Free Republic

Elizabeth Warren has been justly criticized for the magical math in her Medicare for All proposal. That health plan would cost perhaps $34 trillion, according to outside estimates. But Ms. Warren says the true figure is only—alakazam!—$20.5 trillion. Her wealth tax is the same way, as a fiscal fact check this week demonstrates. Ms. Warren wants to tax the net worth of affluent Americans 2% a year on assets above $50 million, and 6% on billionaires. She says it would raise $3.75 trillion over 10 years. Her campaign cites a letter from two economists at UC Berkeley, Emmanuel Saez and...

Elizabeth Warren’s proposed wealth tax—an annual levy on the total value of one’s assets, not income—has drawn a lot of attention. The senator’s claim that her proposal would cost “ultramillionaires” only an annual 2% and billionaires an annual 6% wildly understates the truth. Wealthy people don’t maintain bank accounts with millions or billions of dollars of liquid cash; they invest their assets. Those hit with the wealth tax would have to sell assets each year to pay it, subjecting them to income tax as well. The actual cost would often be several times greater than 2% or 6%. Ms. Warren...

WASHINGTON— Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax would raise $2.7 trillion over a decade, $1.1 trillion short of her presidential campaign’s estimates, according to a new analysis from the Penn-Wharton Budget Model. The difference stems in part from disagreement over the pervasiveness of tax avoidance. Still, the new study projects that the wealth tax would raise more money than critics such as former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers have argued, and the analysis suggests it could be a significant new revenue source targeted at very few people. “This is not nickels and dimes, even in our estimate,” said Kent Smetters, who runs the...

No excerpt from Bloomberg allowed, story here. He makes the point that if the tax code becomes a tool to punish people, it loses its legitimacy.

... Name a tax and there’s a way to reduce it, delay it or not ever really pay it, if you have the right adviser. Upset that the 2017 tax act took away your deduction for state and local taxes in New York? Change your residence to Florida, as President Trump recently did, and those taxes are gone. Don’t want to pay capital gains tax? Well, you can decide when to sell those investments. If you need the money, you could borrow against the account and leave the capital gains taxes for another day. And if you die still holding...

WASHINGTON — Senator Elizabeth Warren’s proposed wealth tax would slow the United States economy, reducing growth by nearly 0.2 percentage points a year over the course of a decade, an outside analysis of the plan estimates. The preliminary projection from the Penn Wharton Budget Model, which will be unveiled on Thursday in Philadelphia, is the first attempt by an independent budget group to forecast the economic effects of the tax that has become a centerpiece of Ms. Warren’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. The assessment found that if the tax raised as much new federal revenue as Ms. Warren...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren is campaigning for a 2% surtax on anyone’s net worth over $50 million and 6% on more than $1 billion. Most discussion of the wealth tax has focused on whether it could generate sufficient revenue to fund Ms. Warren’s various spending plans, and the revenue likely would be far less than she projects. But that focus overlooks the ways the massive new tax would harm all Americans. If you take comfort in Ms. Warren’s claim that her tax would apply only to the wealthiest Americans, think again. In 1913 the progressives of that era sold a federal...

... The constitutional objection to wealth taxation is based on two clauses that require any “direct tax” to be apportioned among the states based on population. So, since 12 percent of the population lives in California, Californians must pay 12 percent of any direct tax. For the Warren and Sanders wealth taxes, that would be a deal breaker. To match revenue fractions to population percentages, as the Constitution’s direct tax clauses demand, we estimate that the wealth tax rate in West Virginia — the poorest state per capita — would need to be roughly 10 times the rate in more...

Warren says she'd talk to Bill Gates about what he'd pay under wealth tax: 'I promise it's not $100 billion' Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) responded to former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates’ reported concerns over what he would have to pay under the senator’s proposed tax on the wealthy. “I'm always happy to meet with people, even if we have different views. @BillGates, if we get the chance, I'd love to explain exactly how much you'd pay under my wealth tax. (I promise it's not $100 billion.)” Warren tweeted Wednesday. Gates spoke with The New York Times writer...

Neil Irwin has an interesting piece about that concept. Basically, if you confiscate people’s wealth to pay for government freebies today, that wealth won’t be there anymore when you want to do the same thing tomorrow. As Irwin writes, Warren’s 6 percent wealth tax on billionaires would quickly eat away at wealth held in assets that don’t grow in value much over time (such as real estate and just generic stuff like yachts); even her 2 percent tax on those with more than $50 million could entirely cancel out returns from safe investments. More aggressive investments could continue to grow...

Elizabeth Warren has finally finished spending all the fake money she intends to raise from her wealth tax, a policy that is unlikely to be enacted, and, were it somehow to become law, would almost certainly raise substantially less money than she claims. The latest idea that Warren wants to finance with her wealth tax is an $800 billion plan to spend more on public schools, which includes grants for schools with low-income and disabled students, as well as $50 billion for school infrastructure. The plan follows a $1.25 trillion plan to make public college tuition free and cancel a...

Elizabeth Warren is among the strongest contenders and Democratic hopefuls for the presidential election of 2020. During the fourth Democratic debate, on October 15, her “Wealth Tax Plan” received close attention as to how it could reduce income inequality in the United States.The central argument of Warren's the wealth-tax proposal is this: through a progressive wealth tax system — which means those with more wealth will pay higher tax rates — the wealthiest people in America will pay their “fair share” and that fair share will enable the equal redistribution of wealth. Set forth by French economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel...

In America, if you play by the rules, working to earn a living and saving to provide for the future, taxes take a piece of your earnings. If you win a state lottery, you owe tax. But if you get lucky in the lottery of life and land an inheritance, you owe no federal tax. That isn’t fair, is it? Extending the federal tax code to include inheritances would end that inequity. Inheritance taxes — regulated differently in the states that have them — are a levy paid by a person who inherits money or property of a person who...

Entrepreneur Andrew Yang slammed Sen. Elizabeth Warren's (D-Mass.) proposed wealth tax because it has been tested and repealed in other countries.“A wealth tax makes a lot of sense in principle. The problem is that it’s been tried in Germany, France, Denmark, Sweden and all those countries ended up repealing it because it had massive implementation problems and did not generate the revenue that they projected," Yang said during the presidential debate on Tuesday evening in Ohio."If we can't learn from the failed experiences of other countries, what can we learn from? We should not be looking to other countries'...

As rich people in the U.K. fret over Brexit and the possibility of an avowed socialist coming to power, Italy and other European countries are slashing taxes to tempt the jet set to relocate. Of mounting concern for many of Britain’s wealthiest is the possibility that Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s embattled government could give way to a high-tax Labour government led by Jeremy Corbyn. A fund manager described the anxious attitude of the wealthy as “in case of Corbyn, break glass.” That concern coupled with the uncertainty created by Brexit and its potential impact on the U.K economy, means some...

Why do liberals think rich people have money just lying around, like Scrooge McDuck swimming in a giant pool of gold coins? That’s the myth behind plans to tax Americans’ wealth, as Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders both propose. Ms. Warren wants an annual asset tax of 2% on households worth more than $50 million, and 3% if you’re worth more than $1 billion. Mr. Sanders would tax “extreme wealth” starting at 1% on households worth $32 million and topping out at 8% on those worth $10 billion or more. Whereas the Soviets confiscated wealth virtually overnight, at least...

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders wants to tax billionaires out of existence, or at least make them an endangered species. His proposed wealth tax of up to 8 percent per year would mean “the wealth of billionaires would be cut in half over 15 years,” he says.The progressive tax would start at 1 percent on retained wealth over $32 million, rising to 2 percent over $50 million, and so on, reaching to the top rate of 8 percent on wealth over $10 billion. Whatever is left would be taxed again the following year, and every year until it was gone.Let’s...

Does this sound like a healthy economy to you? * In nine of the last 10 years, the economy has grown more slowly than professional forecasters had predicted. * Annual G.D.P. growth has not reached 3 percent in almost 15 years. * Median net worth for American households has declined, after adjusting for inflation, since the late 1990s. Those are all big warning signs. They show that the United States is suffering through an era of slow growth — and that the gains from that growth are flowing disproportionately to a small slice of mostly affluent households, making the gains...

Somebody is about to become rather unpopular with the socialists in the Democratic base. 2020 candidate Andrew Yang sat down with John Harwood to take some questions and the subject of the wealth tax came up. While Yang claimed to “understand the spirit and intent of it,” he went on to say that it could be a disaster to actually implement. Supporters of Elizabeth Warren, who initially cooked up this constitutionally dubious idea, and Bernie Sanders, who recently one-upped her on it , are not going to be thrilled with Mr. Yang’s evaluation, as sensible as it may be....

Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders on Tuesday rolled out his plan to levy an “extreme wealth tax” on millionaires and billionaires, which he plans to enforce through the creation of a “national wealth registry.” “Today, the United States has more income and wealth inequality than almost any major country on Earth, and it is worse now than at any time since the 1920s,” Sanders said in his proposal. Sanders’ annual tax on the top 0.1 percent would apply to Americans with a net worth of over $32 million, or about 180,000 households, and would raise approximately $4.35 trillion over...