Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, has announced her bid for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Warren, as she has throughout her career, is campaigning on a theme of ending wealth and income inequality in America. Maybe some of you remember when it was Warren, not President Obama, who created the “you didn’t build that,” theme of anti-capitalist politics.
Warren’s style hasn’t changed much in the six years since then. If anything her tirades against wealth have become more strident. She has happily attempted to assume the mantle of the most radical progressive Democrat.
To burnish her radical bona fides, Warren has just released her tax plan, a whopper set to take $2.75 trillion (yup, with a T) from America’s wealthiest over ten years in the form of a wealth tax. This is money that has already been taxed by the income tax and possibly by capital gains taxes, and most likely will be subjected to an estate tax, but Warren wants to come in for another round of carcass grazing to take a fourth layer of taxation on the same earnings.
It’s hard to imagine the extent of the negative impact on America’s economy of taking $2.75 trillion from the country’s most productive workers and giving it to the counter-productive government. Do Warren and others like her not realize that savings equals investment, and every dollar of savings they take from the wealthy and waste on government bureaucracy is a detriment to the economy?
At Fox News, Adam Shaw reports on Warren’s proposal:
2020 presidential hopeful Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., is proposing a new “wealth tax” on Americans with more than $50 million in assets, as well as other measures that include a significant hike in funding for the Internal Revenue Service.
“We need structural change. That’s why I’m proposing something brand new – an annual tax on the wealth of the richest Americans. I’m calling it the ‘Ultra-Millionaire Tax’ & it applies to that tippy top 0.1% – those with a net worth of over $50M,” Warren, who sits on the left of her party, tweeted Thursday afternoon.
The Washington Post reported the proposal involves a 2-percent wealth tax on those with more than $50 million in assets, and an additional 3 percent on those with more than $1 billion.
Read more here.
