Senator Elizabeth Warren proposes a wealth tax on "ultra-millionaires." Note that in 1913, the federal income tax was sold as a tax on the richest of the rich in America.
Thanks for this. My fear is that there are not many who understand what you lay out, or who want to understand, or who have the K-12 background that would allow them to understand. We live in a "Tinkerbelle" world where 2+2=5, or whatever you want it to be.
Coincidentally, I just did some graphics on Chris Rufo and California's "Empire of Fraud". Put simply, Warren will STEAL ALL THE MONEY, just like Newsom, Walz and the rest.
By naming Jeff Bezos as the source of all the money she wants to misspend, she targets only one person. Not that she was going to get his vote anyway, but the other hundreds of millions Americans don't hear their name, so they can just laugh nervously, hoping they won't appear on the next list Elizabeth Warren announces, and go ahead and vote for her. My sense is politicians would be a lot more convincing if they lead -- i.e., taking other's money only after taking it from politicians first -- but I don't see them doing that. Pony up yourself, Elizabeth, then we'll take your suggestion a lot more seriously that Bezos should take a huge on his personal taxes. Otherwise we'll just understood your proposition as the politics of envy, Warren, and won't take it any more seriously than you take it yourself.
It’s the billionaires who are destroying the country and making us little guys miserable. Or maybe the ultra millionaires. Or the boomers. Or the Asians. Or the Jews. Or the patriarchy. Or white people. Or Republicans. Go get us, Liz. I mean them. Go get them.
How much longer do we have before Liz and Bernie finally call it quits? The latter had a highly predictable op-ed in the WSJ last week. He's another one that can't leave out "billionaires" and "climate change" in all of his communications. When those two dinosaurs are finally gone, it's great to know we have the brilliant bartender statesman (or should I say stateslady?) AOC to continue carrying the torch of nonsense.
For anyone sane and merely *marginally* familiar with economics, soak the rich taxes in general and wealth confiscation taxes - other than death taxes, which I actually find somewhat reasonable - are so clearly bad for the country in merely the medium term, let alone the long term…
…that I have a hard time accepting the concept that anyone even marginally well educated with an IQ above 101 and center-left through libertarian/classical liberal through right can ever find it the lesser evil to vote for today’s Democrats.
However imperfect Orange Man Bad is.
It is a question to which I have never heard a satisfactory answer (histrionics about fascism and death of democracy included).
The Dems pre-2006 were a sane party a reasonable person could vote for. Someone else could argue with at least a shred of credibility that was true all the way through 2016, even though I would respectfully disagree.
But how can anyone serious who is not hyperpartisan make that case today? There are no more responsible adults in that donkey room today. There aren’t even many somewhat-irresponsible-advocates-of-bad-policy-but-not-batshit-idiotic folks like the Barack Obama of 2008 in that room. Back then he was one of the two or 3 furthest left Dems in the Senate; today that Obama would be one of the two or 3 closest to the center.
I don’t even grok how anyone reasonable can make the “a pox on both your houses” case that one should simply vote for neither.
The issue is no longer merely “lesser evil”. It’s (far) “lesser insanity.”
Well, Trump is also an economic illiterate. And he's a murderer-by-proxy more times than Obama was.
Honestly, sometimes I can't shake the feeling that Trump was nightmared into being by Democrats. He thinks like they do, but has opposing cultural aims.
Dude whether he is an economic illiterate or not ain’t the issue.
However imperfect his policies are - and they most surely are imperfect - they are not batshit crazy mega destructive.
I claim they are clearly better than Obama policies (even though not as good as Trump 45 policies). Even if you somehow disagree, they are still far better than the policies espoused by *today’s* Dem party. It’s not even remotely close. And *that* is my point.
You may be right. But he's also a Republican who is by any economic measure very Lefty. (You can tell by Paul Krugman's clownish reversals.) It's tough to dance with two left feet.
“death taxes, which I actually find somewhat reasonable”
The biggest problem with death taxes is that so much of what people inherit is illiquid. So a son inherits his father’s house or farm or business, worth maybe quite a lot on paper — but may have no way to pay the taxes on it short of selling it. (And such a forced sale may drastically reduce its value.)
And of course the father has been paying taxes all along, on the income used to buy or build the asset, on property taxes, on return from the asset. Why should his death open the door for the government to confiscate it?
To partially address the liquidity issue I’m fine with relatively higher starting points for death taxes. Any number from $3M to as much as $20M I’d be ok with
“Why should his death open the door for the government to confiscate it?”
A reasonable ask.
I have 4 mains rationales, in no particular order of importance or weighting:
1) Being a classical liberal and not an anarcho-capitalist, the government has to tax *something* to fund its operations.
2) IMO death taxes don’t do too much to harm proper work and investment incentives so long as the top rate is not too high.
(To me anything higher than 55% is “too high”, and IMO the top rate should be in the 49%-51% range. Were I “king” I would actually make the tax based on individual recipient amounts rather than the total amount, so the more the deceased “spread the wealth” - i.e. reverse primogeniture; the first $10M per recipient is tax-free - the less he/she would have to fork over to the government, on the theory that concentration of unearned wealth is more potentially harmful, and having more people who are well off is a good thing.)
3) Using Rawls “veil of ignorance”, death taxes imo provide a reasonable balance across productivity, incentives, work ethic and the randomness of starting points of individuals in terms of genetics, circumstances of birth, luck of outcomes, etc.
4) Empirically, it seems to me that a fairly high number of people who inherit their wealth devote large amounts of it to anti-capitalist leftist causes that are actively harmful to long-run growth and so to the well-being of society.
Whenever someone sets a threshold like that, I have to ask whether they think the stated threshold will be honored in perpetuity; remember that income tax was originally a 1% rate that applied only to the top 1% of earners. And I have to remember the research that says no matter who you ask about what is too much money for someone to have or earn, the answer is always about twice whatever the person you ask has.
I’m not an anarchy-capitalist either, most days. But the shoveling of cash into the maw of government that was enabled by the income tax is what led to the maximalist government we have today.
And you can't point to (meaningfully) bad effects from it.
[Not that I can *prove* it is a good thing, to be clear.]
Of course, it doesn't bring in that much money either.
Though I'll point out that *unlike* the income tax there is not in fact a history of it capturing an ever larger percentage of taxpayers, and IIRC the number affected has gone down at least twice in the last 50 years.
If I were "the decider", I'd replace the capital gains and income taxes with a moderately progressive consumption tax.
I'd change a bunch of other things about our tax system, and even more on our spending.
But I don't get to be the decider.
And your question was about why death taxes are defensible, not why our current system of obscene spending is.
Your friend and colleague is a naïf. Of course Warren and her ilk realize that. But they don't care about that.
Like Obama, who under questioning was quite explicit on the point about another eat-the-rich tax, even if it would reduce federal revenue, he would still favor it "to further social justice," meaning (though neither he nor Warren nor others of their ilk would ever be so transparent as to say so explicitly) to bring down the class enemies of social justice: the billionaires, the kulaks, the rich, the hoarders and wreckers, the fascists, the running dogs of imperialism, the Jews, whoever The Line is against. But whoever it is, you don't get to decide whether you're one of them.
Remark from one of USA's great statesman, Speaker of the House Thomas B Reed. "I know that when I pass all those mansions on 5th Ave, I know what emotion I have, its honest high minded envy. When the other Congressmen has it he thinks its political economy" Some things don't change. Thanks for the column and for reminding of the quote.
The very wealthy have *options*. If they really believe there will be an exit tax, they'll leave before it comes into force. We'll lose the "trickle down/lift all boats" effect, and not get the confiscation. Pure deadweight loss.
David Burge's essay from 2011 archly shows the stupidity of confiscatory taxation. Consider that since 2011 the Federal budget has doubled to approximately $7 trillion dollars in 2025. Now where do we get the money 'needed'???
The tax Sen. Warren proposes would have to be levied and its proceeds spent by the U.S. Congress. How many Americans trust Congress? One out of three, according to Gallup.
Sen. Warren says that under her bill, "the IRS would be authorized to use cutting-edge retrospective and prospective formulaic valuation methods for certain harder-to-value assets like closely held business and non-owner-occupied real estate." How many Americans trust the IRS?
Regarding the constitutionality of a wealth tax, Sen. Warren says that "Legal experts have submitted two separate letters in support of the constitutionality of this proposal." How many Americans trust "legal experts"?
Senator Warren is as impervious to economic logic as an anorexic is to nutritional counseling. The tax policies she’s championing reek of economic Bolshevism.
Thanks for this. My fear is that there are not many who understand what you lay out, or who want to understand, or who have the K-12 background that would allow them to understand. We live in a "Tinkerbelle" world where 2+2=5, or whatever you want it to be.
Robert, great work.
Coincidentally, I just did some graphics on Chris Rufo and California's "Empire of Fraud". Put simply, Warren will STEAL ALL THE MONEY, just like Newsom, Walz and the rest.
Gavin Newsom’s Empire of Fraud Illustrated:
https://directorblue.substack.com/p/gavin-newsoms-empire-of-fraud-illustrated
Warren know full well the damage she seeks to inflict.
It's her way to seize power and reshape America to her liking.
Deliberate, destructive, Alinskyite tactics.
Shame on her.
By naming Jeff Bezos as the source of all the money she wants to misspend, she targets only one person. Not that she was going to get his vote anyway, but the other hundreds of millions Americans don't hear their name, so they can just laugh nervously, hoping they won't appear on the next list Elizabeth Warren announces, and go ahead and vote for her. My sense is politicians would be a lot more convincing if they lead -- i.e., taking other's money only after taking it from politicians first -- but I don't see them doing that. Pony up yourself, Elizabeth, then we'll take your suggestion a lot more seriously that Bezos should take a huge on his personal taxes. Otherwise we'll just understood your proposition as the politics of envy, Warren, and won't take it any more seriously than you take it yourself.
It’s the billionaires who are destroying the country and making us little guys miserable. Or maybe the ultra millionaires. Or the boomers. Or the Asians. Or the Jews. Or the patriarchy. Or white people. Or Republicans. Go get us, Liz. I mean them. Go get them.
How much longer do we have before Liz and Bernie finally call it quits? The latter had a highly predictable op-ed in the WSJ last week. He's another one that can't leave out "billionaires" and "climate change" in all of his communications. When those two dinosaurs are finally gone, it's great to know we have the brilliant bartender statesman (or should I say stateslady?) AOC to continue carrying the torch of nonsense.
Thank you for this piece.
For anyone sane and merely *marginally* familiar with economics, soak the rich taxes in general and wealth confiscation taxes - other than death taxes, which I actually find somewhat reasonable - are so clearly bad for the country in merely the medium term, let alone the long term…
…that I have a hard time accepting the concept that anyone even marginally well educated with an IQ above 101 and center-left through libertarian/classical liberal through right can ever find it the lesser evil to vote for today’s Democrats.
However imperfect Orange Man Bad is.
It is a question to which I have never heard a satisfactory answer (histrionics about fascism and death of democracy included).
The Dems pre-2006 were a sane party a reasonable person could vote for. Someone else could argue with at least a shred of credibility that was true all the way through 2016, even though I would respectfully disagree.
But how can anyone serious who is not hyperpartisan make that case today? There are no more responsible adults in that donkey room today. There aren’t even many somewhat-irresponsible-advocates-of-bad-policy-but-not-batshit-idiotic folks like the Barack Obama of 2008 in that room. Back then he was one of the two or 3 furthest left Dems in the Senate; today that Obama would be one of the two or 3 closest to the center.
I don’t even grok how anyone reasonable can make the “a pox on both your houses” case that one should simply vote for neither.
The issue is no longer merely “lesser evil”. It’s (far) “lesser insanity.”
Well, Trump is also an economic illiterate. And he's a murderer-by-proxy more times than Obama was.
Honestly, sometimes I can't shake the feeling that Trump was nightmared into being by Democrats. He thinks like they do, but has opposing cultural aims.
Dude whether he is an economic illiterate or not ain’t the issue.
However imperfect his policies are - and they most surely are imperfect - they are not batshit crazy mega destructive.
I claim they are clearly better than Obama policies (even though not as good as Trump 45 policies). Even if you somehow disagree, they are still far better than the policies espoused by *today’s* Dem party. It’s not even remotely close. And *that* is my point.
You may be right. But he's also a Republican who is by any economic measure very Lefty. (You can tell by Paul Krugman's clownish reversals.) It's tough to dance with two left feet.
“death taxes, which I actually find somewhat reasonable”
The biggest problem with death taxes is that so much of what people inherit is illiquid. So a son inherits his father’s house or farm or business, worth maybe quite a lot on paper — but may have no way to pay the taxes on it short of selling it. (And such a forced sale may drastically reduce its value.)
And of course the father has been paying taxes all along, on the income used to buy or build the asset, on property taxes, on return from the asset. Why should his death open the door for the government to confiscate it?
To partially address the liquidity issue I’m fine with relatively higher starting points for death taxes. Any number from $3M to as much as $20M I’d be ok with
“Why should his death open the door for the government to confiscate it?”
A reasonable ask.
I have 4 mains rationales, in no particular order of importance or weighting:
1) Being a classical liberal and not an anarcho-capitalist, the government has to tax *something* to fund its operations.
2) IMO death taxes don’t do too much to harm proper work and investment incentives so long as the top rate is not too high.
(To me anything higher than 55% is “too high”, and IMO the top rate should be in the 49%-51% range. Were I “king” I would actually make the tax based on individual recipient amounts rather than the total amount, so the more the deceased “spread the wealth” - i.e. reverse primogeniture; the first $10M per recipient is tax-free - the less he/she would have to fork over to the government, on the theory that concentration of unearned wealth is more potentially harmful, and having more people who are well off is a good thing.)
3) Using Rawls “veil of ignorance”, death taxes imo provide a reasonable balance across productivity, incentives, work ethic and the randomness of starting points of individuals in terms of genetics, circumstances of birth, luck of outcomes, etc.
4) Empirically, it seems to me that a fairly high number of people who inherit their wealth devote large amounts of it to anti-capitalist leftist causes that are actively harmful to long-run growth and so to the well-being of society.
Whenever someone sets a threshold like that, I have to ask whether they think the stated threshold will be honored in perpetuity; remember that income tax was originally a 1% rate that applied only to the top 1% of earners. And I have to remember the research that says no matter who you ask about what is too much money for someone to have or earn, the answer is always about twice whatever the person you ask has.
I’m not an anarchy-capitalist either, most days. But the shoveling of cash into the maw of government that was enabled by the income tax is what led to the maximalist government we have today.
That's fine, even valid.
But we already have a death tax.
And you can't point to (meaningfully) bad effects from it.
[Not that I can *prove* it is a good thing, to be clear.]
Of course, it doesn't bring in that much money either.
Though I'll point out that *unlike* the income tax there is not in fact a history of it capturing an ever larger percentage of taxpayers, and IIRC the number affected has gone down at least twice in the last 50 years.
If I were "the decider", I'd replace the capital gains and income taxes with a moderately progressive consumption tax.
I'd change a bunch of other things about our tax system, and even more on our spending.
But I don't get to be the decider.
And your question was about why death taxes are defensible, not why our current system of obscene spending is.
Your friend and colleague is a naïf. Of course Warren and her ilk realize that. But they don't care about that.
Like Obama, who under questioning was quite explicit on the point about another eat-the-rich tax, even if it would reduce federal revenue, he would still favor it "to further social justice," meaning (though neither he nor Warren nor others of their ilk would ever be so transparent as to say so explicitly) to bring down the class enemies of social justice: the billionaires, the kulaks, the rich, the hoarders and wreckers, the fascists, the running dogs of imperialism, the Jews, whoever The Line is against. But whoever it is, you don't get to decide whether you're one of them.
Remark from one of USA's great statesman, Speaker of the House Thomas B Reed. "I know that when I pass all those mansions on 5th Ave, I know what emotion I have, its honest high minded envy. When the other Congressmen has it he thinks its political economy" Some things don't change. Thanks for the column and for reminding of the quote.
The very wealthy have *options*. If they really believe there will be an exit tax, they'll leave before it comes into force. We'll lose the "trickle down/lift all boats" effect, and not get the confiscation. Pure deadweight loss.
Warren needs to be force fed Aesop’s fable about the goose who laid the golden egg.
David Burge's essay from 2011 archly shows the stupidity of confiscatory taxation. Consider that since 2011 the Federal budget has doubled to approximately $7 trillion dollars in 2025. Now where do we get the money 'needed'???
The tax Sen. Warren proposes would have to be levied and its proceeds spent by the U.S. Congress. How many Americans trust Congress? One out of three, according to Gallup.
Sen. Warren says that under her bill, "the IRS would be authorized to use cutting-edge retrospective and prospective formulaic valuation methods for certain harder-to-value assets like closely held business and non-owner-occupied real estate." How many Americans trust the IRS?
Regarding the constitutionality of a wealth tax, Sen. Warren says that "Legal experts have submitted two separate letters in support of the constitutionality of this proposal." How many Americans trust "legal experts"?
Thank you very much.
Senator Warren is as impervious to economic logic as an anorexic is to nutritional counseling. The tax policies she’s championing reek of economic Bolshevism.