Abigail Edna Disney, 61, is an American documentary film producer, philanthropist, and social activist.
She married Pierre Norman Hauser in 1988, lives in New York City, and has four children.
Abigail and her husband Pierre Hauser created The Daphne Foundation in 1991 in order to fund programs that handle the causes and effects of poverty in the five regions of New York City.
She is the granddaughter of Roy O. Disney and the grand-niece of Walt Disney.
Abigail explains how the tax system enables rich people to avoid paying income taxes. She has been arguing publicly for years that the United States should implement a moderate wealth tax to close the widening gap between the rich and poor.
The heiress to the Walt Disney Company claimed that the U.S. economy is in an “upside-down structure” in which some people are constantly working “to make ends meet,” while wealthy individuals are “sitting on their rear ends” while “not paying taxes.”
“The fact is that people are sitting on their rear ends on their couches earning and not paying taxes on money while people are going out every day to a job and working their butts off just to make ends meet,” Abigail told on CNN’s New Day.
“There are people flying private aircraft right now who would rather be shot than get on a first-class seat on a normal airline because it would mean they would have to walk through an air terminal… and that is terribly dangerous to democracy, to society.
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Abigail has a net worth estimated to $120 million after inheriting a fortune as the granddaughter of Walt Disney’s brother Roy, who co-founded the iconic studio with his brother in 1923.
A documentary film producer herself, she’s part of a group called the Patriotic Millionaires who are campaigning for other ultra-wealthy Americans to pay more taxes.
Back in 2019, Abigail publicly criticized the huge compensation packages received by current Disney CEO Bob Iger. This was unexpected as you don’t often hear someone say that some other billionaire doesn’t deserve the money they make off the backs of underpaid workers.
The mom of four went on to summarize the arguments she made in an op-ed published by The Atlantic, which followed a ProPublica report released earlier this month that set off a wave of calls for increased taxes on the wealthy.
ProPublica reported that based on tax-return data received from an anonymous source, billionaires including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg have paid little to no taxes in recent years.
Abigail explained that the money should have been going to people who have suffered due to the pandemic.
“If we had invested more in our health systems if we had invested more in making sure the low-income and middle-income workers had some life that’s secure,” she said. “Millions and millions of people who work full time in this country did not have enough money laid by to ensure that they had enough to eat for the next week, much less however long this is gonna last.”
Abigail isn’t asking the government to raise taxes on middle-class people. She is targeting the billionaires. A tax rate of 40% seems high, but the ultra-rich can pay more to help the country recover from the pandemic.
She compared the need for wealth, wealth, and more wealth to an addiction. Just as with alcohol or another substance, a drinker or consumer feels the need to keep collecting whatever it was that made them feel good.
Abigail is one of 98 rich people worldwide who recently signed the “Millionaires for Humanity” letter, calling for governments to tax them higher in the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic.
“As COVID-19 strikes the world, millionaires like us have a critical role to play in healing our world, no, we are not the ones caring for the sick in intensive care wards,” the letter reads. “We are not driving the ambulances that will bring the ill to hospitals.”
“We are not restocking grocery store shelves or delivering food door to door,” the letter continued. “But we do have money, lots of it. Money that is desperately needed now and will continue to be needed in the years ahead, as our world recovers from this crisis.”
According to the letter, the right and only choice to making sure no individual goes without in the aftermath of COVID-19 is to “Tax us. Tax us. Tax us.”