I Am a New York Millionaire. My Message to Albany Is Simple: Tax Me More.

I am a New York City-based millionaire and I have a message for our elected officials in Albany: Tax me more.

Before I retired in 2014, I was a Managing Director at BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management firm. During the financial crisis of 2008, I was part of the team at BlackRock that was hired by the Federal Reserve, Treasury Department, and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to structure and assess the cost of the Citibank bailout. In the years to follow, I would end up working on similar projects in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Greece. 

While I was at a meeting in Greece in 2013, I recall looking out a window during a lunch break and seeing what initially appeared to be a parade down on the street below. I quickly realized, however, that it was actually a protest making its way towards the parliament.

I sat back down at the conference table and tried to refocus on the meeting, but I couldn’t stop thinking: was I doing any good for those economically-frustrated people of Greece other than  helping to save the jobs of the Greek bank executives sitting around me by helping bail out their bank? That experience led me to ask bigger questions about the broader state of the economy and my place in it as a wealthy investor. Ultimately, I resigned from BlackRock in 2014 to work full-time as the Chair of the Patriotic Millionaires, a group of wealthy Americans who want lawmakers to tackle the destabilizing concentration of wealth and power in the United States by taxing them more.

Under our current tax structure, wealthy investors like me pay far lower tax rates than people who work for a living.  

Under our current tax structure, wealthy investors like me pay far lower tax rates than people who work for a living. As a successful investor, I reject the idea that investors need tax breaks as incentives to invest, create jobs, and grow the economy. That’s fundamentally untrue. Even if tax rates on investment income were very high, I would always choose to invest because, the last time I checked, the alternative—stuffing money under mattresses— doesn’t produce the greatest returns.

Opponents of taxing the rich rely on the tired narrative that millionaires like me will flee en masse from higher-tax states to lower-tax states in order to improve their bottom line. We saw this was especially prevalent during theelection campaign of NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani. The data we have available shows otherwise. Research shows that the millionaire population in New York—which has one of the highest tax burdens of any state in the country—has continued to grow, even after taxes increased in 2017 and 2021. New York’s overall population is declining, but it’s not because millionaires are running for the hills, but rather people who are searching for more affordable childcare and housing.

Millionaires and billionaires can afford to live wherever they want, no matter their state’s or city’s tax rate. I, for one, choose to live in a high-tax place like New York because those taxes contribute to the funding of the state’s world-class libraries, universities, parks, transit systems, and more. It’s not an accident that states with higher taxes perform better on things like crime, education, and pollution than their lower-tax counterparts. A higher quality of life is precisely why I’m happy to live in a high-tax state.

State leaders in Albany should not be afraid to raise taxes on super rich people like me in order to enhance public services and make life more affordable for millions of my neighbors. I am proud to pay more. 

Research shows that the millionaire population in New York has continued to grow, even after taxes increased in 2017 and 2021.

Beyond just helping to raise revenue, there is another reason why I’d like to see millionaires like me pay more in taxes: I am worried about our democracy. If we continue to let economic inequality grow unchecked in America—with billionaires like Elon Musk inching closer to becoming a trillionaire while over two-thirds of the country lives paycheck to paycheck—I worry that the uptick we’ve witnessed in political violence in America in recent years will only become more regular. And that’s not good for anyone, including millionaires like me.

I want my granddaughter to grow up in a New York where every person from every background who makes New York the city that it is has the ability to live a safe, decent, and affordable life. That will only happen if lawmakers in Albany do the right thing and raise my taxes.

Morris Pearl chairs the Board of Directors at Patriotic Millionaires. He was formerly a managing director at BlackRock and had a long tenure on Wall Street, where he invented some of the securitization technology connecting America’s capital markets to consumers in need of credit. He has also co-authored two books: Tax the Rich: How Lies, Loopholes, and Lobbyists Make the Rich Even Richer (2021) and Pay the People: Why Fair Pay is Good for Business and Great for America (2024).

Excerpts of the above piece were taken and lightly edited from Morris’ bio page on the Patriotic Millionaires’ website.

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