Marcus Ryu, and Silicon Valley’s Self-Suffocating Disdain for Lower Taxes

Marcus Ryu is co-founder and chief executive of Guidewire Software, a Foster City, CA company that is valued at over $6 billion on the New York Stock Exchange. And while he’s a very rich man, it may surprise some that he’s a ferocious opponent of tax cuts.

As Ryu explained it in an op-ed recently written for the New York Times, people in his position don’t need a tax break. Ryu’s concern, among other things, is that “four out of every five dollars in proposed tax cuts will flow to the top 1 percent, an egregious wealth transfer to those who least need it.”

Oh well, in fairness to the 1 percent “who least need it,” Ryu might acknowledge in a quiet moment that he overstated his case a tad. Implicit in the notion of “wealth transfer” is that there’s a fixed pie of wealth before and after innovation takes place, and that Republicans merely want to shift the wealth to people like Ryu. On its own that’s odd when we consider the disdain among the superrich in Silicon Valley for the Republicans, and their strong dislike for the President (Donald Trump) calling for tax cuts, but it’s also worth pointing out that Ryu’s reasoning is off.