The progressive “Wealth Tax,” fashioned by Elizabeth Warren and other Democrat presidential hopefuls, is the clearest confirmation that they are all Socialists today of the first order.
It is one thing to tax income, transactions, and trade in which free peoples engage. But to tax wealth is to confirm that the “state” – government, not the people – really owns everything. The “zero sum game” that for one person to have more it must be taken from someone else – is their mantra. That is the wealth tax, which is just a variation of the hated “Death Tax”, assessed before death…larger and more frequent.
Why a Wealth Tax, more taxes, and repeal of tax cuts/tax reform? Because of the spending programs these candidates are proposing.
First, there is Medicare for All, which would take over at taxpayer expense the employer health insurance over 100 million Americans already have. That would also abolish original Medicare for Seniors, slated for bankruptcy in 7 years according to Medicare’s own actuaries, without expanding it to everybody.
With the Green New Deal, Reparations, guaranteed income for all, public housing for all, free college for all, taxpayers paying off all student “loans”, welfare, Social Security, and all the socialist dreams these Democrats are peddling, federal spending would soar to close to 100% of GDP. That is why they are seeking new taxes, unable to understand that major tax increases would just mean renewed recession, soaring unemployment, and sinking wages for working Americans.
The American people voted for Trump in 2016 to get away from high taxes, long term Democrat stagnation, and record unemployment. The recovery from the Great Recession started actually on Election Day, 2016. The stock market took off that day on a $12 trillion dollar boom because investors realized they were suddenly clear from repressive Obamanomics. They anticipated instead President Trump’s tax cuts and deregulation.
That deregulation supported American Energy Independence, under which America now leads the world as the No. 1 producer of oil and of natural gas. As Trump advisor Steve Moore wrote in his recent book, Fueling Freedom, “America has more recoverable energy supplies than any nation— by far. We have more oil and natural gas than Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, China and all of the OPEC nations combined.”
But Democrats would leave that $50 trillion dollars of American wealth in the ground under their Green New Deal. They would try to power America’s 21st century economy impossibly with windmills and energy dancing on sunbeams. If you have any fear of getting submerged by rising seas, read Climate Change Reconsidered 2.0, published by the Heartland Institute, based on the work of real, serious scientists, from Princeton, MIT, and NASA, among others. Not high school students from Sweden, or bartenders from the Bronx.
The Trump tax cuts and deregulation got America growing again, creating 7 million new American jobs, and slashing unemployment to the lowest level in 50 years. That includes the lowest level of unemployment ever in American history for Black Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, and young Americans (teenagers).
That means President Trump is leading the most inclusive recovery in American history. With wages for the middle class up under Trump and his tax cuts by more than $6,000.
The U.S. Supreme Court struck down the income tax as unconstitutional as early as 1895, saying the federal government imposed it directly on the people without apportioning it among the states by population as the Constitution requires. To overturn that ruling, the people adopted the 16th Amendment, which provides that “Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived.”
That amendment does not include any power to impose taxes on wealth, in addition to income. But don’t expect today’s lawless 21st Century Democrats to follow any law or ruling dating back to the 19th Century. Senator Warren, your wealth tax abandoned even by the socialists of Sweden is not constitutional in America.
“Impeachment Madness” is today’s front-page news to prevent the reality of Democrat/Socialist tax policy insanity from moving to center stage. It is up to common-sense Americans, including blue-collar workers who have gained both jobs and wage increases due to the lower rates of Trump’s tax reform, to restore sanity to our precious American heritage. As the Bible says, “By their fruits you shall know them”.
Lewis Uhler is founder and chairman of the National Tax Limitation Committee and National Tax Limitation Foundation (NTLF). He was a contemporary and collaborator with both Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman in California and across the country.
Peter Ferrara is the Dunn Liberty Fellow in Economics for the King’s College in New York, and Senior Policy Adviser to NTLF. He served on the White House Domestic Policy Council under President Reagan, and as Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States under President George
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H.W. Bush.
