A writer for Bloomberg wrote a rather decent OpEd on Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax.
He went to Twitter to announce his article by describing it as “looting mansions.”
A Democrat Illinois State Senator thought that was a feature, not a bug.
Counterpoint:
"Warren's wealth tax is an extremely good idea. It is the tax-code equivalent of looting mansions." https://t.co/iIk46WMnAB
— Daniel Biss (@DanielBiss) September 6, 2019
People who know the history of the Soviet Union know that the Soviets encouraged the revolution by empowering the poor who joined the Red Army to loot the property of the wealthy, most of who were not nobles but successful business people and educated professionals.
The Communists weaponized envy to an incredible degree.
This was captured in the movie Doctor Zhivago, where the Doctor’s family home is turned into group housing and the poor are stealing everything that isn’t nailed down.
More and more we see the Democrats coming out in favor of policies that come straight out of the Soviet Revolution.
But this time they’ll do
socialismMarxismcommunism right. Yeah, sure,This was done in Cuba after Castro as well. A high school teacher of mine emigrated afterwards and they told the family the only thing they could leave with was one bag each to carry, so not their family heirloom furniture, etc.
When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
When the only tool you have is the hammer and sickle…
It’s funny- should they try to confiscate that wealth, it would totally disappear.
Even if Bezos and co were to try to help and transfer it to the State, it would just up and go away.
What those clowns don’t know and understand is that the rich don’t sit on bins full of cash notes and gold coins ala Scrooge McDuck. That wealth is invested in something- stock in companies, bonds, or other similar things.
Let’s say Bernie or Fauxcahontas wants to confiscate the billions of dollars a company like Amazon is worth, and Jeff wants to cooperate. Just write a check, yeah? Nope- because they don’t have the total sum value of the company sitting in a bank account. It’s all in stock.
Well, just sell the stock then. Problem is, the value would crash to pretty much nothing immediately- and would trickle down to a lot of other companies.
Warren is disingenuous at best. Outright lying POS is more like it.
Let’s start with this. Warren’s wealth tax is 2% of income over $50 million. The 1% limit is just under $500,000/year but all together the top 1% earned just about $2 Trillion. If they took every single penny from the top 1% in the country, that whole $2 T, they could run the country about six months. The amount of difference they’d get by taking 2% of income above $50 million wouldn’t pay for any of her proposed programs.
Which assumes, as Joe in PNG says, that it’s just lying there and people won’t rearrange their lives to put that income into something else. The “CEO tax” of the late ’80s is what got CEOs paid in stock options instead of dollars. People and systems adapt. The government will probably lose revenue.
2% of the income over $50 Million is nothing to the bottomless pit of the socialist appetites. It’s substantial to the people they’re penalizing for success.
A huge point Adam Smith made waaaayyyy back when is that when taxation is onerous or capacious, people will spend productive energy to try and hide the wealth they have.
If taxation is low and seen as fair, people will spend that productive energy making money.
What often happens is that high tax laws become a more socially acceptable form of Fascism. Companies that toe the Party line (and kick back a far amount of cash back to the Party) are given tax incentives, favorable regulations, and all sorts of favors. Those that don’t are taxed and regulated to death.