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Elizabeth Warren Proposing New ‘Wealth Tax’ on ‘Very Rich’ Americans

Elizabeth Warren Proposing New ‘Wealth Tax’ on ‘Very Rich’ Americans

“I’m calling it the “Ultra-Millionaire Tax”

As we recently pointed out, Democrat hopefuls for 2020 are already trying to out-left each other on how much they want to raise taxes. Elizabeth Warren is trying to stake out new territory in that area with a proposed wealth tax.

Jeff Stein and Christopher Ingraham report at the Washington Post:

Elizabeth Warren to propose new ‘wealth tax’ on very rich Americans, economist says

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) will propose a new annual “wealth tax” on Americans with more than $50 million in assets, according to an economist advising her on the plan, as Democratic leaders vie for increasingly aggressive solutions to the nation’s soaring wealth inequality.

Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, two left-leaning economists at the University of California, Berkeley, have been advising Warren on a proposal to levy a 2 percent wealth tax on Americans with assets above $50 million, as well as a 3 percent wealth tax on those who have more than $1 billion, according to Saez.

The wealth tax would raise $2.75 trillion over a ten-year period from about 75,000 families, or less than 0.1 percent of U.S. households, Saez said.

“The Warren wealth tax is pretty big. We think it could have a significant affect on wealth concentration in the long run,” Saez said in an interview. “This is a very interesting development with deep root causes: the fact inequality has been increasing so much, particularly in wealth, and the feeling our current tax system doesn’t do a very good job taxing the very richest people.”

This proposal serves two purposes. It keeps 2020 candidate Elizabeth Warren in the news, and it’s red meat for the ‘pay your fair share’ obsessed wing of her party.

This also fits right in with Warren’s now famous ‘you didn’t build that speech’which she ripped off from a Berkeley professor. Here’s a refresher:

“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.

“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.”

See it below:

There’s one other thing worth pointing out here. Take a look at Warren’s tweet below and see if any of the language in it sounds familiar:

Does the term ‘tippy top’ ring a bell?

Remember a few weeks ago when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared on 60 Minutes and called for a top tax rate of 70 percent? Here’s the language she used, via the Hannity blog (emphasis is mine):

“Once you get to the tippie tops, on your $10 millionth, sometimes you see tax rates as high as 60% or 70%. That doesn’t mean all $10 million are taxed at an extremely high rate. But it means that as you climb up this ladder, you should be contributing more,” said Cortez.

I’ll leave you with this thought from Stephen Miller:

DONATE

Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.

Comments

the kicker is they don’t have to raise one tax, all they need to do if they were serious is to eliminate some of the schedules. the problem with raising taxes they always seem to miss their intended target e.g. the very rich and hit the middle class. they keep talking about how high the tax rates were during the Eisenhower Administration, but what they fail to mention is the volumes upon volumes of tax regs with all the loop holes for the very rich, the reason for all the tax attorneys and accountants

almost forgot I believe in a straight flat rate tax, no exemptions, no deductions, and no schedules a, b, c, or d. everyone pays the same rate, you know their fair share(that was meant to be funny)

    alaskabob in reply to ronk. | January 25, 2019 at 11:19 am

    or consider the “Fair Tax” which is linked to consumption.

      read up on the Fair Tax, which it isn’t as proposed, all it does is set a almost totally new bureaucracy as same as the old but a different perspective.

        You are a liar full of the most vile crap, and should be pilloried for it. The ONLY thing more “fair” than the FairTax would be a direct tax on expenditures with NO rebate at all (a straight consumption tax). NO ONE has the stomach for that, because we as a society have said there should be some measure for poverty where those subsisting should be free from burden.

        The FairTax does no such thing as set up a totally new bureaucracy. The FairTax does a monthly “Pre-Rebate” of the expected tax expenditure of a family based on family size and poverty rate expenditures, and then collects the taxes on sales of new goods and services at the end-user sale point, based on the census.

        As 95+% of transactions are handled by fewer than 10,000 merchants, the tax bureaucracy drops DRASTICALLY, along with the incentive to “cheat.” HHS or SSI can EASILY handle the payment of the pre-rebate based on poverty level spending.

        So how about you go and actually LEARN something about what you’re denigrating before you go and shoot off at the mouth.

        (Full Disclosure before you question that I don’t know what I’m talking about: I have a Juris Doctorate with a Concentration in Tax Law, and wrote my JD Concentration THESIS on the FairTax).

    Sanddog in reply to ronk. | January 25, 2019 at 11:24 am

    If everyone paid the same percentage, then everyone would be paying “their fair share”.

      True. But why tax INCOME at all. Income is a bad proxy for CONSUMPTION, which is the true drain on society from an individual (the use of resources for living/personal pleasure/activities of life).

      Taxing INCOME is a disincentive to work. Taxing CONSUMPTION is a disincentive to use of resources, leading to conservation. The “disposable society” becomes much less attractive, because pre-owned items are transferred tax free, as the cost of the sale between the parties is already baked into the used sale cost and the depreciation of the item. It is also a disincentive to savings, because interest is itself a form of “income” and is thus taxable, punishing you for delaying gratification.

      Taxing INCOME as a proxy for consumption is only necessary when you don’t have the ability to easily monitor consumption. The only reason to NOT tax consumption now is that it gives the Leftists a cudgel to say “look how much these people are GETTING (regardless of if they are USING it). It is societal warfare of the most evil kind, because it punishes those who limit their own drain on society.

This is a rehash of “you didn’t build that”. Since many people are hired to work this becomes “their” communal property for which they are owed more (except when unions decides to kill a business such as Eastern Airlines). I guess those 75,000 families are doomed to be forced to stay in USA with no way out. Victor Davis Hanson has pointed out that a small number of wealthy Californian taxpayers keep Cali afloat and this dependence on small groups of payers can be a house of cards. This is another way shift tax responsibility off enough other people to buy votes.

    You need a /sarcasm tag when discussing those 75K families.

    I guarantee you, if something like this becomes law, those families will FLEE the United States, and take EVERY penny of their assets with them. And it will happen VERY, VERY fast.

    aka Hoss in reply to alaskabob. | January 28, 2019 at 9:18 pm

    That’s what I thought, Bob. She pretty much took his entire “you didn’t build that” shtick with no attribution.

You. Can bet your Sweet Patootie that she would tax your five hundred dollar saving account as being subject to “wealth Tax”. Of course her money would be untaxable because she is part Native American and therefore having suffered persecution for years is not liable for this tax leveled on the “wealthy”.

So we now move from taxing income to outright confiscation of wealth. Marxists have no regard or respect for private property. They regard personal wealth as a privilege granted by the State. Ownership is an illusion, because all personal wealth is actually collectively owned by the State (the People).

‘You didn’t build that!’

Not to mention this would significantly negatively impact the stock, bond, and the real estate markets. Significantly driving down the value of the targetted assets. The Marxists will not stop at 2 or 3%. And the asset threshold at which the confiscation kicks in will continually move down.

Forward Comrades!

    alaskabob in reply to JHogan. | January 25, 2019 at 11:29 am

    Since about 47% of US citizens do not pay taxes… they didn’t build anything. Taxpayers built the roads, etc, etc.. not the “whole” population. Since the majority of those are Dems… a whole bunch of Dems didn’t build anything.

    MattMusson in reply to JHogan. | January 25, 2019 at 2:55 pm

    I say we give it a try. Roll it out for members of Congress for a five year trial period.

    And, count riding on Military Aircraft as Taxable Income.

The issue is finitely available and accessible resources, and productivity. Will a progressive tax address cost, price, affordability, or availability? How much economic, social, and political (i.e. democratic, bureaucratic) distortion is forced by these rich people? Her proposal seems to have a punitive motive.

American Human | January 25, 2019 at 11:45 am

It makes me sick to believe that people are signing on to this. If the gubmint took all the money in the country and divided it up equally among all 300+ million of us, in a few years all the same people would have all the money again.
Heck, even way back in the old Soviet Union they didn’t have wealth equality unless everyone having nothing counts as wealth equality.

Or, she could suggest what all of us do when times get tight–CUT SPENDING. Ha–sometimes I slay myself.

My Senator is a leftist crackpot. Hey Fake Indian, STFU and go back to Harvard where as John Lennon sang in Strawberry Fields Forever, “Nothing is real…”.

There was never any real definition of a “kulak.” Basically, if you had one cow and your neighbor had two, he was a kulak. Stalin announced the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class” as a necessary precondition for the progress of his program, which was, like Kamala Harris, “for the people.” Dekulakization (раскулачивание) was responsible for the deaths of about 5 million subjects of the workers’ paradise. This was necessary, the socialists argued, because the kulaks dominated the political party system (“for the rich, wealth begets power,” Zucman writes), because expropriating their wealth was necessary to fund benefits for the people (“The affluent,” Saez and Zucman write, “can contribute more to the public coffers. And given the revenue needs of the country, it is necessary”), because the kulaks were hoarders (under the headline “Elizabeth Warren is trying to save capitalism from itself,” David Atkins of Washington Monthly decries the “artificial lack of resources caused by the looting and hoarding of the obscenely wealthy”), etc.

But do our modern progressives really propose to liquidate these “hoarders” as a class?

Saez and Zucman write hopefully of the prospect that high tax rates would make the class of people with larger incomes “largely disappear.” Representative Ocasio-Cortez declares it “immoral” that we have a “system that allows billionaires to exist.” Marshall Steinbaum, the research director of the progressive Roosevelt Institute, wrote: “It’s increasingly clear that having wealthy people around is a luxury our society can no longer afford.”

And, so, here we are again: The kulaks must be liquidated as a class. But who is a kulak?

We might glean some insight into that from the progressives’ thinking in the recent free-speech debates, which goes something like this: “We’re all in favor of free speech, but Nazis should be chased from the public square, by violence if necessary, and we should harass their employers in order to ruin them financially. Also, everybody who disagrees with me is a Nazi, including children wearing hats that I don’t like.”
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You may not feel like a kulak. You may take comfort in hearing that only the “tippy-top” wealthiest people are to be expropriated in the name of social justice. Those children at Covington Catholic probably didn’t think they were Nazis a week ago, either.

History is short, if you look at it with the right kind of eyes. Some of you might want to consider looking from Zurich or Singapore.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/elizabeth-warren-tax-plan-is-asset-forfeiture/

Another wonderfully written, beautifully thought-out, and dead-on piece on this topic.

Warren’s anti-American, unconstitutional, and morally reprehensible impulse isn’t a new one. We’ve seen it all before.

    alaskabob in reply to Ragspierre. | January 25, 2019 at 1:17 pm

    Add to that … the Soviets from time to time totally changed the currency such that any saved money not in a Soviet bank became instantly worthless. Warren and her consultants know the Soviet play book works for it appeals to the SJW class for which “wealth envy” is strong.

    TrickyRicky in reply to Ragspierre. | January 25, 2019 at 1:39 pm

    I’m a dedicated reader of this blog, only commenting occasionally. Many times I am rubbed the wrong way by your comments. I feel that you are often needlessly confrontational, and you receive confrontation in return.

    That being said, your comments about Kulaks in the Soviet Union, and now in our country, are some of the most insightful and immediately relevant that I have seen posted here. Thank you. I only wish you were wrong, but you are not. We are all Kulaks to the utterly vile Democrat party.

buckeyeminuteman | January 25, 2019 at 12:09 pm

The problem isn’t a lax of revenue. The problem is over-spending. LIMIT YOUR SPENDING!!!

funny how people like her always suggest taxes ABOVE their own self worth.
her reported worth is around 8.75 million, bet we never see her set a tax for 5 million and above.

“…The wealth tax would raise $2.75 trillion over a ten-year period from about 75,000 families, or less than 0.1 percent of U.S. households, Saez said…”

No, it won’t raise anywhere near that amount of money. France tried this a few years ago. Guess what happened? Every millionaire and billionaire that would have been subject to the wealth tax got the hell out of France.

There are lots of ways you can avoid paying taxes. Generally the U.S. won’t allow you to renounce your citizenship if you do so for tax purposes. But so what? If you move to a country that doesn’t allow dual citizenship that country won’t recognize your U.S. citizenship anymore. Of course, the U.S. won’t recognize your new citizenship, but again, so what? The USG would be powerless to do anything to you or seize your assets unless you’re stupid enough to return to the U.S. Your new country simply won’t extradite you or recognize that the U.S. has any authority over you. As long as you stay out of the U.S. your new country will protect you.

People hate paying taxes. California just revised downward the estimated annual taxes they expected to rake in on legal marijuana sales. In fact, they just cut the estimate in half. Depending on the municipality combined state and local taxes can double the price of pot. So most pot smokers (no, I’m not one) simply buy their pot how they’ve always bought their pot; illegally.

Here in Texas tax free weekend is perhaps the busiest day in retail. I never understood that as state sales tax is only 6.25% and local taxing authorities can add an additional 2%. There are a lot better sales when you’ll save much more than 8.25%. But it’s so popular simply because people aren’t paying taxes.

These commies are stupid. When they raise taxes they collect less in revenue. There are lots of ways to avoid paying taxes. The “super rich” will never stick around and allow the commies to rip them off every year for ten years.

    Ragspierre in reply to Arminius. | January 25, 2019 at 1:21 pm

    It’s useful to recall that Duh Donald was proposing a “wealth tax” only a few years ago.

    Maybe he’s evolved. Maybe he can devolve.

‘Ultra millionaire tax.’ That’s DOG WHISTLE for ‘We’ll eventually confiscate everyone’s IRA.’

These lying greedy marxist need to be kicked in the teeth (metaphorically speaking, of course).

It’s only January 2019, can you imagine how nutty the proposals from the lunatic left will get by September?

Divide and conquer. It’s been the Democrat modus operandi for at least 3 decades now but it hit warp speed when the election of the community organizer.

Thing about these types of taxes is that it is just the starting point. Institute a wealth tax at 2% for those over $50M today… sure, why not since I don’t have $50M… problem is within 10 years its 3% for anyone over $20M and within 20 years its 5% for anything over $5M because the demands for free shit never stop… ever.

    I’m SINCERELY hoping so. I want the full Nutty-ness of the Leftists on display for the whole world to see, with them trying to climb all over each other to say they’ll raise taxes the most, so that even the most basic economist can say “hold up there, that will destroy the economy.” Then the Leftist will say “that’s the plan.” Then the game will be OVER.

While Ocasio-Cortez’s plan is a tax on income, Warren’s proposal would tax wealth on assets.

This smells of desperation because “soak the rich” income tax schemes usually get pushed on the middle class, but a wealth tax is going to be hard to sneak around. This is going to hit a lot of Democratic donors.

With liberals, it’s always about money.

Clearly, Warren believes that she, personally, can make $49 million some day but will never have more. May she be correct many times over.

One of the biggest threats to our republic is the Billionaires. So I propose a “Net Worth Tax.” To make it work there would need to be a limit to donations to non-profit corps (say $1,000,000 annually). Then each year the Billionaires would be taxed 10% of their net worth over, say, $6 Billion. So Bill Gates would pay $9 this year.

Conveniently setting the threshold well above her own $10 million net worth. You fool no one, you disingenuous hag.

Two problems:

2.75 trillion sounds a lot more impressive so they give the 10 year number than the annual 275 billion that wouldn’t even cover the paperwork for some of their crazy socialist schemes. (and the projection is most likely wrong because the generated money will probably drop drammatically year over year…see next problem)

Being a tax on wealth and assets rather than income, this money can be continually confiscated, even if someone never adds another dime to their wealth. This will wither away net worth from the top and eventually lead to expatriation and other means of withering away this projected government honey hole. That money, once earmarked, will lead to more aggressive confiscation. The bar for the “top” will eventually drift down until everyone making any money needs to pay a “fair share” of their wealth (not just their income).

A tax rate of 1/1024% would be the fairest rate.

I am at a loss how this would be constitutional… The sixteenth ammendment authorized the collection of an income tax… Wouldn’t this be a takings issue? They take a dollar and provide me with just compensation of… a dollar?

    The requirement would be “due process,” and that “Due Process” would be the passing of legislation by the Government (in addition to being a “political question” which the SCOTUS would refuse to hear in the first instance anyway).

      You also have to get over the direct taxation clause which requires that direct taxes be apportioned among the States based on population. The 16th Amendment overcame the Supreme Court’s ruling (Pollack) that blocked taxation of income from property as a direct tax, but the Amendment only allows tax on the income from property, not tax on the property itself.

Not just individuals, Lizzy. Go after billionaire foundations too. I’m thinking about the holdings of universities. We’ll have never heard progressives attacking a progressive politician as when the latter threatens the holdings of the Harvards and Yales of the American Left. This could be fun.

Voice_of_Reason | January 26, 2019 at 9:41 am

Warren’s proposal is a sure-fire way to move enormous amounts of wealth offshore.

Hooray on the wealth tax:

Confiscate 90 % or Soros’ and Bezos’ wealth, world wide and give it to the “pur”

France imposed a wealth tax, the wealthy fled.

I used to toss out a deal to leftists: we’ll give you the tax rates you currently want, however, whenever someone complains that the rich still aren’t paying enough someone gets to come up from behind them and put a .45 through their brain.

You know whatever taxes they get now, nothing is ever going to be enough, and that’s why I knew they’d never go for my deal even in the hypothetical.