THE HAMPTONS (The Borowitz Report)—They don’t pay taxes. They circumvent our laws. They get free stuff from the government. They are America’s billionaires, and many would like to see them gone.
According to a new survey by the University of Minnesota’s Opinion Research Institute, the American people hold the nation’s billionaires in lower esteem than ever before, and a majority would like to see new laws enacted to deport them.
“They come here, take thousands of our jobs, and export them overseas,” one respondent said, in an opinion echoed by many others in the survey.
“They are part of a shadow economy that sucks billions of dollars out of the United States every year and puts it in Switzerland and the Caymans,” another said.
Images of hedge-fund managers arriving via helicopter in the Hamptons this summer have only reinforced the impression that authorities have turned a blind eye to their movements.
“Many of these people should be in prison, and the government is looking the other way,” one respondent said.
Stirring even more controversy is the billionaires’ practice of having babies in the United States and using the nation’s porous estate-tax laws to pass down untold wealth to the next generation.
“They should leave and take their children with them,” one respondent said.
Even after it is pointed out to respondents that some billionaires, such as Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, have made significant philanthropic contributions to the world, a majority of those polled stubbornly maintained their negative views of billionaires.
“Look, in every group you’re going to have some good ones,” one of the respondents said. “But that doesn’t take away from the fact that the vast majority of these people are destroying this country.”
