Fruit Baskets for the Taxed: The Champagne Socialist Network Behind NYC’s Push for Higher Taxes

Andrew Tobias, the financial writer and multimillionaire profiled in Business Insider, says New York City should send “fruit baskets” to its wealthiest residents — right before raising their taxes even higher. He’s happy to pay more, he says, because the city is “worth supporting.” Giving people the impression he is a champagne socialist.

Tobias is part of Patriotic Millionaires, a club that, per its own 2024 disclosure, includes roughly 175 members across 28 states — down from over 200 at its 2011 founding who advocate aggressively for steeper taxes on people in their bracket. The group’s own website and profiles show it includes a notable share of inheritors, creatives, executives, and investors whose wealth often came with significant built-in advantages.

One of the more consistent voices is Chuck Collins, great-grandson of the Oscar Mayer fortune. At age 26, Collins gave away his inheritance (reportedly around $500,000) to social justice causes. He now directs the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies, writes books on wealth concentration, and lives modestly with a net worth estimated at roughly $250,000. Collins actually walked away from significant family wealth.

The broader club, however, presents a different picture. Abigail Disney, granddaughter of Roy O. Disney and an Emmy-winning filmmaker with a fortune once estimated near $120 million, has publicly described her wealth as stemming from “quirks in the tax system, some good luck, and some very loving grandparents.” She remains quite comfortable while calling for higher taxes on the rich.

Andrew Tobias himself offers another contrast: a successful author and investor with multiple properties who once left New York for 25 years after a tax dispute with the city over unincorporated business taxes on out-of-state work. He paid the back taxes and penalties, relocated to Miami, and later returned — now urging others to pay more cheerfully and be thanked for it.

This is the ecosystem cheering on Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s tax-the-rich agenda — Bloomberg reported in March that Patriotic Millionaires members are “fully supportive” of his tax policies specifically, arguing the city’s wealthy can easily absorb the cost. Mamdani, a democratic socialist, is the son of acclaimed filmmaker Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay!, Monsoon Wedding) and academic Mahmood Mamdani. Before politics, he rapped under the names Young Cardamom and Mr. Cardamom, contributing to his mother’s film soundtrack. As an assemblyman with a six-figure salary and family resources, he faced criticism for living in a rent-stabilized Astoria apartment — the kind of affordable unit many working New Yorkers struggle to obtain.

The pattern is hard to ignore: 

Among Patriotic Millionaires’ most visible faces are inheritors, successful creatives, and comfortable professionals pushing policies that would hit wage-earning professionals, small business owners who make payroll, and job creators far harder than their own diversified wealth. Even Collins, the closest thing the club has to a true believer, still lives on roughly $250,000 a year — a sum most New Yorkers would consider a windfall, not a sacrifice.

New York's highest earners already shoulder an outsized share of the tax burden — millionaires alone paid 44.6% of the state's personal income tax in 2024, according to the state's own Department of Taxation and Finance. Yet chronic budget gaps persist, and proposals for even higher rates on millionaires and above come with real risks: New York’s share of the nation’s millionaires fell 31% between 2010 and 2022, and the Citizens Budget Commission estimates that decline cost the state and city over $13 billion in forgone tax revenue in 2022 alone. Proponents of the tax hikes point to competing research suggesting state taxes have minimal effect on where people live — but New York’s own numbers on shrinking millionaire share are hard to wave away. Governments rarely meet new revenue with spending discipline.

Tobias wants gratitude in the form of fruit baskets. What New York actually needs is honest accounting of incentives, mobility, and results — not moral theater from those who have rarely carried the same load they now want increased on everyone else.