How Billionaires Plant the Civic Seeds

Responding to: DAVID MARCUS: Why Abdul El-Sayed’s anti-billionaire screeds may not play in Grand Rapids — David Marcus · 2026-10-16

What the Piece Argues

David Marcus’s October 2026 Fox News Opinion column argues that Grand Rapids, Michigan has prospered primarily because of philanthropic giving by a handful of billionaire families — the DeVos, Van Andel, and Meijer clans — whose names adorn the city’s museums, libraries, and medical centers. He claims Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s stated wish that there be no billionaires, and his plan to route their money through the government instead, would destroy the civic culture that produced the city’s boom. The piece treats El-Sayed’s anti-billionaire politics as a naïve zero-sum attack on civic goodness itself, holds up Astor-Carnegie-era philanthropy as the historic American template, and closes with the load-bearing assertion that “on the ground, billionaires make the places they live much better, and plant the civic seeds that sprout the millionaires El-Sayed claims to want.”

Receipts

The column’s single primary power-protecting talking point is the affirmative-thesis sentence that closes the piece: “In fact, on the ground, billionaires make the places they live much better, and plant the civic seeds that sprout the millionaires El-Sayed claims to want.” Everything in the column — the museum docent, the construction worker’s quip about the donor-named projects, the Holland retired voter Maggie naming the inequality gap two blocks from her porch, the Astor/Carnegie historical parallels — funnels toward delivering that sentence as civic revelation. The framing tells you billionaire philanthropy is civic virtue made manifest; what’s actually happening is that the donor aristocracy decides which institutions your city gets, the federal government subsidizes the gift through the charitable tax deduction, and the working people whose taxes paid the difference never got to vote on what got built.

The framing wants you to believe

• Billionaires are the unsung civic foundation of thriving American cities, and Grand Rapids is the proof.
• Billionaire philanthropy “fills gaps” government bureaucracy cannot.
• Criticizing billionaires is ungrateful resentment aimed at civic virtue itself.
• The historical pattern is settled: Astors built New York, Carnegies built Pittsburgh, DeVos and Van Andel built Grand Rapids.

What’s really going on

• The charitable-contribution deduction is one of the federal government’s largest single tax expenditures, in the tens of billions of dollars annually in foregone revenue per published OMB and Joint Committee on Taxation tax-expenditure tables in recent fiscal years. The “civic gift” is publicly subsidized; the donor’s name goes on the building; the taxpayer underwrites the difference and gets the bracket on the plaque.
• The DeVos family’s philanthropy is inseparable from a sustained political project against public education. The American Federation for Children, the family’s political organization, has spent publicly reported sums on state-level campaigns for voucher and charter-school expansion per filings of record; Betsy DeVos served as U.S. Secretary of Education 2017–2021 with a school-choice agenda explicitly named. The check to the museum and the check to dismantle your daughter’s public school are the same donor’s program.
• Grand Rapids is one of the most unequal cities in Michigan. The $60,000-house-next-to-a-$6-million-house pattern that the piece attributes to a single retired voter, Maggie, reflects a documented structural disparity in census-tract data, not an exception.
• The Astor and Carnegie parallels the column leans on were both built in a nineteenth-century legal environment with no federal income tax, no Federal Reserve, no SEC, no antitrust enforcement, no labor protections, no Clean Air Act. Their fortunes were built on the extractive industries (fur, steel, tenement rents) of the Gilded Age, with documented labor violations — the Homestead Strike of 1892, the Ludlow Massacre of 1914, the immigrant-tenement pattern — that subsequent generations had to clean up. The nostalgia is informative about the columnist.
• The unanimity is curated. The docent, the construction worker, Maggie and Doug all agree against El-Sayed; the column does not find room for the organized labor, tenant organizations, immigrant-rights groups, and progressive faith communities whose views on the same arrangement exist in the documentary record but didn’t fit the column’s unanimity.
• The “war on billionaires” framing the column pins on El-Sayed relabels pro-democratic-redistribution politics as resentment aimed at wealth itself. The structural question is whether the public should subsidize wealthy families’ decisions about which civic institutions get built; that question is not a war on billionaires.

Anchor citation: Office of Management and Budget, Analytical Perspectives, Budget of the U.S. Government (annual tax expenditure tables); Joint Committee on Taxation, Estimates of Federal Tax Expenditures (most recent annual edition; the relevant table cites the charitable deduction as one of the largest single-line items).

The Response Ladder

Polite Reframe

When to use: A persuadable family member who has absorbed the “billionaire philanthropy” narrative and doesn’t yet see the structural question.

The David Marcus column says, and Maggie’s husband Doug half agrees with him, that on the ground, billionaires make the places they live much better and plant the civic seeds that sprout the millionaires El-Sayed claims to want. That is the case the column is built to deliver, and on its surface, the Grand Rapids Public Museum is real evidence for it.

So let’s meet the argument on its own ground. Maggie, the Holland retired voter Marcus quotes in his own column, looks two blocks from her $60,000 house and sees $6 million houses on the lake. The docent Joan at the museum is grateful for the family that funded the building she works in. The construction worker who spoke to Marcus builds half the donor-named projects in town. These are real people, real gifts, real signs of a city that works.

Now the structural question the column skips. Every dollar the DeVos, Van Andel, and Meijer families donate to civic institutions in Grand Rapids is also a dollar they have asked the federal government to refund them on their tax return. The Office of Management and Budget publishes the country’s tax-expenditure tables each year in Analytical Perspectives; the Joint Committee on Taxation’s annual estimates score it the same way. The charitable deduction appears as one of the largest single line items — a sum in the tens of billions of dollars a year in foregone federal revenue. In effect, the public is co-funding those museum wings and didn’t get a vote in what gets built. The donor’s name goes on the building. The taxpayer underwrites the difference. The democratic deficit is the part the column doesn’t mention.

That is the difference between civic virtue and a tax-subsidized donor aristocracy. The philanthropy is real. The deductibility is real. The question of whether the public should subsidize those families’ decisions about which civic institutions get built is also real, and it is the heart of self-government, not the heart of ingratitude.

There is a better version of this civic story. Martin Luther King put it most cleanly in the mid-1960s when he said the country runs “socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor.” The right question is what we owe each other as a community, and how we decide together what the common life requires. That question is what El-Sayed and his cohort are trying to put on the ballot. Calling it a war on billionaires does not make the question go away.

The column ends by saying El-Sayed’s war on billionaires would have a devastating impact on Michigan. Maggie is a safe vote for El-Sayed and she is also a person who can see the inequality from her porch. The point is not that she or Doug or the construction worker is wrong about the generosity of the donor families. The point is that whether the public should subsidize those families’ decisions about which civic institutions get built is a question worth asking.

Mockery and Ridicule

When to use: A loud uncle at Thanksgiving who has just defended the local billionaire’s “civic virtue” for the third time. Effective in any forum where performing for the bystander is the goal.

Let me make sure I have the Grand Rapids story straight. The columnist’s headline thesis is that on the ground, billionaires make the places they live much better and plant the civic seeds that sprout the millionaires El-Sayed claims to want. So the billionaire decides what kind of museum the city gets. The construction workers build it on their dime. The docents give the tours for free. The rest of the citizens pay for the privilege of looking at the bones of a mastodon through a window bearing the donor’s name. Then everybody marvels at how civic-minded the billionaire is, like the Titanic’s orchestra members were civic-minded. Civic seeds, my ass. Civic orchids, maybe.

You ever notice how the buildings in these stories are always named after the giver, never after the people they took it from? The Van Andel Institute. The DeVos Place. The Meijer Gardens. The Meijer Heart Center. The names are everywhere. The people who actually work the buildings — the cleaning crews, the cashiers, the construction trades — get a parking validation and an invitation to the donor ribbon-cutting where the photographer is told to get the name in the shot.

And the tax dodge. Friend, the tax dodge. The country’s largest single tax expenditures — you can look this up, OMB publishes them in Analytical Perspectives, JCT publishes them in its annual estimates — include the charitable deduction that lets the billionaires write off the civic philanthropy they are getting medals for. So when your columnist tells you the billionaire “planted the civic seeds,” what he means is the billionaire decided what to seed, took a deduction on the seed money, and got their name on the blooming. The taxpayer subsidized the seed and got the dirt under the fingernails. It is a tax-efficient civics lesson in self-congratulation, and you are the dirt.

But sure, tell me again about the unstoppable civic virtue of people who would still have more money than your entire neighborhood if the government took ninety percent of what they have. Civic seeds, my friend. The man planted them, he deducted them, and now you get to admire his harvest on a placard.

Nuclear Satire

When to use: The reader who needs to see the grotesque machinery. A high-stakes social-media exchange where being merely polite will be read as agreement.

Picture the feudal manor, somewhere in the eleventh century. The lord extracts a tenth of every harvest from the peasants, keeps them in legal bondage to his land, and disposes of any who object. The peasants are hungry; the lord’s table is overstocked. To atone for the arrangement, the lord funds the village church. The peasants attend. The priest gives thanks for the lord’s generosity. The lord is remembered, as he so often is in these stories, as a saint who planted the civic seeds that sprouted the village church.

The David Marcus column on Grand Rapids is the same document with better typography and a final-page twist that lands exactly like the church-funded-by-the-lord. The closing sentence of the column — “In fact, on the ground, billionaires make the places they live much better, and plant the civic seeds that sprout the millionaires El-Sayed claims to want” — is the doctrinal core: the billionaire is the seed-planter, the city is the garden, the working class is the soil, and the columnist is the priest.

The billionaires of Western Michigan have arranged for the public to fund the conditions of their philanthropy, underwrite their tax deductions, and meekly accept that the family’s name goes on the building they paid for with our money. Then the columnist announces that anyone who objects to the arrangement “does not express the kind of anger and condemnation toward billionaires that he and his fellow travelers — such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders — regularly perform,” which in plain English means: how dare the soil quote scripture back at the lord.

The column’s great theme is that El-Sayed wants to send civic money to the government instead, and that this would somehow destroy civic life. The column never mentions that the philanthropic tax deduction is itself a transfer to the government — specifically, a transfer the billionaires engineered themselves, in their own image, at a scale your columnist does not bother to compute. OMB publishes the table. JCT publishes the table. Taxpayers pay the bill. The billionaire gets the naming rights and is remembered for having “planted the seeds.” Government — the columnist’s favorite scare-word — is the only institution not invited to the ribbon-cutting of the garden it watered.

Carnegie built Pittsburgh, the column reminds us, as if we owed the man a debt of memory that survives the Homestead Strike, the ten thousand workers blacklisted in 1892, the private police force that shot them. The Astor fortune bought Manhattan, as if the rents extracted from immigrant tenements in the 1880s were a gift rather than a theft. The column’s nostalgia for that era is informative about the columnist. In that era, the wealthy gave because the alternative was the lamppost. Today’s billionaires are luckier. They have a columnist on retainer to write the hagiography before the lamppost comes up in conversation.

There is a saner country a few blocks from the Van Andel Institute, where the museum and the medical center and the public schools are all funded by people who decided together what the common life requires, and where the donor’s name is on the building because somebody actually likes the person, not because somebody wrote a check. That country costs more than philanthropy. It also doesn’t cost us our self-government.

The DeVos family has spent publicly reported sums to dismantle the part of that country that involves public schools. That is the seed-planting in question. The mastodon in the museum is the least of it.

Profane Scorched-Earth

When to use: The cathartic release. A reader who has absorbed the billionaire-philanthropy pitch for years and needs the full arsenal to clear the fog. Save for when ferocity is the answer and the audience can carry it.

Listen here, you generous, hardworking, tax-burned people of Grand Rapids, because I’m going to tell you what the smiling columnist’s closing thesis will not. He says — and I want to be precise about the words he used — that “on the ground, billionaires make the places they live much better, and plant the civic seeds that sprout the millionaires El-Sayed claims to want.” That is the load-bearing sentence, the thing the entire column is engineered to plant in your head. Let’s see what’s actually growing.

The DeVos family did not earn their fucking name on your museum. The Meijers did not earn their fucking name on your hospital. The Van Andels did not fucking earn their name on that building with the mastodon. They wrote a check, deducted it from their taxes, and got a plaque — and you are paying the fucking difference.

The federal government subsidizes the philanthropy of billionaires to the tune of billions of dollars a year through the charitable tax deduction. OMB publishes the table. The Joint Committee on Taxation publishes the table. The money you didn’t collect on those deductions is the money you didn’t spend on Maggie’s fucking neighborhood school, on the road the construction worker’s bus takes, on the public library your columnist is too busy shilling for the donors to mention. The billionaire takes the deduction, you take the tax bill, the columnist gets a byline, the museum gets a wing with the donor’s name on it, and everyone tells you what a generous fucking soul the donor is for “planting the civic seeds.”

Martin Luther King called this exact arrangement “socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor.” What we get to do, you see, is “vote” on a ballot privately financed, individually furnished, and individually tax-deductible.

The fucking generous soul. Betsy DeVos — that is a name worth saying out loud — spent her philanthropy money trying to dismantle the public schools of this country. The American Federation for Children. The DeVos family PAC. The school-voucher crusade. It is philanthropy in the same sense that a grenade is a hand-delivered apology. The DeVos family paid for the museum and then paid for the legislators who would close your daughter’s public school. That is the David Marcus civic story in one fucking transaction, and the columnist has the fucking nerve to write it as a tribute and close with “the civic seeds that sprout the millionaires El-Sayed claims to want.”

Civic seeds. Let’s talk about the seeds they planted. The columns that Marcus himself writes claim that billionaires, on the ground, make the places they live much better. Let’s read what that means in your zip code. Maggie, the retired voter Marcus quotes, lives in Holland two blocks from houses she cannot afford. The construction worker Marcus interviews is building the donor-named buildings. The docent Joan is grateful for the museum whose building she tours. These are the seeds the billionaire planted, and the ground those seeds are growing in is the ground where Maggie cannot afford the house two blocks from hers.

And then the column has the fucking audacity to claim that the people who object to this arrangement are waging a “war on billionaires.” A war on billionaires. The arrangement the columnist is describing — the one where the billionaires decide what gets built, where their fucking names go on it, and where the public subsidizes the bill through a tax deduction their accountants engineered — that arrangement is the one El-Sayed and Bernie and Alexandria are criticizing. They are calling it what it is. They are calling it a fucking oligarchy dressed up in civic virtue. That is not a war. That is what democracy looks like when it remembers what it was for.

Grand Rapids is a wonderful city. The mastodon in the museum is a marvel. The construction worker who told the columnist about the donor-named buildings deserves every job he gets. None of those fucking facts are the point. The point is that the column’s load-bearing sentence — “billionaires make the places they live much better and plant the civic seeds” — is shilling for a tax-subsidized donor aristocracy while lecturing the people it exploited about civic gratitude, and the fucking receipts are sitting at OMB and JCT and in the American Federation for Children’s IRS filings, and the names of the people on the fucking buildings are the names of the people who did not pay their fucking fair share.

You want a city that works? Take the fucking museum, take the fucking deduction, and build the schools and the libraries and the roads with everybody’s money on a ballot everybody gets to vote on. That is the city. That is what El-Sayed is talking about. That is not a war on billionaires. That is a war on the David Marcus business model, and it is the one war this country has been fucking losing since the Gilded Age.

By every analytical, civic, and constitutive means available to us, the war stops when the receipt stops.