Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/06/13/enlightened-self-interest.html
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It’s easy for millionaires to answer a poll that says they’d be “cool with it.” Meanwhile they’re already making calls to the Panama Papers guy to start moving money. If this actually does pass it will be interesting to see how many fortunes are at the $49 000 000 threshold and not a penny more.
The easier solution is just to charge everyone on the Forbes list $2000000 a year.
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Nothing focuses the mind like the sound of a guillotine blade being sharpened.
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The correct response to “The billionaires will up and leave” is, “Good riddance!”
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If a person does this sort of thing and renounces their citizenship, deny them a visa. That and start making law that punishes offshoring like this as criminal tax evasion if you are a citizen.
Tough on crime, deadbeats and immigration. Conservatives will love it!
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They like to tell us that giving people things makes them lazy. It stands to reason, then, that taking things away will make people work harder. Wealth tax as economic stimulus, I like it.
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Wouldn’t it be fun if all laws were done by thinking of what various tiny minorities might do if they were enacted?
We can’t make it mandatory to sell pasteurized milk, a tiny number of suicidal ‘whole milk’ enthusiasts will move away to Somalia to drink the milk of freedom!
Maybe instead let’s try making laws for the good of all. Sounds insane and politically unfeasible. Maybe if the US ever becomes a democracy again.
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Majority of American millionaires support a wealth tax on American millionaires
I’m all in, please send a check today!
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The Constitution restricts the sorts of taxes that Congress can create. The original document required that direct taxes be apportioned among the states according to population. The sixteenth amendment carved out an exception to this for a tax on income.
To tax wealth as Elizabeth Warren wants, there would need to be another constitutional amendment. There is no chance that such a thing could pass.
Warren is an accomplished lawyer. She knows all this. Her advocacy of a wealth tax is just noise to excite her base, not a realistic proposal.
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Of course, nothing of the sort will happen until a majority of Australian billionaires named Murdoch support a wealth tax.
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So we can sign you up as one of Warren’s opponents, then?
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As has been said by others:
Every billionaire is a failure of policy.
Tax the rich. And if they won’t pay, eat the rich.
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The Federal government charges a lot of non-income taxes. There are also fees and fines and attachments.
In addition to income taxes, I’ve paid FCC taxes, FAA taxes, and “user fees” to just be present on federal land (a.k.a. Our land, your land, this lang) to multiple separate federal agencies.
As you say, Warren is an accomplished lawyer. Getting around the constitutional restrictions for a wealth tax would seem many times easier than actually getting it passed.
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The billionaires might leave if we tax them? Good. If they leave and renounce their citizenship it’ll be illegal for them to keep meddling in our elections.
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Nothing stops anyone from voluntarily donating money to the federal government. All these wealthy people who claim to want to pay more in taxes are hypocrites. If you feel you are under taxed give more money out of your pocket to the government. Warren Buffet is a loud “Tax me more!” hypocrite, while he claims to want to pay more, his company fights tooth and nail not to pay a BILLION dollars in taxes it owes.
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I’m not sure how eliminating mortgage deductions parses out - like are there tiers of income that are balanced against the amount you can deduct? - but it’s understandable why that polls poorly. We might say that it’s landlords who are against it, but as just a basic homeowner, it’s a helpful deduction. FWIW it’s not the mortgage itself but the interest and property taxes, which end up being a considerable amount of any mortgage payment. There’s far more people like me - just struggling along trying to make it all work who’d like to not have a few deducutions taken away - than there are multimillionaires.
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The most pathetic thing about that tired old tu quoque argument is how many temporarily embarrassed millionaires still voluntarily wheel it out more than a decade after the crash of 2008.
Yeah, that one was less likely to fly with the surveyed group. The mortgage deductions are a uniquely American phenomenon, tied to a lot of “American Dream” baggage about home ownership and, as you say, hitting a lot more people a lot more hard than it would Warren’s proposal (which, I suspect, would exclude the value of primary residence from the total wealth calculation).
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