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 saysSen. 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:
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