I was watching Mr. Deeds Goes to Town the other day.
Please don’t confuse it with Adam Sandler’s Mr. Deeds (2002), which is a perfectly enjoyable film in its own right, but isn’t in the same league as the original. And let’s draw a curtain over the dreadful 1969 television series starring Monty Markham.
I’m talking about Frank Capra’s 1936 classic, starring Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck.
I chose it because I needed something to ease my reentry into the United States—a vision of America I still recognized. An America of decency, optimism, and common sense. Not the version currently being narrated by a news cycle trapped in a death spiral and relentlessly cultivated by the Potentate of Perpetual Prevarication.
If you have never seen the movie, you can find it on Prime. Here is a brief synopsis: Longfellow Deeds, played to perfection by Gary Cooper, is a small-town tuba player and greeting-card poet who unexpectedly inherits a fortune and moves to New York City. There, he finds himself surrounded by opportunists, social climbers, and cynical reporters eager to exploit his naïveté. As Deeds struggles to navigate wealth, power, and public scrutiny, he ultimately proves that common sense, kindness, and integrity can be more powerful than money or status.
Yes, Virginia, in this vision of America, driven through the lens of the Great Depression, common sense, integrity, and kindness defeat wealth and power. A concept not really embraced in our current reality, where celebrities are famous for being famous, influencers are famous for being influencers, and actual accomplishment is often treated like an unfortunate character flaw.
Gary Cooper was famous for making decency look effortless. As Irving Berlin put it, everyone was “trying hard to look like Gary Cooper (super duper).”
Ninety years later, America could use a few more people trying. (Tom Hanks, keep up the good work. At the moment you’re carrying an alarming percentage of the nation’s decency portfolio.)
One of the lines in the movie that really sent me down a rabbit hole about how different our current reality is from that depicted in the film is when Deeds is told that he has inherited $20 million and is now “one of the richest men in America.”
By our standards, that is not a lot of money. Today it is roughly a single-week Mega Millions jackpot or about three hours of volatility in Elon Musk’s net worth.
John D. Rockefeller, whose fortune at the time was approximately $1.5 billion, controlled wealth equal to roughly 1.5% of America’s GDP.
The richest man in America, let alone the world, is Elon Musk. And he makes John D. look like a piker, with a fortune of over $800 billion, or roughly 3% of GDP. Not being a socialist, I can still say that is a scary amount of money and economic power for a single person to control.
But there is a bigger difference between the richest man in America then and now. By the time John D. died in 1937, he had given away nearly one-third of his total wealth to charities that supported education, medicine, science, and public health.
Elon Musk, by any standard, has given far less of his fortune. To date, the value of his charitable donations is generously estimated at $7 billion, or less than one percent of his fortune. But the actual number is much less because, in many cases, he has donated Tesla stock that he retains control of. In actual cash, he has given approximately $620 million or less than .1% of his net worth.
What a guy. He is making Scrooge McDuck look like Andrew Carnegie and Mother Teresa rolled into one.
What Elon Musk gives to charity is up to him. I don’t think we should force him to give a dime of his fortune to charity. But I think it is illustrative of what he is actually paying in income tax. His donation of stock to foundations allows him to eliminate capital gains taxes. Private donations lower that bill even more.
In other words, he no longer needs to give money to charity because he can avoid taxes by giving the appearance of a donation while still building his own personal fortune. Not something the average citizen can do.
What it means, in technicolor, is that the wealthiest Americans—those who have used the most of our resources—are asking those of us in the middle class not only to finance the running of our government, but also their extravagant and self-indulgent lifestyles.
Clearly, there is something wrong with our tax code. We are in this together, and we all need to pay our fair share.
Longfellow Deeds would have. John D. Rockefeller did.
So what is the solution? Let me throw out a couple of ideas and see if they stick.
Minimum Tax: Regardless of your deductions, you must pay a minimum tax on your income. You can use as many fancy, rich-person tax dodges as you like (I’m looking in your direction, Baron von Bluster), but eventually you must write at least one check to the government that doesn’t bounce off a Cayman Islands shell company.
The problem with this method is that the wealthy can afford to be paid in stocks and other instruments that don’t strictly count as income. They can then borrow against those assets and use the cash to finance increasingly ambitious monuments to themselves, whether those monuments take the form of gold statues, vanity space projects, or social-media platforms purchased at prices normally associated with small nations.
Progressive Tax with No Deductions: Our current tax code is riddled with carve-outs that favor the wealthy. A Republican construct based on the canard known as “trickle-down economics,” which, according to its creator, was utter bullshit but sounded good to the Republican base.
Get rid of all deductions. You pay a graduated percentage of your income based on prosperity, period. This has the added benefit of simplifying tax returns and eliminating a large percentage of IRS bureaucracy.
Wealth Tax: If your net worth is more than $10 million, you pay 5% of your net worth in taxes. A tax like this would raise approximately $3 trillion a year. This would completely eliminate the current annual deficit and contribute $1.5 trillion to debt reduction.
The main criticism of this plan is that it would cause wealthy individuals to flee the country, a threat that is issued with such regularity that one would think private jets are idling continuously on runways awaiting the signal.
While I am tempted to say, “See ya,” a simple way of preventing this would be to add a clause stating that if you spend more than 30 days per year in the United States, you will be taxed as a citizen.
Frank Capra’s America was hardly perfect, but it possessed a radical notion that now seems almost revolutionary: the rich owed something to the society that made them rich. Longfellow Deeds understood it instinctively. Rockefeller eventually learned it. Today’s billionaire class often appears convinced that society owes them a thank-you note for paying taxes at all. Perhaps that is why a black-and-white movie from 1936 feels more modern than the headlines of 2026.
One world celebrated decency and regarded greed with suspicion. The other celebrates greed and regards decency as a branding strategy.
Given the choice, I’ll take Mandrake Falls every time.
Winston Churchill once said that if you were not a liberal when you were young you had no heart, and if you were not a conservative when you were older then you had no brain. I know I have both so what does that make me?
Blame it on Rio
No Good Deeds
I was watching Mr. Deeds Goes to Town the other day.
Please don’t confuse it with Adam Sandler’s Mr. Deeds (2002), which is a perfectly enjoyable film in its own right, but isn’t in the same league as the original. And let’s draw a curtain over the dreadful 1969 television series starring Monty Markham.
I’m talking about Frank Capra’s 1936 classic, starring Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck.
I chose it because I needed something to ease my reentry into the United States—a vision of America I still recognized. An America of decency, optimism, and common sense. Not the version currently being narrated by a news cycle trapped in a death spiral and relentlessly cultivated by the Potentate of Perpetual Prevarication.
If you have never seen the movie, you can find it on Prime. Here is a brief synopsis: Longfellow Deeds, played to perfection by Gary Cooper, is a small-town tuba player and greeting-card poet who unexpectedly inherits a fortune and moves to New York City. There, he finds himself surrounded by opportunists, social climbers, and cynical reporters eager to exploit his naïveté. As Deeds struggles to navigate wealth, power, and public scrutiny, he ultimately proves that common sense, kindness, and integrity can be more powerful than money or status.
Yes, Virginia, in this vision of America, driven through the lens of the Great Depression, common sense, integrity, and kindness defeat wealth and power. A concept not really embraced in our current reality, where celebrities are famous for being famous, influencers are famous for being influencers, and actual accomplishment is often treated like an unfortunate character flaw.
Gary Cooper was famous for making decency look effortless. As Irving Berlin put it, everyone was “trying hard to look like Gary Cooper (super duper).”
Ninety years later, America could use a few more people trying. (Tom Hanks, keep up the good work. At the moment you’re carrying an alarming percentage of the nation’s decency portfolio.)
One of the lines in the movie that really sent me down a rabbit hole about how different our current reality is from that depicted in the film is when Deeds is told that he has inherited $20 million and is now “one of the richest men in America.”
By our standards, that is not a lot of money. Today it is roughly a single-week Mega Millions jackpot or about three hours of volatility in Elon Musk’s net worth.
John D. Rockefeller, whose fortune at the time was approximately $1.5 billion, controlled wealth equal to roughly 1.5% of America’s GDP.
The richest man in America, let alone the world, is Elon Musk. And he makes John D. look like a piker, with a fortune of over $800 billion, or roughly 3% of GDP. Not being a socialist, I can still say that is a scary amount of money and economic power for a single person to control.
But there is a bigger difference between the richest man in America then and now. By the time John D. died in 1937, he had given away nearly one-third of his total wealth to charities that supported education, medicine, science, and public health.
Elon Musk, by any standard, has given far less of his fortune. To date, the value of his charitable donations is generously estimated at $7 billion, or less than one percent of his fortune. But the actual number is much less because, in many cases, he has donated Tesla stock that he retains control of. In actual cash, he has given approximately $620 million or less than .1% of his net worth.
What a guy. He is making Scrooge McDuck look like Andrew Carnegie and Mother Teresa rolled into one.
What Elon Musk gives to charity is up to him. I don’t think we should force him to give a dime of his fortune to charity. But I think it is illustrative of what he is actually paying in income tax. His donation of stock to foundations allows him to eliminate capital gains taxes. Private donations lower that bill even more.
In other words, he no longer needs to give money to charity because he can avoid taxes by giving the appearance of a donation while still building his own personal fortune. Not something the average citizen can do.
What it means, in technicolor, is that the wealthiest Americans—those who have used the most of our resources—are asking those of us in the middle class not only to finance the running of our government, but also their extravagant and self-indulgent lifestyles.
Clearly, there is something wrong with our tax code. We are in this together, and we all need to pay our fair share.
Longfellow Deeds would have. John D. Rockefeller did.
So what is the solution? Let me throw out a couple of ideas and see if they stick.
Minimum Tax: Regardless of your deductions, you must pay a minimum tax on your income. You can use as many fancy, rich-person tax dodges as you like (I’m looking in your direction, Baron von Bluster), but eventually you must write at least one check to the government that doesn’t bounce off a Cayman Islands shell company.
The problem with this method is that the wealthy can afford to be paid in stocks and other instruments that don’t strictly count as income. They can then borrow against those assets and use the cash to finance increasingly ambitious monuments to themselves, whether those monuments take the form of gold statues, vanity space projects, or social-media platforms purchased at prices normally associated with small nations.
Progressive Tax with No Deductions: Our current tax code is riddled with carve-outs that favor the wealthy. A Republican construct based on the canard known as “trickle-down economics,” which, according to its creator, was utter bullshit but sounded good to the Republican base.
Get rid of all deductions. You pay a graduated percentage of your income based on prosperity, period. This has the added benefit of simplifying tax returns and eliminating a large percentage of IRS bureaucracy.
Wealth Tax: If your net worth is more than $10 million, you pay 5% of your net worth in taxes. A tax like this would raise approximately $3 trillion a year. This would completely eliminate the current annual deficit and contribute $1.5 trillion to debt reduction.
The main criticism of this plan is that it would cause wealthy individuals to flee the country, a threat that is issued with such regularity that one would think private jets are idling continuously on runways awaiting the signal.
While I am tempted to say, “See ya,” a simple way of preventing this would be to add a clause stating that if you spend more than 30 days per year in the United States, you will be taxed as a citizen.
Frank Capra’s America was hardly perfect, but it possessed a radical notion that now seems almost revolutionary: the rich owed something to the society that made them rich. Longfellow Deeds understood it instinctively. Rockefeller eventually learned it. Today’s billionaire class often appears convinced that society owes them a thank-you note for paying taxes at all. Perhaps that is why a black-and-white movie from 1936 feels more modern than the headlines of 2026.
One world celebrated decency and regarded greed with suspicion. The other celebrates greed and regards decency as a branding strategy.
Given the choice, I’ll take Mandrake Falls every time.
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About 34orion
Winston Churchill once said that if you were not a liberal when you were young you had no heart, and if you were not a conservative when you were older then you had no brain. I know I have both so what does that make me?