Click here: to donate by Credit Card
Or here: to donate by PayPal
Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794
Thank you very much and God bless you.
Posted on 07/24/2026 8:19:43 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
If you ever wished you could be counted among billionaires, your wish might come true soon if the socialists get their way. Of course, it’s not that you’ll have a billion-dollar net worth. Rather, you’ll be subject to the same wealth tax that progressives say they want to foist onto billionaires.
What Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky said of war applies to the wealth tax: you may not care about it, but it cares about you. Recently, California Democrat Rep. Ro Khanna published his own personal manifesto, “Why I Support a Billionaire Wealth Tax.”
But he quickly pulled the mask back even further, revealing the true targets of his tax scheme.
Khanna started arguing to tax billionaires, then halfway through the manifesto decided it should be centimillionaires — $100-million net worth. By the end, he was going after $50-million-aires.
At that rate, give it a year or two, and the wealth tax will be $50 thousand, not $50 million.
This wouldn’t be the first time progressives pulled this kind of bait and switch — it’s what they did with the income tax. Billionaires are the cheese in the mousetrap, a marketing prop to pass the tax before going after the real target.
Once the tax is in place, the communists can get to work knocking zeros off the threshold until it hits pretty much anybody with a job or savings or a home.
This just happened in New York. Comrade Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Socialist mayor, campaigned on enacting new taxes for billionaires.
He’s already pushing tax hikes on millionaires.
Again, this is nothing new. It’s the same play progressives ran with the income tax.
It was just a tax on the rich, they promised at the time — for annual incomes equivalent to $15 million today. Back in 1908, Democrat nominee William Jennings Bryan called for taxing “swollen fortunes” of men of large incomes.
“Wealth may bear its proportionate share of the burdens of government,”
Of course, the rich were the bait to get the middle class into the trap. Today, the income tax hits two-thirds of Americans, starting at $15,000, not $15 million.
So much for swollen fortunes.
Meanwhile, the tax that started at a rate of 1% to 7% on millionaires now hits the middle class at a 35% marginal rate. Throw in additional taxes on income for Social Security, Medicare and state income tax, and the marginal rate is 50% in places like California.
That’s just the dollars that people lose. It doesn’t include the billions of hours Americans spend in an annual month-long humiliation ritual, financial colonoscopy, under threat of audit and imprisonment.
So, it’s nice of progressives to spring the trap early by already removing zeros from the original target of their wealth tax. But even if the tax were limited to billionaires, wealth taxes are catastrophically destructive.
Progressives can’t grasp this because their understanding of billionaires seems to be informed by a cartoon duck who swims around in a vault of gold coins. In reality, billionaires keep nearly all their wealth invested in businesses — Walmart, Chick-fil-A, Tesla, and the like.
So, every dollar taken in a wealth tax isn’t scooped out of the gold pool but is liquidated along with the jobs and innovation built by that investment. The companies fade, replaced with generous funding for Somali “Learing” Centers, left-wing NGOs to riot for social justice and starting new and interesting wars.
And the businesses fade fast — at Khanna’s 5% annual wealth tax, you essentially cancel the investment returns. As in, billionaires should just spend the money on yachts and supermodels instead of parking it in jobs and innovation.
Even if progressives grasped this reality, they’d probably keep pushing a billionaire tax because it’s one of their few schticks that polls well. Of course, it’s just the first act of a tragedy.
Khanna’s already pushing for the proceeds to seed a one-year universal basic income that would pay millions to sit on the couch, including illegal aliens.
It’s essentially a venture investment for trillions of dollars in vote-buying bread and circuses forever. The great economist Frédéric Bastiat once said government is the fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.
Taxing billionaires — and now millionaires — is the cheese in the mousetrap.
|
|
Click here: to donate by Credit Card Or here: to donate by PayPal Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794 Thank you very much and God bless you. |
If they start doing this, the billionaires, millionaires, and the middle class will have a good reason to join forces.
The billionaires, and the hundred millionaires, have all made their money inaccessible to taxation. So, to raise the necessary money, they have to come down the line.
One of the biggest sources of untaxed wealth in the USA is what’s contained 401K plans, ultimately the liberals will go after the retirement plans of individual Americans.
At some point in the future, we will have a stock market crash where people lose billions on paper, that will be used a reason to turn over control of those plans to the Government which will ultimately lead to taxation.
Their true target is the middle class as they cannot fully implement their agenda until they are able to eliminate the middle class. The final outcome will be equal pain except for those in the political class.
Oh, come on!
It’s a one time tax!
True.
America needs a Pinochet now more than ever before.
Politicians apparently don’t know anything about human nature or they’re pathological liars…or both. Ppl need purpose in their lives. If most ppl are getting UBI & just sitting around in their BVDs, expect many of them to get into mischief because they’re bored to death. That’s when the real fun starts.
Time to start playing “Cowboys & Muslims’’.
Now it gets everybody except them and their "charitable foundations."
So you work and pay taxes on income, capital gains and other profits. And now they want to tax your after tax money, the tax sequel cometh….
Tax the truly rich who really didn’t earn it, the unionized government workers with well lobbied huge pensions, salaries and benefits. With highly progressive tax rates. Don’t hit the little guys, rather the big guys who kept receiving higher pay and pension promises in lieu of government laying aside funds now to cover the actuarial costs of those promises. Non-government union pensions and pensions for non-unionized government workers should remain tax free because their level wasn’t warped by non-adversarial feedback. Laws and constitutional rules that prohibit not paying the pensions in full don’t prevent this. They, like private paychecks ARE being paid in full; they are just being taxed. And has any Democrat ever claimed there was something they couldn’t tax? Historically they’ll tax anything they can get away with politically.
The House and Senate are full of millionaires.
Figure out how they hide their wealth and emulate that.
The uniparty will never allow their wealth to be confiscated.
Deep State’s definition of wealthy: Anyone collecting a private sector paycheck.
Personally, if socialists start violating my God given rights, I will defend my rights by any means necessary. I will never acquiesce to the demented left.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.