Ranting On...Angelina Jolie and the Mansion Tax

On this weekend, when we are sitting down and giving thanks with our friends and families, perhaps no person on Earth has more to be thankful for than Angelina Jolie.  The actress, who turns forty next year, pretty much has it all.  She has an insanely successful professional career, working as an actress on major blockbuster films like Salt while also winning a pair of Oscars and has a burgeoning career as a director, with soon-to-be-released Unbroken on-track to be a major awards season player (perhaps even winning Jolie a third golden man).  She’s insanely wealthy-her estimated net worth is roughly $400 million, a sum that is larger than the GDP of some countries.  She’s got a seemingly lovely personal life, being happily married to one of the sexiest men on the planet and having six children that she clearly dotes upon.  She’s still one of the most beautiful individuals on the face of the planet, with lips and cheekbones that a Grecian statue would envy.  And thanks to her humanitarian work, she’s widely respected and when she’s not picking up trophies for her film work, she’s picking them up for her charity work (she was recently made an honorary Dame Commander by the Queen).

All-in-all, pretty much no one is feeling sorry for Angelina Jolie, and I thought she was wise enough to know this.  However, in a recent interview with Channel 4’s Jon Snow (a British journalist), she made a comment regarding an upcoming property tax hike in the UK being potentially a deterrent from her buying a home in London.  This interview happened this past week, but has started to gather press, and quite frankly it’s only a matter of time before the attacks start being unleashed (looking at message boards and Twitter, they’ve already begun).

The problem for Jolie in this regard is two-fold.  One, the property tax only applies to homes that are worth more than $3.2 million, an astronomical sum even in London, where the average home price is nearly $1 million.  That she is complaining about a tax that will effect a sum of money that most of her fans and the American/European populace will never be able to reach, much less spend on a secondary home, reeks of being out-of-touch.  And though she’s a movie star that looks like Aphrodite and is more likely to have dinner with the Queen or the President than she is an average person, the public still demands that their celebrities be approachable.

The second point is that the public loathes when rich people complain about taxes.  It’s perhaps the biggest problem affecting the Republican Party today-that they are seen as standing up for the rich with their tax problems rather than the middle class.  Even if the tax may seem unreasonable (I would need to do a bit more research into it before I issued a verdict), Angelina Jolie has $400 million-no one is feeling sympathy for her because she can’t buy a beautiful British manor to be her second or third home.

This is something that you see countless wealthy people doing, and it’s always a complete disaster for them.  Hillary Clinton ran into an issue recently when she declared she was “broke” after she left the White House, even though anyone who actually has an understanding of the phrase broke realizes that she and Bill were hardly “broke.”  He was about to be making hundreds of thousands of dollars on a speaking tour, while she had just been elected as a United States senator, the salary of which, while not nearly as much as Mrs. Clinton would have made in the private sector, surely is not what one would constitute being broke.  The same could be said for Ann Romney when she complained about Mitt Romney’s struggles with money in the late 1960’s, despite conservative estimates being that they had roughly $400,000 worth of stock at the time (adjusting for inflation) and neither of them had to have a job during their "broke" period.

The reality is that there may be some credence to lowering this specific tax-again, I said that I need to research it, but as a general (and basically complete) rule it’s a TERRIBLE idea for wealthy people, particularly entertainers and politicians, to complain about their taxes, because the public that they are reliant upon for either votes or their salaries do not agree, and as a whole make an immensely smaller amount of money.  Jolie has broken one of the unwritten rules of public life-never complain about the perils of wealth or celebrity.  The same thing goes for complaining about a lack of privacy or the continued viciousness of the press, and those are issues that I think that, if the public has a rational thought to themselves, they probably agree with-it’s near criminal what someone like Jolie has to go through in terms of constantly being photographed, lied about in the tabloids, and having to protect her children from the press.  However, the money issue, for someone who has $400 million, is never going to get general sympathy and is in fact going to produce ire.  She should know better than to put her endorsement and celebrity capital behind such a silly, self-serving cause guaranteed to result in backlash.