many of these people are profoundly inspirational figures who rose from very little through guts, grit, and a whole lot of hard work.

They feature, among others, Dick Portillo, who grew up in Chicago’s infamous (and now demolished) Cabrini-Green housing project; but then with $1,100 and a trailer in a parking lot Portillo started the business that became an eponymous chain of Chicago-area hot dog restaurants. Karen Bentlage turned a sales job into first a tanning bed empire and then a regional chain of hair removal salons. And after developing a new car bumper, Shahid Khan went from an auto parts engineer to the owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars NFL team.

Sure, some of the “main street millionaires” are heirs or business school types who bought a retiring founder’s project. But, while not always representative of the pass-through breed, figures such as Portillo, Bentlage and Khan are backed up in the data as certainly illustrative of the sort of people who become entrepreneurs. These inspiring figures are analogous to the kulaks, peasant farmers whose small plots of land and assets were stolen during Joseph Stalin’s first five-year plan for the Soviet Union.

It’s still America

The second half of The Everywhere Millionaire proposes hitting the American kulaks with tax hikes, union-side labor mandates and minimum-wage hikes. Zidar and Zwick could have limited their book to this conventional call for abusing entrepreneurs in the name of capital-P Progressive “progress.”

But that’s not all the book is about.

They could have written a WEIRD-elite managerial-progressive’s manifesto against the forces of the bourgeoisie, marking the “main street millionaires” out for the Saul Alinsky “pick a target, freeze it, polarize it” treatment. Indeed, the policy-dominant second half of the narrative reserves special opprobrium for Cindy McCain and U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI). McCain, the late Republican politician John McCain’s widow, hails from a family that owns a large Budweiser distributorship. Johnson is a manufacturing businessman backed by another manufacturing businessman, Dick Uihlein, who supports tax cuts for manufacturing businessmen.

But that isn’t all the book is about either.

It would have been much easier for the economists to serve up nameless kulaks and then propose those entrepreneurs be punished with bog-standard tax-spend-and-regulate liberalism. That book certainly would have been more popular among the DSA sans-culottes who now dominate the Democratic Party. That book (ironically) might have been more profitable for Zidar and Zwick. But instead, either by accident or design (or both), the two liberal economists also wrote a stirring defense of American entrepreneurship and the American Dream at a time it seems like nobody else on either side of the political aisle wants to do it.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/two-liberal-economists-accidentally-celebrate-americas-entrepreneurs/