What do the rich owe the rest of us?: A conversation on taxation and democracy

Panelists

Brian Galle, Professor of Law, UC Berkeley
Ray Madoff, Professor, Boston College Law School
Emmanuel Saez, Professor of Economics, UC Berkeley
Vanessa Williamson, Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution

Moderator

Aaron Horvath, Founder and Co-Director, Private Wealth and the Public Good

For much of American history, the privileges of extreme wealth came with obligations to the public, often in the form of philanthropy, public service, or taxation. Yet today’s super rich shamelessly evade taxes and civic responsibility, and their claims of serving the common good have grown indistinguishable from their self-interested pursuits. Why do we continue to accept the terms of a social contract that the nation’s rich refuse to uphold? And what would it look like to negotiate its terms?

Please join our expert panelists for a special conversation at BESI on these and related issues. Moderated by Aaron Horvath, founder and co-director of the Project on Private Wealth and the Public Good, and set against the backdrop of recent proposals for states to tax their wealthiest residents, the conversation will explore how the “grand bargains” between the rich and the rest of us became embedded in law and civic culture, how they have broken down over time, and how a renewed interest in taxation — perhaps as essential to democracy as suffrage — might inform a political and regulatory agenda for the future.

Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative, the Project on Private Wealth and the Public Good, and the Economic Security Project

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About the panelists

Brian Galle is a professor of law at UC Berkeley, where he teaches courses on taxation and nonprofit organizations. He joined Berkeley in 2025 from Georgetown, where he was the Agnes Williams Sesquicentennial Professor of Tax Policy. Before Georgetown, Galle was also on the full-time faculty at Boston College and Florida State University. In 2022 and 2023, he served as a senior fellow at the Securities & Exchange Commission, in the Division of Corporation Finance, where he helped draft and strategize major rule-making for the Commission. Prior to the academy, he was a federal prosecutor in the Criminal Appeals and Tax Enforcement Policy Section at the Tax Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. In addition to his work drafting regulations, Galle has also contributed to a series of bills aimed at taxing the accumulated fortunes of America’s very richest, including wealth-tax or mark-to-market bills in California, New York, Vermont, and Washington State. His monograph from the Roosevelt Institute, “How to Tax the Ultrarich,” summarizes the rationale and design choices behind many of these efforts.

Ray Madoff is a professor at Boston College Law School, where she teaches and writes in tax law and policy, wills and trusts law, and estate planning. She is co-founder and director of the Boston College Law School Forum on Philanthropy and the Public Good, a non-partisan think tank that convenes scholars and practitioners to explore questions regarding whether the rules governing the charitable sector best serve the public good. Madoff’s most recent book, The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy (University of Chicago Press), exposes how the American tax system serves as a mechanism to consolidate wealth by creating two fundamentally separate American societies: the working Americans who pay and the ultra-rich who benefit. An experienced mediator, Madoff is a leading authority on the use of mediation to resolve will and trust disputes. Prior to teaching, she was a practicing attorney for nine years in New York and Boston.

Emmanuel Saez is a professor of economics and Director of the Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality at UC Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 1999. His research focuses on inequality and tax policy. Jointly with Thomas Piketty, he created the top income share data series that show a dramatic increase in U.S. inequality since 1980. The data have been widely discussed in the public debate. His 2019 book The Triumph of Injustice, coauthored with his colleague Gabriel Zucman, narrates the demise of U.S. progressive taxation and how to reinvent it in the 21st century. He has received numerous academic awards, including the John Bates Clark medal of the American Economic Association in 2009, a MacArthur Genius Fellowship in 2010, and an honorary degree from Harvard University in 2019.

Vanessa Williamson is a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institute and a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. She studies taxation and democracy in America. Her recent book, The Price of Democracy (Basic Books, November 2025), reveals the revolutionary power of taxation in American history. She is also the author of Read My Lips: Why Americans Are Proud to Pay Taxes, and, with Harvard professor Theda Skocpol, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism.  She has written on school segregation, tax opinion, and tax politics in The Washington Post, about the Tea Party, anti-union legislation and voter registration at income tax filing in The New York Times, about taxpayer citizenship in The Atlantic, and about philanthropy and austerity and white supremacy in Dissent. She has discussed her research on NPR’s Marketplace, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS, CNBC’s Squawk Box, and MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show. She received her Ph.D. in social policy from Harvard University.

Aaron Horvath (Moderator) is a sociologist focused on the complex relationship between immense private wealth (philanthropy in particular) and the social underpinnings of democracy. His work explores philanthropy’s influence over popular conceptions of the common good, how the fetishization of metrics and quantification has transformed the civic imagination, and the social implications of digitally intermediated community life. His writing has appeared in numerous outlets, including the American Journal of Sociology, Boston Review, Chronicle of Philanthropy, Organization Studies, and The Hedgehog Review. His ideas on philanthropy, nonprofits, tech wealth, and oligarchy have been cited in popular outlets such as The Atlantic, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired. Building on his work at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, he is the founder and co-director of Private Wealth and the Public Good, a multidisciplinary research initiative that counteracts the civic dysfunctions of past philanthropic paradigms and critically examines alternatives for leveraging philanthropic resources to build civic capacity and democratic infrastructure.